Handbook of Philosophy of Management 3030766055, 9783030766054

Table of contents :
Endorsements
Preface
Contents
About the Editors
Section Editors
Contributors
1 Introduction to Philosophy of Management
Introduction
Overview of the Handbook Sections
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
Part I: Epistemology of Management
2 The Epistemology of Management: An Introduction
Introduction
The Problem of Knowledge
What Is Knowledge?
Who or What Has the Capacity of Knowing?
Is Knowledge Possible, and How Much Do We Know?
What Are the Sources of Knowing?
What Kind of Knowledge Is Best?
Epistemological Orientations and Their Reflection in Management Studies
Epistemologies of Representation
Epistemologies of Interpretation
Epistemologies of Imagination
Epistemologies of Intervention
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
3 Evidence-Based Management
Introduction
Philosophical Underpinnings of Evidence-Based Management
The Tension Between Knowledge and Managerial Action
Making Knowledge Actionable and Turning Action into Knowledge
Starting Point 1: Making Knowledge Actionable - A Task Scholars Can Initiate
The Practical Value of Knowledge
Knowledge Communication
Starting Point 2: Turning Action into Knowledge - A Task Practitioners Can Initiate
The Need for Informed Action: Reflection and Absorptive Capacity
The Role of Deliberate Practice: Action Focused on Learning
Balancing Knowledge and Action
Looking Back and Moving Forward: Merging Knowledge and Action
Cross-References
References
4 Realist Inquiry
Introduction
Realism in Philosophy
From Empirical to Critical Realism
Scientific Realism
Management Studies from a Realist View: Key Themes and Contributions
Realism and the Nature of Management and Organizations
Organizations as Multilevel (Open) Systems
Causality, Social Structure, and Agency
The Systemic Nature of Managing
Realism and the Study of Management and Organizations
Role of Reasoning and Experiencing
Nature of Explanation
Methodological Implications
Realism and the Science-Practice Link: Technology, Design Science, and Engaged Scholarship
Avenues for Future Research
Realism and the Study of Grand Challenges
Realism and New Theorizing
Realism and New Methodologies
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
5 Interpretive Inquiry
Introduction
What Is Interpretive Inquiry and How Does It Relate to Constructivism?
The Impact of Interpretive Inquiry on Management and Organization Studies
Application and Implications for Research Practice
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
6 A Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice
Introduction
The Epistemology of Practice
The Sociomateriality of Managing
Managing and Agency
Applications of Humanist Practice Epistemologies in Management and Organization Studies
Cross-References
References
7 Critical Inquiry
Introduction
Denaturalization as Epistemology
Negative Ontology
Reflexivity
Power and Language in Critical Inquiry
Unpacking Understandings of Power in CI
Language and CI: The Naturalization and Denaturalization of Social Reality
Critical Inquiry: How to Do It
Conclusion and Caveats
Cross-References
References
8 Fictional Inquiry
Introduction
Philosophical Foundations of the Epistemology of Fiction
Purpose 1: Juxtaposing Fictional and Counterfactual Statements Against Empirical Reality to Generate Novel Insights and Enhanc...
Ideal Types
Figurative Imagination
Purpose 2: Juxtaposing Fictional/Counterfactual Statements Against Other Scientific Statements to Probe and Refine These State...
Counterfactual Reasoning
Thought Experiments
Simulation
Purpose 3: Studying Fictional Realities as Objects of Inquiry in Their Own Right and Examining Their Impact on Actual Empirica...
Conclusion: Toward an Epistemology of Fiction in Management Studies
Cross-References
References
9 The Performativity of Theories
Introduction
The Conceptual Roots of Performativity
The Performativity of Theory
Distinguishing Two Extremes of a Continuum: Performativity as a Mindset and Performativity as a Social Mechanism
Core Common Assumptions
Distinct Commitments and Analytical Foci
Producing Knowledge ``Through´´ vs. ``About´´ Performativity
Performative Frictions and in/commensurability
Moving Forward: Combining Performativity as a Mindset and Performativity as a Social Mechanism?
Conclusion and Outlook
Cross-References
References
10 Problematizing the Relation Between Management Research and Practice
Introduction
Scientific Research as Self-Referential Communication
The Impossibility of a Direct Transfer of Research Results to Management Practice
The Impact of Research on Practice
Implications
Cross-References
References
Part II: Philosophy of Science for Management Theory and Practice
11 Philosophy of Science for Management Theory, Practice, and Sci-fi Freaks: An Introduction
Introduction
The Nonsense of Theory-Less Management Practice
Large Samples and Correlations Are Not Silver Bullets
The Limits of Induction Illustrated with the Inference of What a Planet Is
The Need for Retroduction Illustrated with the Inference of What a Planet Is
The Need for Concepts with High Discriminating Power in Management Science
The Chapters of This Section
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
12 Reviving Methods of Speculative Philosophy
Introduction
The Nature of Philosophical Inquiry: Three Interdependent Modes of Thinking
Moderate Versus Radical Enlightenment
Modernity: Analytical Versus Speculative Philosophy
Organization Studies: A Natural Space for Reviving Speculative Philosophy
Researching Organizations in the Context of Global Environmental Challenges
Conclusion: Towards a New Enlightenment in Organization and Management Studies
Cross-References
References
13 Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics
Introduction
Rigorous Design of Management Research: Basic Choices
The Scheme
Research Problem
Research Questions
Choice of Logic of Inquiry to Answer Research Questions
Choice of Research Paradigm
Practicalities That Can Influence Design Choices
Logics of Inquiry: Their Evolution and Uses
Traditional Logics of Inquiry and Their Uses: Induction and Deduction
Logics of Inquiry for Making Discoveries: Peirce´s View of Retroduction and Abduction
Retroductive Logic of Inquiry in the Social Sciences: Post Peirce
An Interpretive View of Abduction: Post Peirce
Combining Logics of Inquiry
Logics of Inquiry and Ontological Assumptions
Variety of Research Paradigms
Summary
Logical Inconsistencies and Contradictions
Relevance to Management Research
Treating Inconsistencies and Contradictions (ICs)
Summary
Big-Data and Small-Data Approaches
Fundamental Differences in Data-Oriented Approaches
Traditional and Combinatorial Approaches Differ Yet Complement Each Other
Comparing the Two Approaches
Summary
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
14 Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics
Introduction
Types of Inferences and Discoveries
Beyond Ingenuity in Scientific Inference
Selective Retroduction
Fictional Retroduction
Ampliative Retroduction
The Use of Retroduction in the Science of Organizational Economics
The Retroduction of Transaction Costs
Filtering Retroduction Out of the Messy Scientific Practice
Concluding Remarks
Cross-References
References
15 No Organizations for Today´s Einsteins
Introduction
Scientific Discoveries and Mental Faculties
Organizing for Scientific Discoveries
The Traditional Organizational Layout of Universities
Standardization in Today´s Universities and Business Schools
How Standardization Impinges on Scientific Discoveries
Organizational Structures That Are Most Propitious for Scientific Discoveries
Discussion: The Inherent Suboptimality of Real-World Organizational Layouts
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
16 The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder: Implications for the Social Sciences and Management Practice
Introduction
The Importance of ``Disorder´´ as a Conceptual Foundation for the Mental Health Profession
The Importance of ``Disorder´´ for the Management of Psychiatric Organizations
Szasz´s Attack on the Concept of Mental Disorder and Why It Failed
Conceptual Analysis and the Essentialist Nature of Concepts
Value Versus Scientific Views of Disorder
The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis
The HDA and the Social Sciences
Implications for the Management of Organizations
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
17 Complexity and Management: Epistemic Insights from the Life Sciences
Introduction
Convergences in Management Theory and Practice
Paradigm Fragmentation
Understanding Complexity
On the Dynamic Stability of Living Organizations
Dependencies
Integrated Dynamics
Explananda and Explanantia
Beyond Dichotomies
Systems and Parthood Relationships
Recomposing Theory and Practice
Conclusions: Management at Crossroads
Cross-References
References
Part III: Aesthetics of Management
18 Aesthetics of Management: An Introduction
Introduction
The Brief
Itineraries
In Order of Appearance
Concluding Remarks
Cross-References
References
19 Aesthetic Knowing, ``Designerly´´ Thinking and Scenario Analysis
Introduction
Building Understanding from Aesthetic Knowing
Personal Narratives of Aesthetic Knowing
Aesthetic Learning from Hong Kong
Aesthetic Knowing of ``Home´´
Multiple Realities of Aesthetic Knowing in the Workplace
Where to with Aesthetic Knowing?
Design - Contested Views of a Complex Domain
Design and Management
Design for Social Inquiry
Design as ``Attitude´´
Designing with Users Through Collaborative Realization
Scenario Thinking - Exploring Contexts for Social Innovation
Engaging Critical Scenario Method (CSM)
Beyond the Basic Method - ``Branching´´ Scenarios and Scenario Improvisation
Designing for Social Innovation Through Collaborative Realization
An Overview of Scenario Methods
Critical Scenario Method for Social Inquiry
Meaning of Design, and Design of Meaning
Collaboration for Social Innovation
Conclusions
Cross-References
References
20 Aesthetics, Management, and the Organization of Space
Introduction
An Aesthetics of Space
The Spatial as Intersubjective Agency and Environment
Art, Design, and Spatial Planning
Conclusion: Space, Aesthetics, and the New Model Worker
Cross-References
References
21 A Smile and a Sigh: Leadership Insights from the East
Four Men and Their Ambitions (Analects, 11:26)
Becoming Exemplary: li and yue
Discovering Potential
Coming Together in the Middle
Transference Across the Centuries
The Aesthetic Turn
Achieving Ensemble
Unifying Tendencies and Totalitarianism
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
22 The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action
Choosing an Ethical Path
What Is Ethical Engagement?
Ethical Habits
The Body´s Role in Ethical Engagement
Embodiment as a Way into Empathetic Imagination
Emotional Responses
Bodily Knowing and Aesthetics
Aesthetic Judgment
Kant´s Critique
Connecting Aesthetics and Ethics
Linking the Beautiful with the Good
Using Aesthetic Sensibilities to Foster the Capacity to Engage Well Ethically
Practical Steps Forward
Cross-References
References
23 A Rancièrian Method of Exploring Notions of Management and Organization Through the Artistic Gaze
Introduction
The Artist´s Gaze: Francis Alÿs
Dissensus of Sensibility
Concluding Remarks
Cross-References
References
24 The Aesthetics of St Thomas Aquinas and the Art of the Beautiful Business
Introduction
In (Eternal) Search of Excellence
The Category Error of the Aesthetic
A Tale of Two Traditions
From the Footplate: An Example
The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas
Aquinas on Beauty
Aquinas: The Formal Criteria of Beauty
From Euler to Venn
The Implications for Organizational Aesthetics and Organizational Theory
Pulchrum est Bonum
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
25 State of the Art on Aesthetics and Leadership
Introduction
The State of the Arts and Leadership
Understanding Art and Aesthetics
Art as a Practice and Artifact
Aesthetics and Aesthetic Approaches
Artful and Aesthetic Experiences and Processes in Relation to Leadership
Aesthetics and Creative Responsiveness
Leadership as Professional Artistry and the ``Art of Living´´
Cross-References
References
26 Aesthetics and Leadership
Introduction
Critical, Imaginative-Utopian, and Pragmatic Dimensions of Art and Aesthetics
The Liberating Irritation of the ``Sense of Reality´´
Exploration and Innovation Through the ``Sense of the Possible´´
Sense of Designable and ``Gestalt´´
Aesthetic Qualities and Dimensions of Leadership
The Dark Side and Limitations of Aesthetic Leadership
Aesthetic Leadership and (Aesth-)Ethics and Wisdom
Implications
Practical Implications
Theoretical and Methodological Implications: ``ScholARTistry´´
Cross-References
References
27 Regionally Speaking: Cultural Leadership and Capacity Building in the Asia Pacific Region
Introduction
Narrative Inquiry
Narrative Themes
Reflecting on the Local and Personal
Identity
Voice
Impact
Reflecting on the National
Tradition and Memory
Experimentation, Exploration, Innovation
Advocacy
Reflecting on the Regional
Connectivity and Networks
A Multi-frame View of Leadership
Leadership in the Political Frame
Leadership in the Structural Frame
Leadership in the Social Frame
Leadership in the Symbolic Frame
Implications of the Study
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
28 Curating Management Philosophy: Art and Aesthetics for Business Education
Philosophizing by Curating Management Education
Instrumental Critical Art Before 2000
Invective Art: The 1980s and Dahl´s Frog
Ironic Art: The 1990s and Bonk Business
Imitation Art: 2000 and Masters of Business Art
Intervention Art: 2005 and the Product/Vision Show
Intentional Art After 2000
Curating as Philosophizing
Curating Recognition of Aesthetic Autonomy
Curating for Rematerializing Philosophy
Curatorial Schwung: Philosophy as Aesthetic Action
Cross-References
References
Part IV: Social and Political Philosophy of Management
29 Social and Political Philosophy of Management: An Introduction
Introduction
Elasticity and Permeability of Social and Political Spheres
The Chapters in This Section: Illustrating the Permeability and Elasticity of the Social and Political Spheres
Avenues for a Philosophical Understanding of Social and Political Challenges for Business
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
30 Xenophon´s Philosophy of Management
Introduction
Nine Dimensions of Business Management According to Xenophon
Key Requirements of Business Managers According to Xenophon
Knowledge Involved in Management Practices
Skills Involved in Management Practices
Virtues Involved in Business Management
Discussion and Conclusion
Cross-References
References
31 Wisdom Within the Firm: An Aristotelian-Hayekian Approach to the Managerial Process of Division and Coordination of Labor
Introduction
The Origin and Evolution of the Division of Labor Concept
The Market: A Process of Discovery
The Entrepreneur: An Exemplary Prudent Agent
The Division of Labor: An Effect of Entrepreneurial Prudence
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
32 The Social Role of the Virtue of Integrity
Introduction
A Major Current of Thought in Management: Integrity as Adherence to Acceptable Principles
The Mayer et al.´s Framework
Building on the Mayer et al.´s Framework
A Deeper Exploration of the Complex Concept of Integrity through Aristotelian Social and Political Philosophy
The Pioneering Work of Robert Solomon
A Deeper Analysis: Integrity as an Act of Justice Based on a Disposition
Avenues for Future Research
Avenues Concerning Integrity as an Action
Avenues Concerning Integrity as a Disposition
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
33 A Critical Approach to Civil Society: The Case of Corporate Social Responsibility
Introduction
The Foundational Heroization of CS
Definitions: The Problem of the Frontier, the Influence of the State and MNC on CS
A Problem of Boundaries
Genealogy of the Heroization of CS
The Scottish Enlightenment
Alexis de Tocqueville and the Neo-Tocquevillian Vision of CS
Critical Theory and CS
Critics of CS
Hegel: CS as the Prehistory of the State
Marx: CS as the Instrument of Bourgeoise Domination
Gramsci: The Ambivalence of CS
CS, Critical Theory, and Corporate Change
The Limits of CS Influence on Corporate Change
The Influence of the State
The Influence of MNCs
CS: From Liberal Utopia to Neoliberal Dystopia
Repressive Desublimation: From Utopia to Dystopia
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
34 Blackness as Dignity-in-Sacrifice: From Exploitation to Contribution
Introduction
Historical Considerations of Current Dignity Discourse in Business Ethics
History, Racism, and Dignity Discourse
Racial Invisibility and Agency
Dignity-in-Sacrifice: From Self-Interest to Self-Transcendence
From Black Exploitation to Contribution
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
Part V: Moral Philosophy and Management
35 Moral Philosophy and Management: An Introduction
Introduction
Moral Philosophy and Its Relationship(s) with Management
Modes of Engaging Moral Philosophy in Management Scholarship: Some Examples
Contributions Included in Moral Philosophy and Management: An Overview
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
36 How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business
Introduction
A Common Method: ``Apply-a-Basic-Theory´´
The Naturalistic Fallacy
The Falsifiability Criterion
Connecting ``Is´´ to ``Ought´´
Three Epistemic Methods for Business Ethics
Reflective Equilibrium
Guiding (or Regulative) Ideals
Thought Experiments
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
37 Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics
Introduction: Recovering Ethics Through Philosophical Anthropology
A Brief History of Philosophical Anthropology
From Philosophical Anthropology to a New Business Ethics
Philosophical Anthropology, Virtue Ethics, and Civilization
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
38 Adam Smith´s Moral Philosophy and Its Relevance for Modern Management
Introduction
Sociality and Self-Interest
The Impartial Spectator
Virtues, Moral Sentiments, and the Modern Notion of Emotional Intelligence
Liberty and Justice
Labor, the Labor Theory of Value, and Free Labor
The Invisible Hand
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
39 Critical Moral Philosophy and Management
Introduction
Critical Theory on Management
Reason and the Moral Philosophy of Critical Theory
Management, Critical Theory, and Moral Reason
Cross-References
References
40 How Utilitarianism Can Inform Decent Managers in Plural and Culturally Diverse Contexts
Introduction
The Power and Benefit of Business Activity to Society
Utilitarian Ethical Theory
Long-Term Benefit and the Utility of Keeping Promises
The Utility of Justice, Fairness, and Other General Rules
Utilitarian Calculus
A Utilitarian Approach to Management
Utilitarianism Applied
Utilitarian Management, Pluralism, and Diverse Contexts
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
41 A Good Manager Serves Two Masters: A Kantian Perspective
Introduction
A Manager Serves Two Masters
The Good Manager Compels the Organization to Operate in Accordance with Morality of Right
Three Forms of Organizational Misconduct
The Need for Active Moral Agency
Morally Active Employee vs Morally Passive Employee
Conditions for Moral Development
Cross-References
References
42 Moral Agency and Decent Management
Introduction: Moral Agency and Decent Management
Decency and Management
Decency at Work: Applying Kantian Ethics
Moral Agency
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
43 Creating an Effective Business Ethics
Introduction: The Virtue Ethics Project
The Business World Since Solomon
The Place of Business Ethics in the Culture of Modernity
Understanding Action: From MacIntyre to Bourdieu
Revisiting the Place of Ethics in Modernity: A Brief History
Conclusion: Is the Failure of Solomon´s Project Inevitable?
Cross-References
References
44 The Role of Virtue in Good Management
Introduction
Manipulation and ``Gaming´´
Virtue Ethics as a Means of Understanding the Moral Issue
Agent-Centered Approach
A Combination of Reason and Emotion
The Absence of Impersonal Formulae or Rules that Can Resolve Moral Dilemmas
Both Individual and Common Goods
The Objective Conditions of Human Flourishing
How Virtue Ethics Can Contribute to Good Management
Virtues or Excellences that Assist a Manager in Managing
Virtues or Excellences that Contribute to the Manager Living Well
Virtues or Excellences that Contribute to the Common Good
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
45 Organizations, Virtue Ethics, and Narrative Identity
Introduction
Narrative Identity
Meaningful Work and Narrative Identity in Organizations
Work-Life Balance
Narrative Identity and Social Identity
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
46 Confucianism and Ethics in Management
Introduction
Brief History of Confucianism
Confucian Concepts and Their Managerial Implications
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
47 Daoism and Ethics in Management
Introduction
A Brief History of Daoism
Dao and Virtue: Central Themes in Daoist Philosophy
Managerial Implications: Leadership, Corporate Culture, and Values for the Knowledge Society to Come
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
48 Feminist Ethics
Introduction
Feminist Ethics: A Different Voice or a Different Positionality?
Feminine Ethics of Care
Maternal Ethics of Care
Feminist Ethics
Feminist Ethics in Management
The Ethics of Embodied Difference
Luce Irigaray
Hélène Cixous
Julia Kristeva
Psychoanalytic Feminism in Management
Relationality: Compassion, Cohabitation, and Coexistence with the Irreducible Other
Judith Butler
Bracha Ettinger
Embodied Relationality for Management and Organizations
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
49 Is Moral Growth Possible for Managers?
Introduction
What Is Pragmatism?
How to Be a Pragmatist About Morality?
Commitment to Moral Growth as the Key Moral Responsibility of a Manager
Moral Growth Without Objectivism
How to Grow Morally as a Manager?
Admit the Incompleteness of Your Current Moral Outlook
Seek Opportunities to Expand Your Moral Horizon
Give Others´ Opinions and Viewpoints a Charitable Interpretation
Keep Your Values and Beliefs up to Date
Engage in Moral Imagination
Ensure that Your Subordinates Dare to Challenge You
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
50 Innovation as Ethos
Introduction
Contrasting Responsibility in CSR with Responsibility in Innovation Ethics
Responsible Innovation
The Applicability of Virtue Ethics and Practical Wisdom in Innovation Ethics: A Critical Assessment
Innovation as Ethos: Toward an Action-Based Concept of Responsible Management of Innovation
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
51 Using Aristotle´s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility of Organizations as Artificial Persons
Introductory Overview: Collective Responsibility and the Neo-Aristotelian Approach
The Argument
Presupposition 1: A Neo-Aristotelian Application of Aristotle´s Philosophical Anthropology of Wellbeing
Presupposition 2: Analogy of Attribution, Natural Persons´ Moral Action, and Organizational Analogues
Presupposition 3: Assessing Justice Through Casuistry in Personal, Political, and Organizational Contexts
Presupposition 4: A Revised Stakeholder Model for QPM
Concluding Applications
Cross-References
References
Part VI: Philosophy in Management Practice and Education
52 Philosophy in Management Practice and Education: An Introduction
Introduction
Situating Heidegger in the Context of Research Practices in Organizational Theory
Examples of Lived Experience of Research Questioning from Within the Context of Practice
Using an Exemplar to Illustrate the Heideggerian Process of Practice in the Context of Research
Introducing the Chapters of This Section
Cross-References
References
53 Weeding the Management Garden: Hume´s Fork and Action Nominalism at Work
Introduction
Management and Authority
Language and Values
Philosophical Background
Nominalism
A Nominalist Approach to the Language of Management
Hume´s Fork
Weeding the Management Garden
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
54 The Organization of Philosophy and a Philosophy of Organizations
Introduction
The Absence of Organizations in the Organization of Academic Philosophy
Is the Lack of Interest in Organizations a Problem for Academic Philosophy?
A Philosophy of Organizations in Modern Society
Philosophy of Life in Organizations
Cross-References
References
55 What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian Philosopher
What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian Philosopher
Four Basic Questions
What Makes Heideggerian Thinking Remarkable?
Cultivating Wonder
Heidegger on Thinking from the Lectures Comprising What Is Called Thinking?
Radical Difference and Identification of Bridging Practices
Historical Review
The Discovery of the Marginal
The New Thought Experiment
Habituation or Getting Used to How the World Looks Different
Summary: What Is Thinking?
Finding the Matter for Business Thinking
Thinking and Market Transformation
CEMEX and Patrimonio Hoy
RSA and Mid-Market Commercial Insurance in the UK
Conclusion: Saving Focal Practices
Cross-References
References
56 Why Work? What Does Philosophy (Not) Tell Us About Worker Motivation?
Introduction
Motivation and Management
A Foundational Dichotomy: Aristotle on Praxis and Poiesis
Arendt: Labor Versus Work (Versus Action)
Honneth on Recognition at Work
Concluding Remarks: Retrieving Philosophical Questions in Management Research
Cross-References
References
57 Informing Educational Approaches to PRME Using Foucault
Introduction
A ``History of the Present´´ About PRME
An ``Art of Living´´
Care of the Self and PRME
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
58 Educating Business Students About Kant and Dignity for a Theory of Business-in-Society
Introduction
Dignity as a Moral Threshold
Cultivating an Orientation toward Preserving Human Dignity Via Reflective Judgment
How Kant´s Principles Contribute to Cultivating Reflective Judgment for Community-Oriented, Reality-Facing Sensus Communis: An...
Conclusion
Cross-References
References
Index

Citation preview

Handbooks in Philosophy

Cristina Neesham Markus Reihlen Dennis Schoeneborn Editors

Handbook of Philosophy of Management

Handbooks in Philosophy

The Handbooks in Philosophy series is a comprehensive, wide-ranging multivolume research collection with contributions from experts in all areas of philosophy. It offers up-to-date scholarly summaries and sources of information on the major subject areas and issues of philosophy. Each handbook examines its particular subject area in depth, providing timely, accessible coverage of its full scale and scope, discusses substantive contributions for deeper understanding, and provides reliable guidance on the direction of future developments. The series covers topics within a wide spectrum of areas in philosophy and it will focus particularly in newly emerging research fields. Each volume provides a state-of-the-art treatment of its respective area. The series will quickly prove useful to a broad audience including graduate students, senior undergraduates and scholars across a range of disciplines. This handbook: • Offers collections of emerging topics that discuss cutting-edge research and ensure comprehensive and timely coverage of ever-expanding disciplines • Is written by distinguished specialists from multiple disciplines, and can be easily updated creating a dynamic overview on the topic • Constitutes useful reading for researchers and students in all branches of philosophy

Cristina Neesham • Markus Reihlen • Dennis Schoeneborn Editors

Handbook of Philosophy of Management With 14 Figures and 23 Tables

Editors Cristina Neesham Newcastle University Business School Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Markus Reihlen School of Management and Technology Institute of Management and Organization Leuphana University of Lüneburg Lüneburg, Germany

Dennis Schoeneborn Department of Management, Society and Communication (MSC) Copenhagen Business School Frederiksberg, Denmark School of Management and Technology Institute of Management and Organization Leuphana University of Lüneburg Lüneburg, Germany

ISSN 2524-4361 ISSN 2524-437X (electronic) Handbooks in Philosophy ISBN 978-3-030-76605-4 ISBN 978-3-030-76606-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Endorsements

“This handbook illustrates why philosophy is the queen of the sciences by presenting the insights from ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and philosophers from Confucius to Kant into the theory and practice of management.” Professor Joanne B. Ciulla, Director – Institute for Ethical Leadership, Rutgers University. “This is a great collection of people and topics that should make philosophy relevant to every management researcher. Business schools need more philosophical and humanities thinking if they are to stay relevant in the 21st Century.” R. Edward Freeman, University Professor, University of Virginia. “As the global powers and impacts of managers continue to grow, this essential international collection demonstrates how philosophers can make a unique and vital contribution to management. It offers a wide-ranging and rich set of models of engagement from which researchers and teachers can learn and managers benefit in practice.” Nigel Laurie, Founding Editor, Philosophy of Management Journal. “Timely, exciting, illuminating! – This is an essential collection of insights and ideas on the philosophy of management.” Andreas Georg Scherer, Professor of Business Administration, University of Zurich. “This first comprehensive handbook is an indispensable guide to philosophy of management as a discipline. Prominent scholars from multiple countries provide systematic coverage of epistemology, philosophy of science, aesthetics, social and political philosophy, moral philosophy, and management practice and education.” Duane Windsor, Lynette S. Autrey Professor of Management, Rice University.

v

Preface

The Handbook of Philosophy of Management originated from conversations between Mark Dibben, Rob Macklin, Cristina Neesham, and Steven Segal, on a sunny Tasmanian afternoon in 2015. The original idea was to put together the primary means we have for coping in and with our organized lives, i.e., management, using that ultimate provider of modes of thought that shape our means of coping, i.e., philosophy. The principles of philosophy of management as reason in practice were discussed then: philosophy as practice is that activity which can enable management to move beyond its state of crisis and disclose new worlds and ways of managing, and managers ought to be practising philosophers so that they can truly think and shape – as opposed to, perhaps somewhat unknowingly, react and conform. The Handbook, therefore, addresses the philosophical foundations of management in theory and practice and provides a meta-framework for moving beyond paradigm fragmentation within management research and education. This extensive work, considered across the span of 58 chapters, allows researchers and practitioners to find harmony in the contrasts revealed by multiple philosophical lenses applied to management. The meta-reflections included here are intentionally structured around established branches of philosophy, each having their own implications for management. Just as those original Tasmanian conversations predicted, allowing the philosophy explicitly to take the lead does indeed open very different possibilities, not envisaged through the application of the social sciences alone. As the wide array of topics and issues addressed here sketch the contours of the field, this work creates a forum where philosophy can meaningfully be applied to the study of management in all its forms. It also sets the terms of reference for the philosophy of management as a discipline in its own right and encourages both managers and researchers to develop the discipline of thinking from a practitioner’s point of view. The project has been a long but above all extraordinary journey with many enthusiastic contributors, some of whom are now retired. While we are indebted to many more than we can possibly mention here, we would like to give special thanks to our section editors, Alejandro Agafonow, Marian Eabrasu, Steven Segal, and Wim Vandekerckhove, who have put together their sections with much effort, competence, and foresight for topics and authors. We are equally thankful to all chapter authors, and to all reviewers, for their commitment to ensuring that the Handbook vii

viii

Preface

becomes an essential scholarly source for the field. We also acknowledge the valuable inputs of Mark Dibben and Steven Segal, who (as past co-editors-inchief) developed the original idea of the Handbook and helped it to take off, together with past section editors Vincent Blok, Paul Griseri, Nigel Laurie, Rob Macklin, and Frits Schipper. Furthermore, our gratitude goes to Springer for making this publication possible. As a final note, the second (Markus) and third editor (Dennis) would like to thank Cristina for inviting us at a later stage to join this philosophical venture as editors-inchief. The success of the project, of the very idea of it, can be measured in the remarkable expansion of topics covered; we came on board to help share the load that success brought with it. Nonetheless, we want to note Cristina is not only the first editor by alphabetical ordering but also by shouldering the greater weight. We hope that the connections made between philosophy and management in this book will open new directions of inquiry into how reason in practice can assist humankind in creating its own better future. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK Lüneburg, Germany Frederiksberg, Denmark November 2022

Cristina Neesham Markus Reihlen Dennis Schoeneborn Editors

Contents

1

Introduction to Philosophy of Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cristina Neesham, Markus Reihlen, and Dennis Schoeneborn

Part I

1

Epistemology of Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

15

2

The Epistemology of Management: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . Markus Reihlen and Dennis Schoeneborn

17

3

Evidence-Based Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mona Mensmann, Denise M. Rousseau, and Michael Frese

39

4

Realist Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Markus Reihlen, Stefanie Habersang, and Natalia Nikolova

55

5

Interpretive Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Blagoy Blagoev and Jana Costas

79

6

A Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice Silvia Gherardi

...................

99

7

Critical Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dan Kärreman

121

8

Fictional Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dennis Schoeneborn and Joep Cornelissen

139

9

The Performativity of Theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jean-Pascal Gond and Guillaume Carton

159

10

Problematizing the Relation Between Management Research and Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Benjamin Grossmann-Hensel and David Seidl

183

ix

x

Contents

Part II Philosophy of Science for Management Theory and Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Philosophy of Science for Management Theory, Practice, and Sci-fi Freaks: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alejandro Agafonow

12

Reviving Methods of Speculative Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arran Gare and Cristina Neesham

13

Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Norman Blaikie and Jan Priest

203

205 219

235

14

Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics . . . . . . . . Alejandro Agafonow and Marybel Perez

265

15

No Organizations for Today’s Einsteins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alejandro Agafonow and Marybel Perez

287

16

The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder: Implications for the Social Sciences and Management Practice . . . Jerome C. Wakefield and Jordan A. Conrad

309

Complexity and Management: Epistemic Insights from the Life Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marta Bertolaso

333

17

Part III

Aesthetics of Management

.........................

18

Aesthetics of Management: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wim Vandekerckhove

19

Aesthetic Knowing, “Designerly” Thinking and Scenario Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . George Cairns

355 357

369

20

Aesthetics, Management, and the Organization of Space . . . . . . . . Jonathan Vickery

389

21

A Smile and a Sigh: Leadership Insights from the East . . . . . . . . . Ralph J. Bathurst and Michelle Sitong Chen

413

22

The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action Donna Ladkin

....................

431

23

A Rancièrian Method of Exploring Notions of Management and Organization Through the Artistic Gaze . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wim Vandekerckhove and Myrtle Emmanuel

447

Contents

24

xi

The Aesthetics of St Thomas Aquinas and the Art of the Beautiful Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tom Cunningham

461

25

State of the Art on Aesthetics and Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wendelin Küpers

477

26

Aesthetics and Leadership Wendelin Küpers

...............................

491

27

Regionally Speaking: Cultural Leadership and Capacity Building in the Asia Pacific Region . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Caitlin Byrne and Ruth Bereson

509

Curating Management Philosophy: Art and Aesthetics for Business Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pierre Guillet de Monthoux

529

28

Part IV 29

Social and Political Philosophy of Management . . . . . . . .

Social and Political Philosophy of Management: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marian Eabrasu

30

Xenophon’s Philosophy of Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vincent Blok

31

Wisdom Within the Firm: An Aristotelian-Hayekian Approach to the Managerial Process of Division and Coordination of Labor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arnaud Pellissier-Tanon

549

551 565

585

32

The Social Role of the Virtue of Integrity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Philippe Jacquinot

33

A Critical Approach to Civil Society: The Case of Corporate Social Responsibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Guillaume Delalieux

623

Blackness as Dignity-in-Sacrifice: From Exploitation to Contribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paul T. Harper

643

34

Part V

Moral Philosophy and Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

603

661

35

Moral Philosophy and Management: An Introduction Cristina Neesham

.........

663

36

How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business . . . . . . . . . . . Thomas Donaldson

677

xii

Contents

37

Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arran Gare

38

Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy and Its Relevance for Modern Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Patricia H. Werhane and David J. Bevan

693

713

39

Critical Moral Philosophy and Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Edward Wray-Bliss

40

How Utilitarianism Can Inform Decent Managers in Plural and Culturally Diverse Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andrew Gustafson

743

A Good Manager Serves Two Masters: A Kantian Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wim Dubbink and Luc Van Liedekerke

757

41

731

42

Moral Agency and Decent Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eva Tsahuridu

777

43

Creating an Effective Business Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arran Gare and Cristina Neesham

793

44

The Role of Virtue in Good Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andrew West

809

45

Organizations, Virtue Ethics, and Narrative Identity Chris Provis

..........

821

46

Confucianism and Ethics in Management Matthias Niedenführ and Alicia Hennig

...................

837

47

Daoism and Ethics in Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alicia Hennig and Matthias Niedenführ

851

48

Feminist Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marianna Fotaki

863

49

Is Moral Growth Possible for Managers? Frank Martela

...................

883

50

Innovation as Ethos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vincent Blok

897

51

Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility of Organizations as Artificial Persons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David Ardagh

911

Contents

Part VI 52

53

54

xiii

Philosophy in Management Practice and Education . . . . .

941

Philosophy in Management Practice and Education: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Steven Segal

943

Weeding the Management Garden: Hume’s Fork and Action Nominalism at Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Robert Spillane

959

The Organization of Philosophy and a Philosophy of Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jean-Philippe Deranty

981

55

What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian Philosopher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1003 Charles Spinosa, Matthew Hancocks, and Billy Glennon

56

Why Work? What Does Philosophy (Not) Tell Us About Worker Motivation? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1027 Dale Tweedie

57

Informing Educational Approaches to PRME Using Foucault . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1045 Donella Caspersz and Elly Leung

58

Educating Business Students About Kant and Dignity for a Theory of Business-in-Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1061 Walter P. Jarvis and Natalia Nikolova

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1079

About the Editors

Cristina Neesham is Associate Professor of Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility at Newcastle University Business School, United Kingdom. She applies social philosophy methods to issues of environmental sustainability, ethics of technology, and business strategy innovation. Her research focuses on interdependencies between individual and group behaviors, social norms, and institutional-regulatory regimes in creating, as well as addressing, global systemic problems. Her work has been published in the Journal of Business Ethics, International Journal of Human Resource Management, International Journal of Project Management, and Accounting Auditing and Accountability Journal, among others. In particular, she has published on philosophy of needs in organization studies, philosophical foundations of qualitative research, and philosophical research paradigms in responsible management education, in Routledge, Sage, and Springer anthologies. Cristina serves as Associate Editor of Business Ethics, the Environment and Responsibility (formerly Business Ethics European Review) and is Editor-in-Chief of Philosophy of Management. Markus Reihlen is Professor of Strategic Management at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany. His research interests are quite diverse, ranging from strategic and international management to corporate and digital entrepreneurship, professional services and professions, as well as to the application of a realist philosophy for explaining organizational behavior. He has recently worked with process theories and new methodologies for conducting qualitative meta-studies. He is author and co-editor of eight books on various management topics. His work has appeared in such xv

xvi

About the Editors

journals as Accounting Organization and Society, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Professions and Organization, and Research in the Sociology of Organization. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Management Studies and Journal of Professions and Organization. Dennis Schoeneborn is Professor of Organization, Communication, and CSR at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, and Visiting Professor of Organization and Management at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany. His main research areas are organization theory, organizational communication, CSR communication, digital communication, and new forms of organizing. His work has been published in the Academy of Management Review, Business & Society, Human Relations, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Management Studies, and Organization Studies, among others. He serves as associate editor at Business & Society and as member of the editorial board at Management Communication Quarterly and Organization Studies. During 2015–2020, he served as head coordinator of the Standing Working Group “Organization as Communication” at the European Group of Organizational Studies (EGOS), together with Nicolas Bencherki, Timothy R. Kuhn, François Cooren, and Consuelo Vásquez.

Section Editors

Alejandro Agafonow ESSCA School of Management Organization, Management and Human Resources Paris, France

Marian Eabrasu EM Normandie Business School Métis Lab Paris, France

xvii

xviii

Section Editors

Cristina Neesham Newcastle University Business School Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Markus Reihlen School of Management and Technology Institute of Management and Organization Leuphana University of Lüneburg Lüneburg, Germany

Dennis Schoeneborn Department of Management Society and Communication (MSC) Copenhagen Business School Frederiksberg, Denmark School of Management and Technology Institute of Management and Organization Leuphana University of Lüneburg Lüneburg, Germany

Section Editors

xix

Steven Segal Metavision Institute Burradoo, NSW, Australia

Wim Vandekerckhove EDHEC Business School Lille, France

Contributors

Alejandro Agafonow ESSCA School of Management, Angers, France GRANEM, Université d’Angers, Angers, France David Ardagh Formerly Charles Sturt University, Newcastle, NSW, Australia Ralph J. Bathurst School of Management, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand Ruth Bereson Griffith University, Mount Gravatt, QLD, Australia Marta Bertolaso Faculty of Science and Technology for Humans and the Environment, University Campus Bio-Medico of Rome, Rome, Italy David J. Bevan St Martin’s Institute of Higher Education, Hamrun, Malta Blagoy Blagoev Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany Norman Blaikie Melbourne, VIC, Australia Vincent Blok Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands Caitlin Byrne Griffith University, Nathan, QLD, Australia George Cairns QUT Business School, Brisbane, Australia Guillaume Carton Emlyon Business School, Écully, France Donella Caspersz University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia Michelle Sitong Chen School of Management, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand Jordan A. Conrad Institute of Philosophy, Katholiek Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium Center for Bioethics, New York University, New York, NY, USA Joep Cornelissen Rotterdam School of Management, Department of BusinessSociety Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands xxi

xxii

Contributors

Jana Costas Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Europa Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany Tom Cunningham Institute for Business and Professional Ethics, Driehaus Business School, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA Guillaume Delalieux University of La Rochelle, La Rochelle, France Jean-Philippe Deranty Philosophy Department, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia Thomas Donaldson The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA Wim Dubbink Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands Marian Eabrasu EM Normandie Business School, Métis Lab, Paris, France Myrtle Emmanuel University of Greenwich, London, UK Marianna Fotaki Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK Michael Frese Asia School of Business, Sasana Kijang, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Leuphana University of Lueneburg, Lueneburg, Germany National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore Arran Gare Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia Silvia Gherardi University of Trento, Trento, Italy Billy Glennon VISION Consulting, New York, USA Jean-Pascal Gond Bayes Business School, City University of London, London, UK Benjamin Grossmann-Hensel University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland Pierre Guillet de Monthoux Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden Andrew Gustafson Creighton University, Omaha, NE, USA Stefanie Habersang School of Management and Technology, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany Matthew Hancocks Strategic Thinking, Oxford, UK Paul T. Harper Business Administration at Katz School of Business, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA Alicia Hennig Technical University, Dresden, Germany

Contributors

xxiii

Philippe Jacquinot Université Paris-Saclay, Univ Evry, IMT-BS, LITEM, EvryCourcouronnes, France Walter P. Jarvis University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia Dan Kärreman Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK Wendelin Küpers Karlshochschule – International University, Karlsruhe, Germany ARTEM ICN, Nancy, Paris, Berlin, France Donna Ladkin Graduate School of Leadership and Change, Antioch University, Yellow Springs, OH, USA Elly Leung University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia Frank Martela School of Business/Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland Mona Mensmann Faculty of Management, Economics, and Social Sciences, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany Cristina Neesham Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK Matthias Niedenführ China Centre Tübingen, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany Natalia Nikolova UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia Arnaud Pellissier-Tanon Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris, France Marybel Perez ESSCA School of Management, Angers, France Jan Priest Practice Research, InfoServ P/L, Hobart, TAS, Australia Chris Provis UniSA Business, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia Markus Reihlen School of Management and Technology, Institute of Management and Organization, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany Denise M. Rousseau Heinz College and Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Dennis Schoeneborn Department of Management, Society and Communication (MSC), Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark School of Management and Technology, Institute of Management and Organization, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany

xxiv

Contributors

Steven Segal Metavision Institute, Bowral, NSW, Australia Formerly Graduate School of Management, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia David Seidl University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland Robert Spillane Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia Charles Spinosa VISION Consulting, New York, USA Eva Tsahuridu Formerly RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia Dale Tweedie Department of Accounting and Corporate Governance, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia Luc Van Liedekerke Faculty of Applied Economics, University of Antwerp, Antwerpen, Belgium Wim Vandekerckhove University of Greenwich, London, UK EDHEC Business School, Lille, France Jonathan Vickery Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, West Midlands, UK Jerome C. Wakefield Center for Bioethics and Silver School of Social Work, New York University, New York, NY, USA Patricia H. Werhane Darden Business School, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA Andrew West School of Accountancy, QUT Business School, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia Edward Wray-Bliss Formerly Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

1

Introduction to Philosophy of Management Cristina Neesham, Markus Reihlen, and Dennis Schoeneborn

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Overview of the Handbook Sections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Abstract

Mainstream philosophy has not paid much attention to management, and the field of management studies is only beginning to recognize the actual power of philosophy for understanding, designing and reflecting on management practice. The Springer Handbook of Philosophy of Management is the first of its kind. It covers, in 58 chapters organized into six sections, essential philosophical themes in management studies: epistemology of management, philosophy of science for management theory and practice, aesthetics of management, social and political philosophy of management, moral philosophy and management, and philosophy in management practice and education. The aim of this handbook has been to cover a C. Neesham (*) Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] M. Reihlen School of Management and Technology, Institute of Management and Organization, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] D. Schoeneborn Department of Management, Society and Communication (MSC), Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark School of Management and Technology, Institute of Management and Organization, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_75

1

2

C. Neesham et al.

diversity of perspectives and practices in the philosophy of management, and to illustrate how this diversity shapes our understandings, forms of studying, educating, and practicing management. The choice of topics and chapters has been guided by finding a balance between traditional topics and new developments in the field. Keywords

Aesthetics · Business ethics · Epistemology · Management · Moral philosophy · Philosophy of science · Philosophy in management practice and education · Social and political philosophy

Introduction The Springer Handbook of Philosophy of Management signals the dawning of a new chapter in management and philosophy. Managing and organizing are not only instruments that we have at our disposal. They also define the world in which we live and the way(s) in which we live in the world. In order to understand ourselves today, we need to understand that we both organize and are organized, manage and are managed. Mainstream philosophy has not paid much attention to how organizing and managing now describe and perhaps even define how we are drawn into a relationship with each other, ourselves, and the world we live in. Further, the field of management studies is only beginning to recognize the actual power of philosophy. This power is reflected in the range of philosophical dimensions that are needed to make thorough sense of how managing and organizing constitute the world and, to a great extent in this information age, an age of crisis and grand challenges, determine our impact on it. Importantly, this requires the serious-minded application of philosophy to the area of management. The Handbook will therefore bring out a new meaning of managing and organizing in light of philosophy. It will rethink the significance of management through the traditional categories of philosophy. It will also bring out a new meaning of philosophy in light of management: it will rethink philosophy by illustrating how organizing and managing shape our world. While philosophical questions are paramount when doing scholarly research, what precisely is the business of philosophy? Philosophy is, following Rescher (2001: 3), “the venture in the rational inquiry whose mission is to provide tenable answers to our ‘big questions’ regarding humans, the world, and our place within . . . [our socio-material world.] . . . Rational reflection is the prime instrument of philosophizing.” The aim of doing so is “to achieve the guidance of a coherent cognitive orientation in a complex world.” Philosophy offers orientation to fundamental questions of meaning and truth(s) (logic and semantics), existence in the world (ontology), knowledge and inquiry (epistemology and methodology), as well as value (axiology) – be it about beauty (aesthetics) or morals and right vs. wrong human actions (ethics). This nucleus of contemporary philosophy has been supplemented by various applied philosophies such as political and social philosophy, philosophy of education, and philosophy of practice, to name a few. This Handbook aims to sketch the contours of the philosophy of management.

1

Introduction to Philosophy of Management

3

A critical question that has been raised is the relation of philosophy to management, which is expressed by three different positions: mutual ignorance, hierarchical ordering, and mutual interaction. Firstly, philosophers and management scholars alike often share a position of mutual ignorance. Accordingly, the business of philosophy is decoupled from managing and organizing human endeavors and vice versa. Management scholars, educators, and business people sharing the position of mutual ignorance consider philosophy as offering little direction to solve their problems. Such a negative evaluation of philosophy as hindering rather than nurturing new forms of managing and organizing is expressed by several common prejudices against philosophy. Among them are: • Comprehensibility: Philosophical literature requires substantial investments and is, for the nontrained management scholar and practitioner, often incomprehensible and (hence) of limited use. • Relevance: Philosophy engages in impractical, insignificant, hair-splitting distinctions, and it is difficult to see how these distinctions can guide scholarly research or practical problem-solving. • Payoff: While the distinctions made by philosophers may be relevant for them (and only for them), for management scholars engagements in philosophizing do not pay off. It is an investment with little return because it helps neither to improve publishable research nor to search for better technological solutions to practical problems. These and other prejudices are rarely expressed openly. Instead, they are tacitly shared among philosophy-skeptics and transmitted through whispers rather than open debates. Unfortunately, this view overlooks that fundamental questions of what we study and do in managing and organizing build upon shared problems, principles or concepts with philosophical ramifications. Think about the relationships between structure and agency or between nature and organizations. Think about the possibilities of rational agents, the appropriate methods of investigation, or whether we shall value the freedom of the individual or responsibility for the common good in our organizations and society. Managing and organizing are so ingrained with fundamental philosophical questions that it would be foolish to ignore them. While some management scholars may lack an interest in philosophizing, so do philosophers who have paid little attention to fundamental problems of managing and organizing and what this means for rethinking philosophy and philosophizing as well. Laurie and Cherry (2001: 4) argue that many philosophers “appear to exhibit . . . ‘structural blindness’, working as if management does not exist.” Secondly, the traditional counter-position to mutual ignorance is a hierarchical ordering of knowledge fields. Hence, philosophy is the “queen of the sciences” (Gutting 2003: 41), independent of – and hierarchically above – factual sciences such as management studies. Considering philosophy as a metascience means that philosophical issues can only be settled, if at all, within the field of philosophy itself. This position has substantial drawbacks because it assumes that the advancement of

4

C. Neesham et al.

the factual sciences, including management studies, would have nothing significant to offer to inform philosophy in any way. It ignores the crucial importance of the sciences in raising awareness, and developing factual knowledge, about new phenomena. Examples of such new phenomena of widespread interest for the existence of humankind can be found in abundance: managing grand challenges, including climate change, the new arms race, the rapid depletion of nonrenewable resources, environmental degradation, hunger and thirst, overpopulation, the widening NorthSouth gap, the organization of disinformation, fake news – and the list goes on. Keeping philosophy isolated from the factual sciences creates a considerable gap between what philosophy teaches us about fundamental questions of being, living, inquiring, right and wrong actions, and what we know about how these issues are addressed, researched, and practiced in the management community. A philosophy that wants to inspire managing and organizing has to keep pace with management studies instead of becoming ossified. Therefore, philosophers should pay far more attention to the sciences and technologies, including management studies, and management scholars and practitioners should assess the offerings of philosophical orientation by their fruits (see Bunge 2012). In this sense, the influence of philosophical debates on management is not a one-way but a two-way street: both should develop through mutual exchange and cross-fertilization. Finally, the position of mutual interaction between philosophy and management suggests that management knowledge is co-produced with multiple contributors. While sociology, economics, psychology, political science, and cultural studies have all, to various degrees, been considered sister disciplines contributing theories, methods, and evidence to approaches to management and organization, the role of philosophy is different because it is not a factual science and does not provide domain-specific theories and methods of management and organization. So, what is the role of philosophy in nurturing management studies and practice? Philosophy fulfills, according to Locke (1996/1689: 3), the role of the “under-laborer in cleaning a little, and removing some rubbish, that lies in the way of knowledge” (emphasis added, see also Tsang 2017). Thus, philosophy helps management studies to weed out questionable assumptions, methods and findings, and thus identify and overcome obstacles in order to progress in knowing and doing. Different philosophies offer a collection of fundamental assumptions on which management studies can be built; they are nutriment for reflections upon how we think, study and practice managing and organizing. For instance, a long-standing debate in the social sciences and management studies goes back to the Älterer Methodenstreit (controversy over methods) in German-speaking academia between Menger (1883, 1884) and Schmoller (1883), which later became known as the individualism-holism debate, propagated by such prominent social philosophers as Weber, Popper, von Hayek, Marx, Durkheim, and Parsons (for an overview see O’Neill 1973; Vanberg 1975; Reihlen et al. 2007). For management studies, this debate raises fundamental questions on what, for instance, we consider an organization to be. Are organizations mainly an aggregation of individual preferences, choices, and actions (individualism), or do they have a life of their own by forming emerging properties such as structures, routines, and cultures transcending

1

Introduction to Philosophy of Management

5

individual actions (holism)? This controversy has led to various efforts to integrate the two approaches by seeking a “third way” to account for individual agency and structure (Bunge 1996; Giddens 1984; Granovetter 1985; Dosi and Nelson 1994). In other words, philosophy can help management scholars and practitioners to analyze and refine their concepts and bring their assumptions to light. In particular, management informed by philosophy helps to (1) problematize existing positions from a philosophical stance, (2) inform researchers about different forms of investigation, theory building, testing and reflection, and (3) locate and reflect upon one’s own stance and limitations. Engaging in mutual beneficial conversations between philosophy and management creates a powerful position about what philosophy and philosophizing are for: guidance on dealing with “the big questions” in managing and organizing. It is this interplay of philosophy and management that the contributions in this handbook explore.

Overview of the Handbook Sections The Handbook comprises 58 chapters organized into six sections that focus on various philosophical themes in management studies. Our aim has been to cover a diversity of perspectives and practices in the philosophy of management and to show how this diversity shapes our understandings, forms of studying, educating, and practicing management. The choice of topics and chapters has been guided mainly by finding a balance between traditional topics and new developments in the philosophy of management. Since key chapters in the epistemology section consider an inquiry into management studies from an onto-epistemological position, we decided not to have a separate section on the ontology of management in this first edition of the Handbook. The section entitled Epistemology of Management, edited by Markus Reihlen and Dennis Schoeneborn, examines different views on scholarly inquiry in management studies. An understanding of inquiry starts with what has traditionally been called the “problem of knowledge” (Bunge 1996), which is reflected in several interrelated questions such as: what is knowledge? who or what has the capacity of knowing? how much can be known? what are the sources of knowing? what knowledge is considered best? Since the foundation of management studies, different epistemological positions have been adopted by management scholars, framing the problem of knowledge from different epistemological stances. Each stance offers an orientation on how to deal with the problem of knowledge, and (thus) how inquiry and learning can be understood, and how knowledge and the underlying processes of knowledge production can be justified. Instead of classifying various positions according to different epistemological schools of thought, this section distinguishes different epistemological orientations by categorizing them with respect to how scientific statements and empirical reality are interrelated. The section introduces four different epistemological orientations.

6

C. Neesham et al.

First, epistemologies of representation assume that knowledge should adequately mirror social reality. It draws on the image that knowledge is to reality what a map is to a territory. The more accurate our knowledge about reality is, the better we can understand, predict, and act in the world. Thus, shedding light on the multiple sources of evidence (chapter by Mensmann, Rousseau, and Frese) in a realist inquiry (chapter by Reihlen, Habersang, and Nikolova) offers direction for how representational epistemologies are practiced in management studies. Secondly, epistemologies of interpretation draw on the hermeneutic tradition. Accordingly, what distinguishes the natural sciences from the social sciences is interpretation. Understanding management studies as an interpretative science, therefore, suggests focusing on the disclosure of individual and collective meaning. Social reality is not “mindindependent” or “out there” to be discovered. Instead, reality is constructed individually by meaning-seeking agents, and collectively through social practices shaped by common cultures (chapter by Blagoev and Costas). This view also offers a rationale for looking at managerial work as collective and knowledgeable doing (chapter by Gherardi). Consequently, epistemologies of interpretation reject the idea that management studies should strive for knowledge that aims to represent “the” (one and only) objective true reality. Thirdly, epistemologies of imagination do not seek to create scientific statements that mirror or correspond to reality but, rather, to develop knowledge in contrast with empirical reality. What unites these epistemologies is the role of imagination, either as a normative yardstick for emancipation and critique (chapter by Kärreman) or as a fictional benchmark for creative thinking and learning about possible futures and their consequences (chapter by Schoeneborn and Cornelissen). Finally, epistemologies of intervention deal with issues of design. The guiding question for them is: how do theoretical statements influence or shape reality? Traditionally, intervention and design have been essential issues in design science, engaged scholarship, and evidence-based management. Yet the performative role of theories as they (co-)constitute the very instances of social reality (chapter by Gond and Carton), as well as the role of management studies to “irritate” rather than shape management practice (chapter by Grossmann-Hensel and Seidl), have received insufficient attention so far. The section Philosophy of Science for Management Theory and Practice, edited by Alejandro Agafonow, emphasizes the importance of theory for generating insights about management. The significance of theory-based insights, not only for scholarly research but also for the practice of management, in turn, requires reflections upon the philosophical underpinnings of such theory development. In the same spirit, this section involves contributions from a broad spectrum of philosophy of science, including the social sciences and the natural/life sciences – and mobilizes these cross-disciplinary insights to reflect upon the field of philosophy of science applied to management studies. The section familiarizes the reader with different ways of drawing scientific inferences: deductive (i.e., derived top-down from theoretical considerations), inductive (i.e., generated bottom-up from the empirical material at hand), abductive (i.e., through iterative back-and-forth movements between theory and empirics), and retroductive (i.e., provisional, educated “best guess” about the most likely

1

Introduction to Philosophy of Management

7

explanation for an empirical observation) (chapter by Blaikie and Priest). Further contributions in this section build on these distinctions – for instance, by showcasing, in the context of organizational economics, the value of retroduction as a chance to generate open, creative and (counter-)intuitive new theoretical insights (chapter by Agafonow and Perez). Further contributions mobilize insights from philosophy of science applied to neighboring disciplines and relate them to the area of management. The other disciplines discussed here are psychiatry (chapter by Wakefield and Conrad) and the biology of cancer (chapter by Bertolaso). The section also includes critical considerations of how organizational mechanisms of standardization and bureaucratization shape the conditions under which scientific inquiry can be conducted (further chapter by Agafonow and Perez). Approaches to speculative philosophy are highlighted as alternatives and complements to philosophical analysis in order to develop new forms of knowing and discovering in management theory and practice (chapter by Gare and Neesham). The section entitled Aesthetics of Management, edited by Wim Vandekerckhove, is focused on an oftentimes overlooked dimension in the philosophy of management – that is, the dimension of art and aesthetics. This oversight is all the more surprising given that developing theories of organization and management involves not only choices based on content or methodological rigor but also choices based on aesthetic considerations (e.g., the beauty of a simple but nevertheless powerful explanatory model). The section compiles a rich and diverse set of contributions that are all united by an interest in teasing out more or less explicit aesthetic, bodily, and/or emotional dimensions of scholarly engagement with phenomena of organization and management. More specifically, the section combines contributions on the aesthetics of leadership (two chapters by Küpers and chapter by Bathurst and Chen), design thinking and scenario planning (chapter by Cairns), workplace design (chapter by Vickery), ethical decision making (chapter by Ladkin), and business education (chapter by Guillet de Monthoux). Moreover, the section brings together contributions that draw on particular streams of philosophical heritage, such as works by St. Thomas Aquinas (chapter by Cunningham) or Jacques Rancière (chapter by Vandekerckhove and Emmanuel), and relate them to the aesthetics of management. A further special emphasis of this section is to bring in cross-cultural insights about aesthetics, for instance, from Asian contexts (e.g., the above-mentioned chapter by Bathurst and Chen). The section entitled Social and Political Philosophy of Management, edited by Marian Eabrasu, offers a selection of pieces that provoke new understandings of how socio-political arrangements shape managing and organizing. In times of crisis, conflicts and political struggles, the search for legitimate social institutions, forms of governance and social practices sustaining the rights and liberties of individuals, while ensuring responsibilities for the common good is more urgent than ever. The aim of social and political philosophy is, as Simon (2002: 2) puts it, “the moral evaluation of political and social institutions.” Yet the relationship between philosophy, social and political theory, and

8

C. Neesham et al.

policy-making has been controversial, to say the least. Western political philosophy has been divided between a so-called “analytic” approach (as favored by Locke, Mill, and Rawls) and the “continental” tradition associated with the works of Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and Foucault (Christman 2018; Bunge 2009). Not surprisingly, this has led to various approaches used for philosophizing about social institutions, principles of justice, and responsibilities for individuals and business firms. The section is organized around a fundamental tension between the elasticity of the political and social spheres and the permeability of their frontier with management, as outlined by Eabrasu. While managers are socially embedded and draw on political institutions, rules and norms as resources for organizing and managing, they do so in a nondeterministic fashion, as social structures can facilitate diverse patterns of deliberation and social interactions. This tension between “permeability” and “elasticity” of the social-political sphere is explored on different levels. The first chapter explores Xenophon’s philosophy, which is used to criticize contemporary management’s focus on private interests and offer an innovative approach to how societal interests can be integrated into the management of business organizations (chapter by Blok). Also drawing on ancient philosophy, the nature of the virtues of “integrity” and “prudence” is explored, and its intimate social dimension is emphasized in a managerial context (chapter by Jaquinot). Another managerial virtue is examined by focusing on phronesis (or “practical wisdom”) in an Aristotelian-Hayekian perspective, allowing for bridging conversations about the division of labor in economics and organization studies (chapter by Pellisier-Tanon). Regarding the interplay between civil society, governments, and businesses, it is argued that civil society is characterized by permeability between politics and business – in contrast with the idealistic assumption rooted in the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, which considered civil society to be an independent social force (chapter by Delalieux). Contributing to racial justice conversations, there is discussion about how dignity discourse needs to be reframed to integrate cultural Blackness primarily excluded in past research on human dignity (chapter by Harper). The section entitled Moral Philosophy and Management, edited by Cristina Neesham, brings together a wide range of philosophical approaches to challenge established views on ethical issues in business and management practice. Setting aside narratives about what is right and wrong, the catalyzing element here is a preoccupation with the moral life of the manager as a human being called to decide and act in the complex, paradoxical, and constraining conditions of today’s organizations. The moral philosophy applied to management in these chapters, while guided by the Socratic question about how we ought to live (Singer 2010; Williams 1985), goes beyond the normative-theoretical approaches that have come to dominate business ethics research over the decades, and stimulate the reader to reflect on our deeply ingrained assumptions about what managers, management, and organizations are for. Key philosophical questions raised here connect management – as both organizational function and human-social practice – with the grand challenges we are all facing today and redefine managerial responsibilities in the context of

1

Introduction to Philosophy of Management

9

individuals, organizations and communities living together in a world of plural values. Faithful to this plurality, the section includes perspectives that are not only different but sometimes even conflicting – all sharing, however, unconditional respect for intellectual fairness in argumentation. The journey starts with an exercise in methods of moral philosophy, to prepare us for sharpening our critical reasoning and for applying several tools of philosophical analysis to some of the provocations that lie ahead for business and management practice (chapter by Donaldson). Three different historical explorations are then offered around what can possibly constitute ethics and morality, in the most fundamental ways, in business and management. First, questions of philosophical anthropology prompt us to reflect on assumptions about human nature and reconsider the role of virtues and the meaning of wisdom in the process (chapter by Gare). Secondly, Adam Smith’s moral philosophy is rescued from preconceptions that are still dominant in business scholarship, to shed light on the complex relationships between self-interest and justice in the highly socialized economic behaviors of humans (chapter by Werhane and Bevan). Thirdly, the humanist-emancipatory focus of critical theory (in particular, the Frankfurt School) is engaged in examining the oppressive, reductionist, and totalizing effects of managerial rationality and industrial organization on human life (chapter by WrayBliss). Shifting from foundational questions of meta-ethics to normative ethics applied to management, a further set of chapters explores how individual ethical theories could be fruitfully employed to address more specific concerns about the manager’s role in organizations. Utilitarianism is represented in a discussion of how seeking “the greatest good for the greatest number” can be an effective force against instrumental rationality, promoting meaningful work, cooperation among employees, workplace diversity, and respect for human dignity (chapter by Gustafson). Kantian deontology is deployed to define the manager’s role as a morally active factor in preventing misconduct and creating ethical organizations (chapter by Dubbink and Liedekerke). The notion of moral agency is further explored in the context of decency as the preference to avoid doing wrong to others, at the risk of accepting to suffer wrong oneself (Heller 1988), and concluding that decent management is only possible if we properly understand our duties in relation to other human beings (chapter by Tsahuridu). The role of moral character in organizations is further discussed in an evaluation of the prospects of Solomon’s (1993) virtue ethics project in improving management practice and having it contribute more meaningfully to a better society (chapter by Gare and Neesham). Aristotelian virtue ethics is then called upon to analyze what practicing moral virtues in the workplace would entail, beyond ethical behavior as compliance with given rules: several vignettes outline the contours of agent-centered ethical practice concerned with multidimensional notions of the common good (chapter by West). The central role of employees’ identities in shaping conceptions of meaningful work, work-life balance, and workplace diversity is investigated using a MacIntyrean perspective on virtue ethics (chapter by Provis). Nonwestern sources of philosophical discussions of virtue and character are also referred to emphasizing Confucian principles of business and management behavior

10

C. Neesham et al.

based on benevolence, reciprocity, and role modeling (chapter by Niedenführ and Hennig), and, respectively, Daoist values that can be practiced by individual managers toward moral self-realization, as well as by organizations toward more harmonious and fulfilling workplaces (chapter by Hennig and Niedenführ). A discussion of equality in management practice is drawing on the concept of embodied relationality and the feminist philosophies of Ettinger, Butler, and Benjamin (chapter by Fotaki). Further, a Deweyan pragmatist perspective is employed to explain why ethical management is a constantly developing, never-ending project, whereby the manager must remain committed to moral growth and open to a plurality of voices (chapter by Martela). A critique of both virtue ethics and practical wisdom illustrates the inadequacy of both concepts in guiding the responsible management of innovation in organizations and proposes a vulnerability strategy of practicing innovation as ethos, whereby innovation managers place themselves in constant engagement with societal needs (chapter by Blok). The section concludes with a detailed application of Aristotle’s meta-ethics to address a recurrent question raised in business ethics research: do organizations have moral responsibility? While providing some relief to the individual manager, this argument shows how moral agency and responsibility can be attributed directly to the organization as an artificial person (chapter by Ardagh). The section entitled Philosophy in Management Practice and Education, edited by Steven Segal, rounds off the Handbook. While the philosophy of management traditionally tends to focus primarily on interrelations between management theories and their philosophical underpinnings, this section, in turn, is concerned with how philosophical processes can facilitate reflective and reflexive practice. This also includes considerations about how philosophy can inform education about management (e.g., in business school contexts). Positioned in this way, the section represents a much-needed addition to established ways of engaging with the philosophy of management. In sum, the contributions of this section cover a broad and diverse spectrum of professional, educational, and everyday life contexts, and shed new light on these contexts by drawing on specific philosophical streams. This includes, for instance, a philosophical look at the practice of consulting from a Heideggerian perspective (chapter by Spinosa, Hancocks, and Glennon), a critical engagement with the use of managerial jargon in business practice, by employing the notion of Hume’s fork (chapter by Spillane), and a reconsideration of work motivation in practice, by mobilizing philosophical insights sourced from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt and Axel Honneth (chapter by Tweedie). Furthermore, the section involves contributions that directly relate philosophical reflections to the area of management education: for instance, ideas that inform extant attempts to foster ethical considerations in business school education (e.g., the UN’s Principles of Responsible Management Education initiative) by drawing on Foucault’s philosophy (chapter by Caspersz and Leung) and the proposal to call on Kantian philosophy to cultivate a deeper normative grounding of business students’ understanding of business-society relations (chapter by Jarvis and Nikolova). Finally, the section reminds us of the large-scale absence of the term “organization” in the history of philosophy. This shortcoming is remedied

1

Introduction to Philosophy of Management

11

by drawing, among others, on Hegelian philosophy, among others, to illuminate the potentials of a philosophical account of organizations (chapter by Deranty).

Conclusion Projects emphasizing the role of philosophical ideas in the study of organizations (Mir et al. 2016; Tsoukas et al. 2021) and projects focusing on the philosophy of management itself (Griseri 2013; Blok 2020) reflect the development of steady scholarly interest in “practicing” philosophy of management as a distinctive area of inquiry, in its own right. The selection of chapters included in this handbook confirms the enormous potential that management scholarship has for engaging in applied philosophical work. The key thesis of this handbook is that philosophy matters to management. Philosophy offers orientation in a complex world by helping management scholars and practitioners to problematize existing positions from a philosophical stance, to inform researchers about different forms of investigation, theory building, testing, and reflection, and to locate and reflect upon one’s own stance and limitations. This Handbook offers a rich collection of positions and insights on how philosophy can be made relevant for management, and also on how management studies can be made relevant for philosophy as a field of application. We hope that this handbook will further stimulate debates between these two overlapping fields, “because any important advance in either raises problems for the other, as well as supplying tools to solve them” (Bunge 1996: 12). More work in this direction is still needed, to explore and fulfill the potential of philosophy of management as a foundational area in the study of organizations and organizing.

Cross-References ▶ A Critical Approach to Civil Society: The Case of Corporate Social Responsibility ▶ Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy and Its Relevance for Modern Management ▶ Aesthetic Knowing, “Designerly” Thinking and Scenario Analysis ▶ Aesthetics and Leadership ▶ Aesthetics of Management: An Introduction ▶ Aesthetics, Management, and the Organization of Space ▶ A Good Manager Serves Two Masters: A Kantian Perspective ▶ A Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice ▶ A Rancièrian Method of Exploring Notions of Management and Organization through the Artistic Gaze ▶ A Smile and a Sigh: Leadership Insights from the East ▶ Blackness as Dignity-in-Sacrifice: From Exploitation to Contribution ▶ Complexity and Management: Epistemic Insights from the Life Sciences ▶ Confucianism and Ethics in Management ▶ Creating an Effective Business Ethics

12

C. Neesham et al.

▶ Critical Inquiry ▶ Critical Moral Philosophy and Management ▶ Curating Management Philosophy: Art and Aesthetics for Business Education ▶ Daoism and Ethics in Management ▶ Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics ▶ Educating Business Students about Kant and Dignity for a Theory of Business-inSociety ▶ Evidence-Based Management ▶ Feminist Ethics ▶ Fictional Inquiry ▶ How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business ▶ How Utilitarianism Can Inform Decent Managers in Plural and Culturally Diverse Contexts ▶ Informing Educational Approaches to PRME Using Foucault ▶ Innovation as Ethos ▶ Interpretive Inquiry ▶ Is Moral Growth Possible for Managers? ▶ Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics ▶ Moral Agency and Decent Management ▶ Moral Philosophy and Management: An Introduction ▶ No Organizations for Today’s Einsteins ▶ Organizations, Virtue Ethics, and Narrative Identity ▶ Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics ▶ Philosophy in Management Practice and Education: An Introduction ▶ Philosophy of Science for Management Theory, Practice, and Sci-fi Freaks: An Introduction ▶ Problematizing the Relation Between Management Research and Practice ▶ Realist Inquiry ▶ Regionally Speaking: Cultural Leadership and Capacity Building in the Asia Pacific Region ▶ Reviving Methods of Speculative Philosophy ▶ Social and Political Philosophy of Management: An Introduction ▶ State of the Art on Aesthetics and Leadership ▶ The Aesthetics of St Thomas Aquinas and the Art of the Beautiful Business ▶ The Epistemology of Management: An Introduction ▶ The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder: Implications for the Social Sciences and Management Practice ▶ The Organization of Philosophy and a Philosophy of Organizations ▶ The Performativity of Theories ▶ The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action ▶ The Role of Virtue in Good Management ▶ The Social Role of the Virtue of Integrity ▶ Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility of Organizations as Artificial Persons ▶ Weeding the Management Garden: Hume’s Fork and Action Nominalism at Work ▶ What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian Philosopher

1

Introduction to Philosophy of Management

13

▶ Why Work? What Does Philosophy (Not) Tell Us About Worker Motivation? ▶ Wisdom Within the Firm: An Aristotelian-Hayekian Approach to the Managerial Process of Division and Coordination of Labor ▶ Xenophon’s Philosophy of Management

References Blok V (2020) What is (business) management? Laying the ground for a philosophy of management. Philos Manag 19(2):173–189 Bunge M (1996) Finding philosophy in social science. Yale University Press, New Haven/London Bunge M (2009) Political philosophy: fact, fiction, and vision. Transaction, Somerset/London Bunge M (2012) Evaluating philosophies. Springer, Dordrecht Christman J (2018) Social and political philosophy: a contemporary introduction, 2nd edn. Routledge, New York Dosi G, Nelson RR (1994) An introduction to evolutionary theories in economics. J Evol Econ 4: 153–172 Giddens A (1984) The constitution of society: outline of the theory of structuration. Polity, Cambridge Granovetter MS (1985) Economic action and social structure – the problem of embeddedness. Am J Sociol 91(3):481–510 Griseri P (2013) An introduction to the philosophy of management. SAGE, Los Angeles/London Gutting G (2003) Rorty’s critique of epistemology. In: Guignon C, Hiley DR (eds) Richard Rorty. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 41–60 Heller A (1988) General ethics. Basil Blackwell, Oxford Laurie N, Cherry C (2001) Wanted: philosophy of management. Philos Manag 1(1):3–12 Locke J (1996/1689) An essay concerning human understanding. Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis Menger C (1883) Untersuchungen über die Methode der Socialwissenschaften und der Politischen Ökonomie insbesondere. Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig Menger C (1884) Die Irrtümer des Historismus in der Deutschen Nationalökonomie. Hölder, Vienna Mir R, Willmott H, Greenwood M (2016) The Routledge companion to philosophy in organization studies. Routledge, London O’Neill J (ed) (1973) Modes of individualism and collectivism. Heinemann, London Reihlen M, Klaas-Wissing T, Ringberg T (2007) Metatheories in management studies: reflections upon individualism, holism, and systemism. M@n@gement 10(3):49–69 Rescher N (2001) Philosophical reasoning: a study in the methodology of philosophizing. Blackwell, Oxford Schmoller G (1883) Zur Methodologie der Staats- und Sozialwissenschaften. In: Schmoller G (ed) Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirthschaft im Deutschen Reich, 7. Jahrgang. Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig, pp 239–258 Simon RL (2002) Introduction: Social and political philosophy – sorting out the issues. In: Simon RL (ed) The Blackwell guide to social and political philosophy, vol 20. Wiley, Blackwell/ Malden, pp 1–13 Singer P (2010) How are we to live?: Ethics in an age of self-interest. Prometheus Books, Amherst Solomon RC (1993) Ethics and excellence: cooperation and integrity in business. Oxford University Press, New York Tsang EWK (2017) The philosophy of management research. Routledge, London Tsoukas, H, Sandberg, J, Fayard, A-L, Zundel, M (2021) Call for papers on a special issue on philosophy and organization studies: how does philosophy illuminate the study of organizations? https://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/OSS/SI_Philosophy_and_Organiza tion_Studies-1611161042153.pdf Vanberg V (1975) Die Zwei Soziologien: Individualismus und Kollektivismus in der Sozialtheorie. Mohr, Tübingen Williams B (1985) Ethics and the limits of philosophy. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

Part I Epistemology of Management

2

The Epistemology of Management: An Introduction Markus Reihlen and Dennis Schoeneborn

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Problem of Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Is Knowledge? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Who or What Has the Capacity of Knowing? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Is Knowledge Possible, and How Much Do We Know? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Are the Sources of Knowing? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Kind of Knowledge Is Best? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Epistemological Orientations and Their Reflection in Management Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Epistemologies of Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Epistemologies of Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Epistemologies of Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Epistemologies of Intervention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

18 19 19 20 22 23 25 27 27 29 31 32 34 34 35

Abstract

The epistemological foundations of management studies have been contested throughout the history of the discipline. In this chapter, we first introduce the core of epistemology – the problem of knowledge. The problem of knowledge M. Reihlen (*) School of Management and Technology, Institute of Management and Organization, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] D. Schoeneborn Department of Management, Society and Communication (MSC), Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark School of Management and Technology, Institute of Management and Organization, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_66

17

18

M. Reihlen and D. Schoeneborn

includes, in fact, several interrelated problems that form a system, such as: What is knowledge? Who or what has the capacity of knowing? How much can be known? What are the sources of knowing? And what knowledge is considered best? We then cluster current epistemological positions in management studies by differentiating between four epistemological orientations that differ in how the scientific statements relate to empirical reality. We refer to these orientations as (1) epistemologies of representation, (2) epistemologies of interpretation, (3) epistemologies of imagination, and (4) epistemologies of intervention. These four orientations serve as a structure to the contributions of this handbook, and also offer a novel way of mapping contemporary epistemologies in management scholarship. Keywords

Epistemology · Knowledge · Epistemologies of representation · Epistemologies of interpretation · Epistemologies of imagination · Epistemologies of intervention

Introduction About fifty years ago, C. West Churchman, philosopher, management scholar, and the first editor-in-chief of Management Science, made an essential contribution to the epistemology of management. In his book “the design of inquiring systems,” Churchman (1971) outlines how different epistemologies shape the design of systems that would be capable of securing knowledge about the world. More specifically, he proposes a taxonomy of five inquiring systems representing a rationalist (Leibnizian), empiricist (Lockean), phenomenological (Kantian), dialectical (Hegelian), and progressive (Singerian) epistemological tradition. Churchman shows how each design of an inquiring system helps us gain and impose limits on our understanding of the world. As he writes: “We can regard the history of epistemology (theory of knowledge) not as a description of how men [and women] learn and justify but as a description of how learning can be designed and how the design can be justified” (p. 17). Since Churchman’s early contribution, a lively discussion about the epistemological foundations of management studies has emerged (e.g., Johnson and Duberley 2000). While positivism, with its focus on observable reality, has dominated mainstream management research (Donaldson 1996), it has become popular to mark shifts in philosophical view as “turns.” As a result, a wide range of epistemological approaches appeared in management studies, in the meantime. Positivistic assumptions were challenged in different ways. For instance, focus on mind-independent reality led to the realist turn (Reed 2005), emphasis on language to the linguistic turn (Alvesson and Kärreman 2000), on sensemaking to the interpretative turn (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2015), on action as a source of knowing to the pragmatist turn (Lorino 2018), and on radical indeterminacy to the postmodern turn (Chia 1995). Each view offers an epistemological orientation on how inquiry and learning can be understood, and how the research design can be justified. In his historical analysis of scientific disciplines, Kuhn (1962) argued that discplines tend to be united (at least for certain periods) around one joint paradigm,

2

The Epistemology of Management: An Introduction

19

which provides researchers with shared assumptions as well as a set of problems and respective solution heuristics. However, while Kuhn grounds his analysis primarily in the study of disciplines from the natural sciences (such as chemistry or physics), his theorization of the structure of scientific revolutions has been criticized for being hardly applicable for the domain of the social sciences (including management studies). For instance, in his sociology of sociology, Friedrichs (1970) describes the social sciences as inherently multi-paradigmatic in character. In other words, while we can perceive in the natural sciences (such as physics) that single paradigms (such as the Newtonian or the Einsteinian) have been able to unify, by and large, a majority of scholars in a given discipline for a particular duration, in the social sciences multiple paradigms tend to coexist at the same time. Their relation is either described as competing (Rescher 1985) or as incommensurable (Kuhn 1962). The latter is the thesis that rival theories from different paradigms are partly incompatible and incomparable because of very different underlying assumptions. In this section, we propose to embrace the inherently multi-paradigmatic and pluralistic character of management studies as a social scientific discipline. While each of the contributions to this handbook has a particular (tacit or explicit) epistemological commitment, it is not the purpose of this book to favor one position over the other. Instead, we offer an overview and systematization of very different positions on the epistemology of management and provoke debate and reflection on how research could be conducted that is consistent with a particular epistemological stance. This overview aims to demonstrate how epistemological views shape specific understandings and therefore offer the reader different positions to make better and informed choices and be aware of each approach’s limitations.

The Problem of Knowledge Epistemology addresses what has been traditionally called the “problem of knowledge” (Bunge 1996). In fact, what has been considered the problem of knowledge includes instead a number of interrelated problems or questions that form a system. The main questions here are: What is knowledge? Who or what has the capacity of knowing? How much can be known? What are the sources of knowing? What knowledge is considered best? Let us elaborate briefly on each of these five questions and outline critical positions that have emerged in relation to them.

What Is Knowledge? The notion of what knowledge is has become a contested concept in epistemology and its application in management studies. Consider the following classical definition of “knowledge as justified true belief” (de Grefte 2021; Audi 1998). Scholars in favor of this definition have argued that not every outcome of a cognitive process should be called knowledge. Instead, an inquiry is a “belief-forming method” (de Grefte 2021) improving the reliability of our beliefs about the world. While

20

M. Reihlen and D. Schoeneborn

many management scholars have widely adopted this classical definition of knowledge as justified true belief (e.g., Nonaka 1994), it is problematic as a general definition of knowledge. Indeed, epistemology is concerned with how knowledge can be justified based on reasons, evidence, and/or practice and, as a result, may become more reliable. Yet, justified true belief is a specific form of knowledge. What may be considered as a well-justified solution to a problem for one group may be superficial to another. In fact, justification is a matter of degree, and it is communitybound. It ranges from well justified to poorly justified beliefs, and this justification depends on legitimate evaluation procedures shared by a particular scholarly community (Geiger and Schreyögg 2009). Consider another problem related to this definition. Knowledge also comes in different forms. Think about the prominent distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge, introduced by several philosophers. For instance, James (1890/1950) and Russell (1918/1956) distinguish between knowledge by acquaintance (tacit knowledge) and knowledge by description (explicit knowledge). This distinction was taken up and further elaborated by Polanyi (1966), who argues that all knowledge has a tacit dimension, and became a mainstream issue in cognitive psychology. While there is some misunderstanding of the nature of tacit knowledge in management studies (for a discussion, see Reihlen and Ringberg 2013; Tsoukas 2005), tacit knowledge is usually considered as being partly inaccessible to deliberate evaluation and justification because it may not easily be expressed in language. Yet, we still consider it as (part of our) knowledge. In short, knowledge as justified true belief has to be regarded as a special case of knowledge. In a more general sense, we understand knowledge as the accumulation of learnt experiences, concepts, skills, and normative orientations available to a subject in order to generate actions, behaviors, and solutions for cognitive and practical problems. Yet, who or what can acquire the status of subject here remains to be clarified, and this leads us to the second question.

Who or What Has the Capacity of Knowing? Across different epistemological traditions, we find four answers to who or what has the capacity of knowing: the lonely knowing subject, the embedded knower, the thought collective, and non-human artifacts. Let us briefly introduce each position. Traditionally, epistemology has focused on the lonely knowing subject and his or her epistemic challenges in making sense of the world. For instance, Popper’s (1962) epistemology of a continuous process of conjecture and refutation is ultimately individual-centric. He stresses how the individual researcher engages in critical investigations for the progress of science. More precisely, the notion of the knowing subject has been formulated as the psychoneural identity hypothesis inspired by the mind-body problem in the philosophy of mind, contemporary neuroscience, and biological physiology. Accordingly, all mental processes, whether emotional, cognitive, or volitional, are brain processes (Virues-Ortega et al. 2012). Thus, human cognition and knowing are controlled by the plastic neuronal supersystem, and

2

The Epistemology of Management: An Introduction

21

human mental or subjective life is a result and a collection of neural processes. Since the brain is a self-referential system, thought processes are regarded as “self-organized” and do not simply mirror reality. Thus, every piece of information, no matter how trivial it may seem, must be conceived of in relation to how it links up with the subject’s self-referential system (von Glasersfeld 1995). Consequently, perceiving, thinking, feeling, and learning are mutually dependent and influenced by preexisting internal cognitive dispositions (Maturana and Varela 1980). Accordingly, the psychoneural identity hypothesis suggests that knowledge has a biopsychological operating system – the neuronal network – and knowledge does not exist in and of itself without a knowing subject (Bunge 1996; Rescher 1997). While traditional epistemology has been individualistic in focus, the rise of social epistemology has helped to rebalance this distorted picture of the role of the individual in his or her social context. Since human epistemic situations are also shaped by social relations, networks, and institutions, the field of social epistemology has become a blooming discipline at the intersection between the social sciences and epistemology (e.g., Goldman and Whitcomb 2011). Two prominent positions have emerged on how the social shapes the human epistemic situation. The moderate position suggests that social communities influence the work of the inquirer through shared world views, methods, aims, research problems, and social networks. Social structures and resources of a learning community not only enable but also constrain inquiring practices. Yet, it is still the inquiring individual – as the agent of perceiving, conceiving, experiencing, testing, debating, and writing – who is socially embedded. As such, researchers and their teams interact with their environment, which provides resources such as funding, human resources, or legitimacy, and offers cognitive networks of orientation through which inquiring practices are enabled and constrained (Krohn and Küppers 1989; Goldman 1999). In short, this moderate position assumes that the knowing subjects as agents are the drivers of inquiry all along, from formulating research problems to implementing solutions. Yet, they are not free but socially embedded and constrained, not least by shared research approaches. The strong position, on the other hand, “shifted the attention from the individual scientist to the activities of communities of scientists, and proposed that scientific facts are the collective accomplishment of communities” (Oreskes 2019, p. 29). Hence, this view moved knowledge processes from the embedded human knower to the collective mind of a social community. From this perspective, knowledge is accessible to individuals from socially situated practices (Gherardi 2001; Tsoukas 2005), shared activities (Blackler 1993), collective thought worlds (Dougherty 1992; Fleck 1979), and communities of practice (Brown and Duguid 1991). This strong position reflects the social constructionist thesis that social communities can be thought of as knowing entities. Consequently, every “fact” is socially constructed by a “thought collective” or a community of people united by a common “thought style” (Fleck 1979). Finally, posthumanist researchers have suggested that focus on knowledge and knowing of the human subject does not reflect more recent advances and applications in technology. In modern times, technology has been applied as human

22

M. Reihlen and D. Schoeneborn

enhancement by changes of the human body ranging from technological artifacts like implants to augmented reality and artificial intelligence. Posthumanism “seeks to undermine the traditional boundaries between the human, the animal, and the technological” (Bolter 2016, p. 1556). Haraway, in her cyborg manifesto, questions the established distinction between humans and machines, and offers the picture of a cyborg as a “cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway 2006, p. 117). While technology has been used as enhancements of human cognitions for quite some time – just think about wearing glasses to correct farsightedness or using computer programs for statistical analysis –a very different approach is taken when machines such as computers are considered non-human knowers. More recent advancements in artificial intelligence raise exciting debates about whether machines have awareness, perceive, and think. Whether posthumanism will lead to a posthumanist epistemology, an epistemology of knowing or knowing-like for machines or other disembodied artifacts, is still disputed and remains an open question.

Is Knowledge Possible, and How Much Do We Know? In principle, we can imagine three answers to this question: we know everything, nothing, or something (Bunge 1996; Reed 2002). The first optimistic answer implies that there are no limits to inquiry. This view does not mirror our human shortcomings because we face cognitive limitations and make errors even concerning the most obvious things. The second answer is pessimistic – we know nothing – and face complete ignorance or never know anything for sure. This position overlooks the fact that, despite making errors, we sometimes do get things right. Perhaps, for better or worse, the achievements of science and technology offer proof of this. Therefore, Reed (2002) concludes that almost every contemporary theory of knowledge takes a more sensible middle ground position called fallibilism. This humble position suggests that whatever knowledge we have acquired, it always remains to some degree conjectural and fallible. More precisely, fallibilism is the thesis that no knowledge can ever be theoretically and/or empirically justified in a conclusive way. We simply have no assurance that our knowledge is reliable; hence, there always remain possible doubts about the truth or usefulness of our knowledge claims. Consequently, being (moderately) skeptical about one’s knowledge seems appropriate. For this reason, knowledge and knowing require continuous self-reflexivity and peer control, but this can only work if inquirers and their learning community show an openness to and tolerance of pluralistic diversity. Orientational pluralism fulfills what is probably the essential fundamental prerequisite for effective quality management of our epistemic business. Only by confronting one’s knowledge with different and mutually contradictory perspectives does one succeed in questioning the validity of one’s own position (Rescher 1993). As Popper (1965) aptly notes: “Without contradiction, without criticism, there would be no rational motive for changing our theories: there would be no intellectual progress” (Popper 1965, p. 266, translation by authors).

2

The Epistemology of Management: An Introduction

23

In short, the fallibilist thesis reminds us that we are far from perfect knowers and every piece of knowledge is worth improving.

What Are the Sources of Knowing? Knowing has different sources, as represented by the four influential epistemological schools of thought – empiricism, rationalism, intuitionism, and pragmatism. We briefly introduce each of these here. Empiricism is a doctrine which claims that the sole source of knowing, and the test of knowledge, is experience (Crotty 2003; Godfrey-Smith 2003). Empiricism comes in different degrees. Traditional empiricism, which is supported by famous protagonists such as Bacon, Locke, and Hume, and has also become a hallmark of several sociologists of science from Bloor and Knorr-Cetina to Latour, suggests that all knowledge is experiential, so there is no qualitative difference between scientific and ordinary knowledge. This view contrasts with positivism, which draws a clear borderline between science and nonscience. Auguste Comte, one of the founders of positivism, was committed to producing positive or reliable knowledge. For him, positive knowledge is created through scientific reasoning grounded in observations. The logical empiricism developed by the Vienna Circle and its offshoots in Berlin and Prague merged logical analysis with empirical testability (Oreskes 2019). This commitment to using observational knowledge to show whether a statement is true or false has become known as the “verifiability principle of meaning”: something exists and is part of our world when empirically verified through sense-experience (Zimmerman 1962). In short, empiricism teaches the virtue and necessity of observation and induction in acquiring (reliable) knowledge. Rationalism is an epistemological doctrine that recognizes that knowledge is created through ideation, in contrast to observation, and is founded on the authority of reason (Godfrey-Smith 2003; Bunge 1996). Trust in reason has been one of the hallmarks of the enlightenment: “if only men [and women] were to think and act rationally, the rest would follow” (Bunge 1999, p. 130). Accordingly, knowledge is acquired and assured if statements can ultimately be derived from indisputably true, evident principles of reason. That is, according to this view, our reason alone is a guarantor when evaluating our cognitions. Rationalism also comes in different versions. Moderate rationalism suggests that reason is necessary but insufficient to understand the world. Karl R. Popper can be considered a moderate (critical) rationalist. According to his view of science, experience and the principle of induction is insufficient “because inductive inferences cannot be justified based on any purely logical rule, and therefore cannot be established with logical necessity. Nowadays, this is referred to as the black swan problem” (Oreskes 2019, p. 27). Hence, observations cannot prove that a statement is true. We can only use evidence to (what he calls) falsify, or disprove it. For Popper (1962), science operates as a process of conjecture and refutation, and critical rationality is the appropriate foundation of inquiry. In a similar vein, Toulmin’s (1958) theory of argumentation and Habermas’ (1984) idea of rational discourse and the ideal of communicative

24

M. Reihlen and D. Schoeneborn

rationality share the position of moderate rationalists. Yet, radical rationalism is different. Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza proposed that reliable knowledge is reflected in the sole faith of reason unsupported by perceptions, experience, or actions. In sum, rationalism suggests that knowing is based on thinking and ideation, and that reason provides the yardstick used to judge our knowledge. Intuitionism is the view that intuition is superior to reason, experience, and action. Intuition is the appeal to direct apprehension, gut feeling, and tacit knowing. It is a powerful form of cognition – as it allows immediate perception, imagination, synthesis, and evaluation – and, therefore, has played an essential role throughout the history of science and epistemology (see Bunge 1962). Various philosophers and social scientists have favored intuitionism. For instance, Dilthey (1957), one of the founders of the Verstehen school in social sciences, suggests that the aim of the social scientist is not to explain but to comprehend (Verstehen) social issues using empathy (Mitempfindung). Similarly, Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, emphasizes what he calls Wesensschau (vision of essences), a mode of thinking that pertains to the pure awareness of essences. “Husserl,” as Mohanty (1959, p. 222) argues, “is treating thought as a mode of disclosure, and not as a mode of construction or analysis [. . .]. In this sense, thought is intuitive, but it is not so in any other mystical sense.” Intuitionism is also favored by poststructuralists such as Derrida (1979) and postmodernists like Lyotard (1986). Radical intuitionism leads to the rejection of reason. This has become the hallmark of irrationalism, which distrusts reason and rational debates in favor of intuition, and sees little value in empirical evidence produced through observations and experience. In short, intuition is a fruitful form of knowing, one that relies on “crystallized intelligence” and direct awareness. Finally, we come to pragmatism, a doctrine that refers to action as the source and test of knowledge. Like the above schools of thought, pragmatism comprises a variety of somewhat different positions. Yet, what they all seem to have in common is that they prioritize experience and practice over theory, rules of practice over general principles or laws, trial and error over intuition, and common sense over ideology. Hence, despite differences within pragmatism, it seeks “knowledge that works” in particular practice fields (see Rescher 2016, p. 21). However, there are substantial differences between various pragmatists. For instance, Peirce’s pragmatism is firmly cognitive, using the test of practice as a sensible standard to assess the truth of theories. Dewey and Mead, on the other hand, favor a community and social form of pragmatism. The search for truth and the removal of doubt has to be settled not by the individual but by a community of rational inquirers. Another stance was taken by James, who took a personalistic and psychological approach to pragmatism. While Dewey’s community credo of pragmatism is “what works for us,” James’ individualistic view is “what works for me.” A particular postmodern and relativistic position was proposed by Rorty, who suggests that there “is no method for knowing when one has reached the truth, or when one is closer to it than before” (Rorty 1982, pp. 165–166). In sum, “pragmatism,” as Rescher (2000, p. 47) reflects, “has not managed to achieve a uniform stability but has come to be construed very differently

2

The Epistemology of Management: An Introduction

25

by different philosophers.” Yet, what is shared across this diversity is the value of action as a source of knowing.

What Kind of Knowledge Is Best? Each of the aforementioned epistemologies offers an answer to what knowledge is best in guiding our cognitive business and actions. Empiricists suggest that knowledge is best grounded in appearance and experience, rationalists argue that knowledge bound to reasoning and argumentation enjoys the best prospect of success in action, and intuitionists imply we should follow our gut feeling and tacit knowing, and pragmatists propose we follow knowledge that works grounded in practice to solve problems. While we consider that each position offers an essential grain of truth, we argue that a strong epistemological position draws on multiple sources of knowing and does not prioritize a priori either experience, reason, intuition, or action. Furthermore, inquiry as a guided learning process also has different purposes, such as understanding problems, designing solutions, or inspiring new ideas. What is best depends on best for what purpose. We, therefore, submit that the question of what kind of knowledge is best is evaluated across different epistemological traditions, yet with different emphasis, on three accounts: its truth value, its usefulness to tackle practical problems, and its novelty value to inspire new thoughts. These three values – truth, usefulness, and novelty – are quite distinct but can be related. For instance, a theory should offer true accounts of what it aims to explain and can also provide a novel way of seeing things. Knowledge should be adequate, and one core value to assess the adequacy of our knowledge is whether it is considered true or false. Yet, the question of truth is a contested concept in epistemology (Bunge 1996). Radical skeptics deny that we can find any factual truth; yet, they also reject that we can know anything. A more optimistic view is adopted by realists, who embrace the correspondence theory of (factual) truth, suggesting that a statement is true if it matches the facts it refers to. For instance, the statement that an organization is in decline is only true when we have a theoretical definition of organizational decline and objective evidence that corresponds to and supports this claim. Alternatively, realists have also adopted a coherence theory of truth, which suggests that a statement is true when it shows coherence or close fit with some body of knowledge (Rescher 1973). A lively response to the correspondence theory of truth has been developed by protagonists of the hermeneutic and constructionist tradition. For them, truth is a social construction and convention. What is considered as truth is agreed upon within a particular community and is, therefore, community-bound. The consensus theory of truth by Habermas (1984) eloquently illustrates this. True is what finds agreement. Picking up our example above, the statement that a firm is in decline is true when agreed upon within a particular community. Finally, postmodernists have suggested an “anything goes” (Feyerabend 1975) attitude because, as they argue, there are no objective, universal criteria, and standards to evaluate the truth of a statement. Hence, assessing something as true is personal, contextual, and local (Sarup 1993).

26

M. Reihlen and D. Schoeneborn

In sum, while truth has become a paramount criterion to evaluate knowledge, there is little agreement across different schools of thought on what truth means and how one is to determine its existence. Another criterion to assess the adequacy of knowledge is to consider its usefulness. Especially pragmatists have substituted truth for usefulness when seeking knowledge “that works.” Yet, usefulness is a very different thing upon closer scrutiny because it reflects instrumental values (Bunge 1989). All technologies aim to produce knowledge that is useful in tackling practical problems. Technological designs, from new business models to new organizational forms, are useful to someone. Consider the digital business model of Google and Facebook based on surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019). Obviously, the digital business model is not true or false, but useful or harmful to someone – profitable for its owners, and potentially harmful for its users because of lax privacy practices. This is why the technological imperative should be “Do not design anything useless” (Bunge 1989, p. 259). In short, some knowledge is best because it is beneficial, from developing an effective vaccine protecting the public from infections to new organizational forms facilitating participation and democratic forms of governance. Finally, knowledge can be considered superior when it is novel and offers more creative ways of thinking about specific problems. This position has become particularly influential in the social sciences and management studies and has been eloquently proposed by Davis (1971). In his article, he argues that a theory is not considered influential and impactful because it is true but because it is interesting. He then raises the question of what makes a particular theory interesting to its audience in contrast to those considered uninteresting. His answer is that “[a]ll interesting theories, at least all interesting social theories, then, constitute an attack on the taken-for-granted world of their audience. . . . If it does not challenge but merely confirms one of their taken-for-granted beliefs, [the audience] will respond to it by rejecting its value while affirming its truth” (Davis 1971, p. 311). Hence, “[a]n interesting proposition was always the negation of an accepted one” (Davis 1971, p. 311). This idea that superior knowledge should push novel thoughts instead of incremental improvements is also mirrored in Alvesson and Sandberg’s (2011) problematization approach to generating research questions. A good research problem, as the authors suggest, is one that “problematize[s] assumptions in a way that generates novel research questions” (Alvesson and Sandberg 2011, p. 253). This may lead to an outcome that is more creative, has an interesting appeal, and provides novel thinking about a subject matter (Alvesson and Kärreman 2011). As Weick (1989, p. 525) emphasizes: “A disconfirmed assumption is an opportunity for a theorist to learn something new, to discover something unexpected, to generate renewed interest in an old question, to mystify something that had previously seemed settled, to heighten intellectual stimulation, to get recognition, and to alleviate boredom.” In sum, while not undisputed (Bettis et al. 2016), it is fair to say that novelty became an influential value to assess knowledge in current social science and management studies.

2

The Epistemology of Management: An Introduction

27

Epistemological Orientations and Their Reflection in Management Studies The setup of the Epistemology of Management section aims to reflect our understanding of management studies as a pluralistic and multi-paradigmatic discipline of the social sciences, as described above. For structuring this section and its chapters, we opted against relying on classical schools of thought, such as (post-)positivism, hermeneutics, and so on. Instead, we aim to familiarize readers with contemporary epistemology-related debates in the field of management studies. We do so by distinguishing four different epistemological orientations in the field, each differing in how scientific statements and empirical reality are interrelated. More specifically, we differentiate between (1) epistemologies of representation, (2) epistemologies of interpretation, (3) epistemologies of imagination, and (4) epistemologies of intervention. Epistemologies of representation aim to advance scientific statements to best match, explain, or predict empirical reality. Epistemologies of interpretation relate scientific statements not to an objectively given reality but instead to one that is socially constructed in inter-subjective meaning-making and situated in practice. Epistemologies of imagination mobilize fictional scenarios, counterfactuals, and/or ideal-type thinking as scientific statements, with the aim to contrast them with empirical reality, also as a means for creative theory development and critique. Finally, epistemologies of intervention are concerned with how scientific statements enter and potentially alter empirical reality. Taken together, these four main epistemological orientations cover the field of management studies in a pluralistic and comprehensive way. At the same time, we consider these orientations as a heterarchy; in other words, none of them is generally superior to the other – but, instead, they simply differ in their suitability for addressing different kinds of research questions. In that spirit, we encourage management scholars to embrace the epistemological pluralism that characterizes our field – rather than considering one paradigm in particular as the one-size-fits-all approach. In the following, we describe in more detail the four main epistemological orientations that form the main corpus of this section and briefly summarize and foreshadow the chapters that populate these different orientations.

Epistemologies of Representation Epistemologies of representation assume that theories are to social reality what the map is to a territory. The better maps (i.e., theories) are those that represent the territory (i.e., social reality) more accurately. Yet, just like maps are not the territories, so theories are not the things they represent. Instead, theories offer an abstracted and simplified picture that represents its real counterparts only approximately. Ultimately, theoretical representations should give us cognitive orientation within our environment. As Rescher (2003: xvi) explains: “To know something, then, is not to be engaged in an activity but to have entered into a certain condition – a cognitive condition.” Not surprisingly, epistemologies of representation have been

28

M. Reihlen and D. Schoeneborn

deeply engaged with the question: under what conditions do scientific statements become better approximations of reality and can be considered true? As such, inquiry from a representational view seeks scientific statements that are appropriately and rigorously grounded, and establish an objective, accurate and reliable relation between the statements and the real objects they represent. In particular, positivism and realism can be associated with epistemologies of representation in management studies. Unfortunately, they have often been confused with one another. In a first approximation, the former is the view that all knowledge is grounded in experience, and the latter assumes that most of the reality transcends the mind. While positivism, as Johnson and Duberley (2000) summarize, focuses “on the observable and the approach to the analysis of organizations assumes that their reality is objectively given” (p. 41), different versions of realism “are united by a rejection of the view that the world is created by the minds of human observers” (p. 149). Among many other differences, we would like to highlight two critical distinctions between these views. First, positivists and realists deviate from their reference point of what they consider as reality. Positivism suggests that only positive facts (experience) should be attended to when developing scientific statements. Hence, the real is related to phenomenalism or how things appear to someone. While positivism today has been interpreted differently by management scholars and has been modified by including Popper’s (1959) principle of deduction and falsification, the focus upon observable facts and the development of theories that can be tightly related to those observables, most preferably through quantification, are typical hallmarks of positivist research. On the other hand, realism suggests that reality is more than how it appears to us and how we experience it because a large part of reality, from sensemaking to error cultures, is inaccessible to direct observations. Yet, these unobservable elements of reality have to be included in our theorizing for gaining a proper, more comprehensive understanding. Consequently, positivism and realism deviate concerning the inclusion of unobservables in our theorizing. Second, both views also differ in how we best gain knowledge about (empirical) reality. While positivism is grounded on an empiricist epistemology following inductive and verification principles, and in its Popperian revision entailing an interplay between conjecture and refutation (Popper 1962), realists entertain a more complex relation between ideation and theorization on one hand and experience and empirical reality checks on the other. Since unobservable aspects of reality are beyond our senses, they have to be invented, as realists argue, and that means that realist inquiry goes beyond systematic collection and analysis of experience, but, in addition, entails creativity, invention, and “creating leaping” (Klag and Langley 2013). Realist epistemology is, therefore, a blend of rationalism and empiricism. This section of the book includes two chapters. In ▶ Chap. 3, “Evidence-Based Management,” by Mona Mensmann, Denise Rousseau, and Michael Frese, the authors focus on the tension between scientific knowledge and organizational reality. Traditionally, evidence-based management has been associated with a positivist epistemology. Yet, as this chapter and the previous contributions of the authors

2

The Epistemology of Management: An Introduction

29

make clear, evidence-based management is related to a critical realist position, thus shedding light on the multiple sources of knowledge that can and should inform action in organizations. The chapter discusses why abstract scientific knowledge and managerial expertise often appear incompatible in the context of organizational practice, especially when organizations have to act quickly under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity. The chapter concludes by offering ways to reduce this tension, by making knowledge actionable and turning action into knowledge. The future of evidence-based management, as the authors argue, may help scholars to contribute to more scholarship-informed practice and allow practitioners to balance better scientific knowledge and reflective practice for more effective decisions and action. ▶ Chapter 4, “Realist Inquiry,” by Markus Reihlen, Stefanie Habersang, and Natalia Nikolova offers a broader and more comprehensive introduction into how realism informs management studies. As the authors suggest, realism provides a particularly attractive way out of anthropocentrism and idealism in much contemporary research in management studies that detaches theorizing from its material conditions. This becomes especially problematic when understanding and handling the “Grand Societal Challenges” (George et al. 2016) intertwined with our material existence in the world. The chapter outlines three different versions of realism: empirical, critical, and scientific realism. Contrary to much of the contemporary literature in management studies that builds upon a Bhaskarian approach of critical realism, the authors suggest that management scholars could benefit from opening up to a broader diversity of realist positions, including scientific realism as proposed by Mario Bunge, in order to strengthen their philosophical stance and, at the same time, stimulate a debate on different directions of a “realist turn” in management studies. The chapter discusses specific consequences of a realist approach to management concerning its ontology, epistemology, and praxeology.

Epistemologies of Interpretation Epistemologies of interpretation assume that there is a marked difference between the natural sciences and the social sciences. While the former deals with discovering the laws of nature, social science, including management studies, in contrast, inevitably is an interpretative science that is centered on the disclosure of individual and collective meanings. Social facts, unlike natural facts, involve interpreting people’s actions, and this entails “‘getting inside’ the actors’ world views: attributing motives, concepts, convictions, and beliefs to the actors in an effort to make sense of what they do” (Steel and Guala 2011, p. 143). Hence, social facts, as argued by protagonists of this view, are loaded with meaning. Reality is not “out there” to be discovered but is constructed individually by meaning-seeking agents and collectively through social practices shaped by common thought styles and paradigms. Consequently, epistemologies of interpretation reject the idea that social sciences should strive for knowledge that aims to represent reality (in the form of correspondence) and would reject the notion that inquiry should get us closer to “the” (one and only) objective truth. Instead, the truth of

30

M. Reihlen and D. Schoeneborn

a scientific statement is considered the result of social processes that reflect social conventions, a community consensus, or a “viable” orientation for actors within their environment. Epistemologies of interpretation are represented by several different sub-streams covering constructivism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, post-structuralism, and postmodernism. In particular, hermeneutics has become an essential inspirational source and foundation for a non-positivistic social science. While initially hermeneutics was considered the art and science of text interpretation, it was especially Wilhelm Dilthey (1957) who introduced the “hermeneutic turn” in the social sciences. Instead of considering hermeneutics merely as an auxiliary discipline, he proposed a new epistemological and methodological foundation for the social sciences that clearly set itself apart from the positivist claim of a universal science (Grondin 1997). Its central thesis is that social science does not explain but rather verstehen (i.e., to understand/comprehend) social reality. Accordingly, verstehen became the modus operandi for social scientists. Yet, the method of verstehen has been differently used by its protagonists. For Dilthey (1957), verstehen was associated with empathy, and for Weber (1922) it was the attribution of purpose to action. With Martin Heidegger’s “existential turn,” hermeneutics was no longer about the interpretation of a text, but human existence itself became its object. Consequently, hermeneutics was transformed from an epistemological and methodological approach into an idealist ontological doctrine (Grondin 1997). In a similar vein, the rising interest in how language shapes organizations and society, as expressed by the “linguistic turn” (Rorty 1967), became an influential view in the social sciences and its reflection in management studies, which suggests that the world can best be understood as text or as a language game (Alvesson and Kärreman 2000). Derrida’s famous statement expresses this well: “there is no outside the text” (Derrida 1976, p. 163). Accordingly, reality is viewed as constituted in and through discourse. This section of the book features two chapters. In ▶ Chap. 5, “Interpretive Inquiry,” by Blagoy Blagoev and Jana Costas, the roots of interpretative inquiry in the philosophical tradition of constructivism – and with relations to its sociological, historical, cognitive, and linguistic foundations – are reconstructed. For the authors, interpretive inquiry aims to understand how actors make sense and attach meaning to their actions and interactions, experiences, and phenomena. The authors emphasize the close relationship between interpretive inquiry and philosophical constructivism, with its multiple offshoots. Based on this overview, key research areas in management studies based on interpretive inquiry are outlined, such as research in organizational culture, organizational storytelling, rhetoric, discourse and communication, contemporary process and practice studies of organization and management, and, finally, work on the intersection between organizations and technology. The chapter highlights implications for the practicing researcher and concludes with a discussion of some common criticisms of social constructivism as a philosophical foundation of interpretative inquiry. The second chapter of this section, ▶ Chap. 6, “A Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice,” by Silvia Gherardi, contributes practice epistemology to the study of

2

The Epistemology of Management: An Introduction

31

management and organization. Using a practice lens to study how organizations know and learn has become influential in management studies. In this conceptualization, knowledge is constituted and transferred through practices and activities. The author argues that practice theories are particularly suited to answering the question of what managers do when they manage. For her, a posthumanist practice theory offers a rationale for looking at managerial work as collective and knowledgeable doing. Hence, knowledge is viewed as an activity rather than as an object. It is further elaborated while being used in practice. Yet, this application, as an ongoing practical accomplishment, is performed within materially heterogeneous practices. Following previous work on sociomateriality and actor network theory, Gherardi assigns agency not just to humans but also to non-human entities. She thus opens up new avenues for posthumanist conversations that seek to de-center the human subject. The relationship between the social and the material is understood as a form of “entanglement” where the separation between subject and object disappears, and agency is achieved within what she calls the agencement of practice elements. Following the footsteps of phenomenalism, reality is understood as thingsin-phenomena and not as things-in-themselves. The chapter illustrates the applications of a humanist and posthumanist practice epistemology to show the respective implications of methodology. She sees the challenge of a posthumanist epistemology for future research by inventing post-qualitative methods based on the concept of entanglement of human and more-than-human elements.

Epistemologies of Imagination Epistemologies of imagination generate scientific statements – in contrast with epistemologies of representation – not to correspond with a given reality but rather to contrast these statements with empirical reality and as a means for creative thinking and critique. With this section of the Handbook, we deliberately go beyond the typical canon of epistemological orientations in philosophy. More specifically, we highlight that the field of management studies is characterized by a broader range of scientific statements, some of which deliberately go beyond the ambition of “mapping” social reality – and, by contrast, these works use scientific statements to address inadequacies of that social reality critically and/or reveal its inherent alternativity. This section of the book features two chapters. In ▶ Chap. 7, “Critical Inquiry,” Dan Kärreman lays out the contours of critical approaches in management studies – those streams of research that use scientific statements to problematize institutionalized inequalities and power relations in managerial and organizational settings, based on an emancipatory understanding of the social sciences. In that sense, critical inquiry confronts empirical reality with normative statements (i.e., what the world should be like) and uses such statements as a backdrop for critical interrogations of the status quo of managerial and organizational realities. Kärreman structures his elaborations into three main commitments of critical inquiry (see also Fournier and Grey 2000): (1) commitments to

32

M. Reihlen and D. Schoeneborn

a negative ontology (i.e., the key assumption that society exists as a nexus of ideological practices, material conditions, and exercises of power – but that it could be different in principle), (2) an epistemology of denaturalization (i.e., the aim of revealing the inherent “un-naturalness” and irrationality of managerial and organizational settings), and (3) reflexive methodology (i.e., the need to be selfaware of the assumptions, vocabularies, and methodological techniques invoked by critical inquiry and to reflect upon their shortcomings and limitations). The chapter concludes by pointing out two possible avenues for future development of critical inquiry: a stronger engagement with critical realist assumptions about objective, naturalized realities and/or forms of engaged scholarship, and constructive critique that would be concerned first and foremost with imagining alternative realities (see also the notion of critical performativity in Spicer et al. 2009). Beyond this critical and normative impetus, in the chapter on ▶ Fictional Inquiry, Dennis Schoeneborn and Joep Cornelissen map out those approaches in management and organization studies that generate scientific statements which deliberately deviate from actual empirical reality. In that sense, fictional inquiry opens up the epistemology of management studies to a broader range of ways in which scholars can use scientific statements in the area of management. The authors structure the heterogeneous works in this epistemological orientation by distinguishing between three main purposes of fictional inquiry: (1) juxtaposing fictional and counterfactual statements against empirical reality to enhance our understanding of that reality (e.g., through ideal-type thinking or figurative imagination); (2) juxtaposing fictional/ counterfactual statements against other scientific statements to test and refine those statements (e.g., via counterfactual reasoning, thought experiments, or simulation); and (3) drawing on fictional realities as an object of inquiry in its own right. The chapter concludes with reflections on fictional inquiry and its particular fit to management studies as a field.

Epistemologies of Intervention Epistemologies of intervention are concerned with whether, how, and under what circumstances scientific statements intrude upon, shape, and alter social reality. Social science theories can enter the lifeworld under investigation either tacitly, by what Giddens referred to as the “double hermeneutic” (Giddens 1993), or by deliberate design. According to the “double hermeneutic,” there is a close entanglement between theories and social reality. While in the natural sciences (e.g., in physics or chemistry), the objects of study tend to be unaware of the fact they are studied, in the social sciences (e.g., sociology or management studies), the objects of study are themselves meaning-processing subjects. Therefore, one can expect for the social world a recursive hermeneutic process between the researchers (who aim to understand the social world) and those who are studied (i.e., who are able to take scientific theories into account in their behavior). As Giddens (1993, p. 13) writes:

2

The Epistemology of Management: An Introduction

33

“Lay actors are concept-bearing beings, whose concepts enter constitutively into what they do; the concepts of social science cannot be kept insulated from their potential appropriation and incorporation within everyday action.” Design, on the other hand, is based on deliberate intervention. The design function of management knowledge has been emphasized since its foundation as a discipline. Consequently, questions of design have been addressed by such approaches as action research, design science, mode 2 knowledge production (as explained further below), engaged scholarship, or evidence-based management to shape managerial decision-making and interventions (for a review see Kieser et al. 2015), as well as ▶ Chaps. 3, “Evidence-Based Management,” by Mensmann et al., and ▶ 4, “Realist Inquiry,” by Reihlen et al., in this handbook. The epistemology of design raises some specific questions. For instance, what is the relation between scientific knowledge and practical skills, or between scientists and practitioners, in solving a practical issue? How are design theories validated when their purpose is to change, and not to explain, practice? How are design theories translated into action? These and related questions frame problems of the epistemology of design. This section is composed of two chapters. ▶ Chap. 9, “The Performativity of Theories,” by Jean-Pascal Gond and Guillaume Carton, the authors explore this interrelation based on the notion of performativity (see also Gond et al. 2016). Scientific statements become performative if they (co-)constitute the very instances of social reality that they aim to describe (Marti and Gond 2018). In the same context, the authors newly introduce two ideal-type positions that can be seen as poles of a continuum of scholarship on theory of performativity: (1) performativity as a mindset and (2) performativity as a social mechanism. The notion of performativity as mindset primarily relates to performativity as an ontoepistemological lens – that is, how researchers perceive their own relation to the subjects they study. In contrast, the notion of performativity as a social mechanism instead emphasizes that researchers study performativity intending to reveal more general social mechanisms “out there” (and hence the ontological claims are less pronounced in this latter view). Gond and Carton specify the common core assumptions underlying both perspectives as well as their distinctive commitments to these assumptions. Based on their ideal-typical distinction, and the continuum between the two poles, they develop a research agenda for future performativity-sensitized research in organization and management studies. In the second chapter of this section, “Problematizing the Relation Between Management Theory and Practice” by Benjamin Grossmann-Hensel and David Seidl, the authors shed critical light on the epistemological question of how theories of management interrelate, relate to, and become applicable in managerial and organizational practice. This issue has been the subject of a long-standing debate in the field about the status of management studies as an applied and practically relevant science. For instance, the field of management studies has been diagnosed as being in a trade-off between scientific rigor and practical relevance (e.g., Kieser et al. 2015). This debate reminds us of the distinction in philosophy of science between “Mode 1” knowledge (i.e., theory building and testing with the aim of

34

M. Reihlen and D. Schoeneborn

generating universal knowledge) and “Mode 2” knowledge (i.e., know-how that is targeted at the practical application in specific circumstances). In this chapter, Grossmann-Hensel and Seidl draw on the “descriptive” stream of the literature on practical relevance, especially Niklas Luhmann’s (1990) sociology of science, to discuss the forms and conditions of management science’s practical relevance in epistemological terms. In a nutshell, the authors argue that the very character of science as a social system of self-referential communication renders impossible the direct, linear transfer of research insights to practice. Based on this diagnosis, the authors discuss several humble, alternative ways in which management research can impact and “irritate” management practice (Kieser and Leiner 2009, p. 516).

Conclusion The central thesis of this conclusion is that there is a close science-philosophy connection, and management research, in the light of philosophy in general and epistemology in particular, is likely to produce better – more novel, accurate, and useful – knowledge. Each of the four aforementioned epistemological orientations – (1) epistemologies of representation, (2) epistemologies of interpretation, (3) epistemologies of imagination, and (4) epistemologies of intervention – constitutes a research program with very different assumptions and implications of what management research is and how it should be conducted. Hence, each research program guides us on how knowledge is utilized to understand the nature of research problems and their solutions. The question we have to ask is: are they equally valuable? On the level of the research field, plurality is an essential indicator of a vibrant knowledge field. The plurality of views and debates stimulates critique, novelty and creativity. Yet, for the individual scholar facing a particular research issue, the epistemic situation is different because not all positions would have equal merit for him or her to tackle a specific research problem. To adopt the most plausible position in order to understand a research problem, scholars have to make choices that involve rejecting positions they consider less valuable. In other words, they have to engage in valuations of what is best for the issue at hand (Rescher 1985, 1993). Perhaps the most basic yardstick to be applied is the “fertility criterion.” Accordingly, “[b]y their fruits ye shalt know them: Tell me what your philosophy is doing for the search for truth or the good, and I will tell you what it is worth” (Bunge 2012, p. 182, italics in original). We hope that this section will spark stimulating debates about different epistemological directions in management studies, so that scholars can reap its fruits in the future.

Cross-References ▶ A Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice ▶ Critical Inquiry

2

The Epistemology of Management: An Introduction

35

▶ Evidence-Based Management ▶ Fictional Inquiry ▶ Interpretive Inquiry ▶ Problematizing the Relation Between Management Research and Practice ▶ Realist Inquiry ▶ The Performativity of Theories

References Alvesson M, Kärreman D (2000) Taking the linguistic turn in organizational research: challenges, responses, consequences. J Appl Behav Sci 36(2):136–158 Alvesson M, Kärreman D (2011) Qualitative research and theory development: mystery as method. Sage, London Alvesson M, Sandberg J (2011) Generating research questions through problematization. Acad Manag Rev 36(2):247–271 Audi R (1998) Epistemology: a contemporary introduction to the theory of knowledge. Routledge, London Bettis RA, Ethiraj S, Gambardella A, Helfat C, Mitchell W (2016) Creating repeatable cumulative knowledge in strategic management. Strateg Manag J 37:257–261 Blackler F (1993) Knowledge and the theory of organizations – organizations as activity systems and the reframing of management. J Manag Stud 30(6):863–884 Bolter JD (2016) Posthumanism. In: Jensen KB, Craig RT (eds) The international encyclopedia of communication theory and philosophy. Wiley-Blackwell, Malden, pp 1556–1563 Brown JS, Duguid P (1991) Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovating. Organ Sci 2(1):40–57 Bunge M (1962) Intuition and science. Spectrum book; S-22. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs Bunge M (1989) Treatise on basic philosophy. In: Ethics: the good and the right, vol 8. Reidel, Dordrecht Bunge M (1996) Finding philosophy in social science. Yale University Press, New Haven/London Bunge M (1999) The sociology-philosophy connection. Transaction, New Brunswick/London Bunge M (2012) Evaluating philosophies. Springer, Dordrecht Chia R (1995) From modern to postmodern organizational analysis. Organ Stud 16(4):579–604 Churchman CW (1971) The design of inquiring systems: basic concepts of systems and organization. Basic Books, New York Crotty M (2003) The foundations of social research: meaning and perspective in the research process. Sage, London Davis MS (1971) That’s interesting. Towards a phenomenology of sociology and a sociology of phenomenology. Philos Soc Sci 1(4):309–344 de Grefte J (2021) Knowledge as justified true belief. Erkenntnis (Online First) 1–19 Derrida J (1976) Of grammatology, 1st American edn. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore Derrida J (1979) In: Bloom H (ed) Living on: border lines: deconstruction and criticism. Seabury, New York, pp 75–175 Dilthey W (1957) Gesammelte Schriften. Teubner, Stuttgart Donaldson L (1996) For positivist organization theory: proving the hard core. Sage, London Dougherty D (1992) Interpretive barriers to successful product innovation in large firms. Organ Sci 3(2):179–202 Feyerabend P (1975) Against method. Outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge. Verso, London Fleck L (1979) Genesis and development of scientific fact. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Fournier V, Grey C (2000) At the critical moment: conditions and prospects for critical management studies. Hum Relat 53:7–32

36

M. Reihlen and D. Schoeneborn

Friedrichs RW (1970) A sociology of sociology. Free Press, New York Geiger D, Schreyögg G (2009) Coping with the concept of knowledge: toward a discursive understanding of knowledge. Manag Learn 40(4):475–480 George G, Howard-Grenville J, Joshi A & Tihanyi L (2016) Understanding and tackling societal grand challenges through management research. Acad Manag J, 59(6), 1880–1895. Gherardi S (2001) From organizational learning to practice-based knowing. Hum Relat 54(1): 131–139 Giddens A (1993) New rules of sociological method: a positive critique of interpretative sociologies. Polity, Cambridge Glasersfeld E (1995) Radical constructivism: a way of knowing and learning. Studies in mathematics education series, vol 6. Falmer Press, London Godfrey-Smith P (2003) Theory and reality: an introduction to the philosophy of science. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Goldman A (1999) Knowledge in a social world. Oxford University Press, Oxford Goldman A, Whitcomb D (eds) (2011) Social epistemology: essential readings. Oxford University Press, Oxford Gond JP, Cabantous L, Harding N, Learmonth M (2016) What do we mean by performativity in organizational and management theory? The uses and abuses of performativity. Int J Manag Rev 18(4):440–463 Grondin J (1997) Introduction to philosophical hermeneutics. Yale University Press, New Haven Habermas J (1984) The theory of communicative action. Beacon Press, Boston Haraway D (2006) A cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late 20th century. In: Weiss J, Nolan J, Hunsinger J, Trifonas P (eds) The international handbook of virtual learning environments. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 117–158 James W (1890/1950) Principles of psychology. Dover, New York Johnson P, Duberley J (2000) Understanding management research: an introduction to epistemology. Sage, London Kieser A, Leiner L (2009) Why the rigour-relevance gap in management research Is unbridgeable. J Manag Stud 46:516–533 Kieser A, Nicolai A, Seidl D (2015) The practical relevance of management research: turning the debate on relevance into a rigorous scientific research program. Acad Manag Ann 9(1):143–233 Klag M, Langley A (2013) Approaching the conceptual leap in qualitative research. Int J Manag Rev 15(2):149–166 Krohn W, Küppers G (1989) Die Selbstorganisation der Wissenschaft. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/Main Kuhn TS (1962) The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Lorino P (2018) Pragmatism and organization studies. Oxford University Press, Oxford Luhmann N (1990) Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main Lyotard J-F (1986) The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge. Manchester University Press, Manchester Marti E, Gond JP (2018) When do theories become self-fulfilling? Exploring the boundary conditions of performativity. Acad Manag Rev 43(3):487–508 Maturana HR, Varela FG (eds) (1980) Autopoiesis and cognition: the realization of the living. Reidel, Dordrecht Mohanty J (1959) Individual fact and essence in Edmund Husserl’s philosophy. Philos Phenomenol Res 20(2):222–230 Nonaka I (1994) A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organ Sci 5(1):14–37 Oreskes N (2019) Why trust in science? Princeton University Press, Princeton Polanyi M (1966) The tacit dimension ([1st] ed., Terry lectures, 1962). Doubleday, Garden City Popper KR (1959) The logic of scientific discovery. Basic Books, New York Popper KR (1962) Conjectures and refutations: the growth of scientific knowledge. Basic Books, New York Popper KR (1965) Was ist Dialektik? In: Topitsch E (ed) Logik der Sozialwissenschaften, 2nd edn. Köln, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, pp 262–290

2

The Epistemology of Management: An Introduction

37

Reed B (2002) How to think about fallibilism. Philos Stud 107(2):143–157 Reed M (2005) Reflections on the ‘realist turn’ in organization and management studies. J Manag Stud 42(8):1621–1644 Reihlen M, Ringberg T (2013) Uncertainty, pluralism, and the knowledge-based theory of the firm: from J.-C. Spender’s contribution to a socio-cognitive approach. Eur Manag J 31:706–716 Rescher N (1973) The coherence theory of truth. Clarendon library of logic and philosophy. Clarendon Press, Oxford Rescher N (1985) The strife of systems: an essay on the grounds and implications of philosophical diversity. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh Rescher N (1993) Pluralism: against the demand for consensus. Clarendon library of logic and philosophy. Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York Rescher N (1997) Objectivity: the obligations of impersonal reason. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame Rescher N (2000) Realistic pragmatism: an introduction to pragmatic philosophy. SUNY series in philosophy. State University of New York Press, Albany Rescher N (2003) Epistemology: An introduction to the theory of knowledge. SUNY Press: Albany Rescher N (2016) Pragmatism in philosophical inquiry: theoretical considerations and case studies. Springer Rorty R (ed) (1967) The linguistic turn: recent essays in philosophical method. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Rorty R (1982) Consequences of pragmatism: essays, 1972–1980. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Russel B (1918/1956) Mysticism and logic and other essays. George Allen & Unwin, London Sarup M (1993) An introductory guide to post-structuralism and postmodernism, 2nd edn. University of Georgia Press, Athens Spicer A, Alvesson M, Kärreman D (2009) Critical performativity: the unfinished business of critical management studies. Hum Relat 62(4):537–560 Steel D, Guala F (eds) (2011) The philosophy of social science reader. Routledge, London Toulmin SE (1958) The uses of argument. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Tsoukas H (2005) Complex knowledge: studies in organizational epistemology. Oxford University Press, Oxford Virues-Ortega J, Hurtado-Parrado C, Martin TL, Julio F (2012) Psycho-neural identity as the basis for empirical research and theorization in psychology: an interview with Mario A. Bunge. Sci Educ 21(10):1527–1534 Weber M (1922) Ueber einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie. In: Weber M (ed) Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. Mohr, Tübingen, pp 403–450 Weick KE (1989) Theory construction as disciplined imagination. Acad Manag Rev 14(4):516–531 Yanow D, Schwartz-Shea P (eds) (2015) Interpretation and method: empirical research methods and the interpretive turn. Routledge, London Zimmerman M (1962) The status of the verifiability principle. Philos Phenomenol Res 22(3): 334–343 Zuboff S (2019) The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Public Affairs, New York

3

Evidence-Based Management Mona Mensmann, Denise M. Rousseau, and Michael Frese

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Philosophical Underpinnings of Evidence-Based Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Tension Between Knowledge and Managerial Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Making Knowledge Actionable and Turning Action into Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Starting Point 1: Making Knowledge Actionable – A Task Scholars Can Initiate . . . . . . . . . . Starting Point 2: Turning Action into Knowledge – A Task Practitioners Can Initiate . . . . . . . Looking Back and Moving Forward: Merging Knowledge and Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

40 41 44 46 46 48 50 51 51

Abstract

This chapter deals with the concept of evidence-based management (EBM), with a focus on the tension between scientific knowledge and organizational reality, which underlies this managerial practice. It first describes the philosophical roots of EBM and shed light on the multiple sources of knowledge that can and should inform action in organizations. It then discusses why abstract scientific knowledge and managerial acumen often appear incompatible in the context of M. Mensmann (*) Faculty of Management, Economics, and Social Sciences, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany e-mail: [email protected] D. M. Rousseau Heinz College and Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] M. Frese Asia School of Business, Sasana Kijang, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Leuphana University of Lueneburg, Lueneburg, Germany National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_50

39

40

M. Mensmann et al.

organizational practice, especially in times of urgency and uncertainty. The chapter concludes by offering ways to reduce this tension by making knowledge actionable and turning action into knowledge. The presented advice regarding the future of EBM may help scholars contribute to more scholarship-informed practice and help practitioners to better balance scientific knowledge and reflective practice for more effective decisions and action. Keywords

Evidence-based management · Realist rationality · Reflective praxis

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts. Abraham Lincoln

Introduction Reliable knowledge or, as Lincoln labels it, “real facts” are critical to guide decisions and actions, including those of managers. This chapter deals with the philosophical underpinnings of evidence-based management (EBM). In this context, EBM means combining evidence from multiple sources, vetted for quality or trustworthiness, in the making of organizational decisions (Barends and Rousseau 2018). EBM is at once both a framework for organizational practice and for educating managers and other organizational decision-makers. By conscientiously incorporating reliable knowledge from multiple sources, including scientific and organizational facts, stakeholder considerations, and professional judgment, EBM aims to improve the quality of the decisions made in organizations. Its goal is to facilitate organizational progress, increasing the effectiveness of organizations and human well-being (Pfeffer and Sutton 2007; Rousseau 2006). This chapter has three goals. First, it provides insights into the philosophical foundations and key assumptions underlying EBM in order to provide a fundamental understanding of it as an organizational practice. Second, it elucidates the tension between incorporating into organizational decisions science-based reliable knowledge (“real facts”), typically general and abstract, and the reality of a particular organization’s actions, which can demand quick, workable, and contextualized decisions. Given the timing of this chapter’s writing, it sets this tension in the highly uncertain context of the COVID-19 pandemic, where existing knowledge is not easily transferred into action. Third, this chapter offers a way forward in resolving the tension between organizational reality and efforts to ground practice in trustworthy evidence. The chapter proposes that multiple sources of evidence including science-based facts, organizational information, stakeholder values and concerns, and practitioner experience provide a basis for mindful conversations in organizations to fuel

3

Evidence-Based Management

41

individual and collective reflection. In this context, complex relationships between knowledge and actions can arise, for which this chapter offers a variety of ways forward.

Philosophical Underpinnings of Evidence-Based Management As the term “evidence-based” suggests, EBM is rooted in the assumption of a knowable reality, scientifically assessed and understood. This assessment eventually yields evidence that managers and other organizational decision-makers can use to guide action. Contrary to the opinion of some critics (e.g., Morrell and Learmonth 2015), EBM does not entail action based only on absolute, objective laws. Rather this chapter’s perspective on EBM merges realism, grounded in the belief that there is an objective truth, with the philosophical perspective of relativism, where any truth is socially interpreted, and praxeology, where actions or practice help refine thinking. EBM is thus rooted in the epistemology of critical realism (Bhaskar 1975; Rousseau et al. 2008; Reihlen et al. 2022; Van de Ven 2007), acknowledging an objective reality that must be interpreted, reflected, and acted upon to generate human knowledge. Following Simon’s perspective regarding cognition and decision-making in organizations (Simon 1947/1997; see Koumakhov and Daoud 2020), the interpretative process in EBM is informed not only by multiple sources of evidence but also by the prior experience of individual decision-makers. However, one tension around EBM is that human decision-making is limited by attentional capacity and cognitive biases. Thus, it is important that EBM makes use of biasreducing organizational practices and decision aids that can improve decision quality (Rousseau 2018, 2020). This chapter also includes the concept of praxis to acknowledge that actions inform the reality of one’s reflections, consistent with the observation by Engels (1940, p. 10) that “[t]he proof of the pudding is in the eating.” The praxeological approach (von Mises 1996) suggests that knowledge, particularly the general and abstract knowledge from science, is not always readily translatable into action. The actor is not just a decision-maker; she interacts with reality by acting on it, which in turn can lead to better knowledge. This perspective has several implications. First, people interacting with a particular reality in their daily work (i.e., rank-and-file workers) often know more about this reality than decision-makers removed from that work (e.g., CEOs). The greater the distance from daily work, the less actors can learn from the actions taken. Second, this perspective takes knowledge from science with a “grain of salt.” It is the praxis that determines whether something turns out to be true – or works (Engels 1940). Third, it is informed and reflective praxis that is relevant to advance knowledge. The authors do not agree with the almost positivistic stance of some praxeologists like von Mises (2003), who are disinterested in empirically establishing the truth of their suppositions because they assume they can be deduced from abstract propositions. Thus, this chapter enhances the concept of praxis with the concept of self-reflective praxis – and indeed, it is the selfreflective component of praxis that the authors call critical (Kärreman 2021). Critical

42

M. Mensmann et al.

realism is self-reflective realism. Here, the psychological concept of meta-cognition facilitates the understanding of critical realism. EBM should be based on metathoughts that critically evaluate whether the right cognitions have been used in one’s practice (Flavell 1979). Action errors are an important source of these thoughts. Frese has worked for about three decades on the question of how action errors can lead to knowledge (summarized by Frese and Keith 2015; Keith and Frese 2008). The upshot of this work is that action errors per se often do not lead to improved action. However, four conditions can help to deliver rapid learning from errors in order to inform action: (1) The actor accepts the error as useful information; (2) The actor engages in meta-cognitive processing of reflection, since without reflection there is no learning; (3) The actor develops rough hypotheses and tests them in action; and (4) The actor obtains feedback in order to sharpen knowledge. Two clarifications need to be made. First, while this chapters builds on some of the ideas around von Mises’ praxeology (1996), it does not follow his approach to politics or his negative view of experimental and empirical science. Further, any theory of praxis needs to address errors and mistakes. There might be similarities between this chapter’s descriptions and Popper’s falsificationism (Popper 1962). However, in contrast to Popper (1962), the chapter does not distinguish between developing knowledge and testing knowledge. Instead, it points to the fact that praxis can help both develop and test hypotheses. Thus, critical realism merges practical experience with science, providing summaries of these experiences and methodologically better approaches to understanding them. To return to the example of the COVID-19 pandemic, critical realism acknowledges that the spread of the virus is real and occurs independently of human interpretation. However, the way individuals assess and interpret the pandemic and its consequences for humankind directly impacts the knowledge obtained from the pandemic experience. A sudden increase in infection rates can be perceived as more or less threatening, depending on characteristics of the interpreter (such as geographical location, state of health, or social role). Consequently, different managerial decisions may follow from the same pandemic-related event (e.g., whether to reopen a store or keep it closed). However, in interaction with the virus and through reflective thinking about these interactions, individuals learn more about the virus, its social and institutional context, and how to respond to it to serve human wellbeing. Praxis tells them how the virus behaves in a certain context. The social behavior of others and leader behavior interpreted as competent often are taken as proxies for knowledge acquired through actions. By blending realism, relativism, and praxeology, EBM deploys diverse sources of knowledge. Originally focused on the integration of scientific knowledge into managerial practice, EBM, like its precursor, evidence-based medicine (Barends and Briner 2014) increasingly recognizes that an array of evidence sources is critical to quality decisions. Key sources of knowledge include (1) scientific evidence, including scholarly research and theory; (2) stakeholder perspectives and concerns, reflecting the organizational decision’s constituents who affect or are affected by a decision; (3) practitioner and expert judgment based on experience, education, and

3

Evidence-Based Management

43

training; and (4) organizational or contextual evidence, from data, metrics, and observations relevant to the setting, including experiments (Rousseau and Gunia 2016). The latter is an especially important contributor to decisions in the context of COVID-19, where prior experience and scientific evidence are limited. In such uncertain circumstances, evidence-informed action includes small experimentation steps, reflectively and non-defensively evaluated (Rousseau 2018, 2020). Depending on the circumstances, evidence sources may complement or contradict each other, and be more or less informative. Making sense of these complementarities and contradictions is part of the “aggregation” process that evidence-based practitioners engage in by combining multiple sources of evidence to make well-informed decisions and take informed action (see Barends and Rousseau 2018). Integration of diverse sources of knowledge enacts the principle of realist rationality (Rousseau 2020). Realist rationality acknowledges the limits of the available evidence and the cognitive capabilities of humans in making decisions. Its intent is thus reflective and non-defensive. It recognizes the value of decision aids and routines in supporting mindful decision-making. At the same time, realist rationality recognizes the inherent uncertainty in human understanding and the tentative nature of knowledge. It accepts that in their decisions and actions, human beings make errors. This can be informative if, accepting the occurrence of errors surfaced by action as inevitable, they use them to improve their cognitive map of the world (Frese and Keith 2015). In EBM, a common statement is “evidence isn’t answers.” This means that facts or knowledge alone cannot tell us how to act: neither can be translated directly into organizational practice or action. Instead, deliberate efforts need to be taken to gather, interpret, and incorporate the best available evidence into the decisions at hand. To engage in realist rationality, organizational practitioners require several critical capabilities (cf. Rousseau 2020). First, practitioners need to access the currently available best evidence and remain up to date with that knowledge base over time. What appears to be the best way to protect employees’ health in times of COVID-19 may change with new scientific findings. The understanding of vulnerable groups, for example, can evolve as clinical experience increases. Second, practitioners seeking to use evidence need to bridge the gap between available evidence and their own professional practice. This can be done by adapting the use of evidence to the problem, opportunity, or crisis. If decision-makers are concerned with how to maintain their team’s trust when forced to work virtually, the available evidence from science may only take them so far. Academic research may indicate that good communication is based on systematic efforts to maintain trust and provide support. However, figuring out how to do so in the specific work setting requires local evidence, including feedback from team members and repeated action by practitioners such as managers (Cramton 2002). Third, practitioners need to use decision processes that are appropriate to the degree of uncertainty their decision involves. In recurring decisions, practitioners may recognize “known knowns,” i.e., familiar conditions that help to confidently rely on past evidence. A classic known known are decisions on hiring, which can put to use the vast evidence on the predictive validity of selection methods (Schmidt and Hunter 1998). For more uncertain or less

44

M. Mensmann et al.

familiar decisions, practitioners may need to analyze, contrast, and integrate conflicting or ambiguous evidence (“known unknowns”) to be able to appropriately inform decisions. For people going from working 1–2 days a week at home to everyday at home, both scientific and organizational evidence indicate that, eventually, people may miss informal social contact (Gendronneau et al. 2019). But, while the problem is known, how to address it may require people collaborating to identify good supports and substitutes for “water cooler” conversations, until colocated work resumes. It is clear that not all managerial practice can or does rely on past evidence. Yet the same is true in virtually all evidence-based practice domains, including medicine (Castle 2017). In the context of EBM, novel situations including times of crisis can require experimentation and learning by doing, as past evidence is not applicable (or may not exist, which is the situation of “unknown unknowns”). Experimentation and thoughtful alternative approaches may be needed, as in the case of the search for an effective COVID-19 vaccine. Last, the red thread through all these required skills is the meta-skill of reflection, which includes the ability to engage in social processes like conversations with others in order to compensate for the limits of individual cognition and reflectively consider how to best frame the decision and the information attended to (Heath et al. 1998). Key to successful EBM practice is recognizing that existing evidence alone is in itself insufficient for good decision-making. A decision is only cognition that has not yet crossed the bridge into action. The concept of reflective praxis, which is grounded in action theory (Zacher and Frese 2018; Gollwitzer et al. 1990), makes an important distinction between a goal intention and an implementation intention. A goal intention is purely cognitive and expresses a preference for something. It does not cross the bridge into action until a person formulates some rudimentary plan of action. Once an action plan has been developed, an implementation intention exists and the person enters the realm of action. This plan must have some degree of realism associated with it. When even rudimentary aspects of the plan are carried out, feedback can be obtained, which forms the basis of reflection and learning. Actions that provoke feedback give rise to conscious experimentation testing the limits of one’s approach individually and organizationally (Keith and Frese 2011). Using reflective action, any organization and every individual can experiment. Action-reflection-learning-action cycles provide a basis for developing quick error feedback mechanisms that need to be accepted by the individual and the organization.

The Tension Between Knowledge and Managerial Action Adapting knowledge to organizational reality is a challenge for practitioners. On the one hand, a premise of EBM is that practices should be based on quality evidence from multiple sources. Faced with low to moderate levels of uncertainty, decision-makers with the skills of gathering and interpreting evidence can follow

3

Evidence-Based Management

45

structured evidence integration processes that improve decision quality (Rousseau 2018; Yates 2003). However, when uncertainty is high (for example, in a rapidly evolving pandemic), evidence can be difficult to aggregate or decipher. Indeed, highly uncertain situations can induce rigidity in decision-makers overwhelmed by situational demands (Staw et al. 1981). In uncertain and dynamic contexts like the COVID-19 pandemic, learning by experimenting (e.g., how to open businesses up safely without increasing infection), informed by relevant past evidence (e.g., facts regarding infection spread or use of contact tracing) can allow for quick adaptation (Baird et al. 1999). Nonetheless, in trying to make well-informed decisions, practitioners frequently face the limits of existing evidence. In times of uncertainty and urgency, decision-makers may therefore be tempted to use intuitive decisionmaking – to their peril (Kahneman and Klein 2009). Decisions and consecutive actions based on intuition come with a number of obstacles. First, human decision-making is characterized by bounded rationality (Simon 1947/1997). Managers tend to make “good enough” decisions without considering other available options. Doing so typically deploys decision-making heuristics that can result in bias and suboptimal decision quality. These heuristics may free the decision-maker to move on to the next decision – a welcome gain, given the tendency of managers to spend little time on most decisions (Mintzberg 1971). In doing so, however, they may ignore important information and stakeholders where deeper consideration might improve decision quality. Second, nonreflective action may lead to trial-and-error approaches. Trial-and-error is a nonreflective defensive way of acting with little thinking, preferencing initial ideas while overlooking potential problems. It yields limited learning in contrast to a reflective and non-defensive approach (van Der Linden et al. 2001). The key idea is that acting is important to practice. However, it must be done with reflection and awareness of the decision-maker’s own fallibility (Frese and Keith 2015). Relying on intuition alone often leads to irrationality (Bunge 1962). Third, the nature of organizations can render intuitive decision-making and action difficult (Rousseau 2018), because managers differ in their frames of reference. In organizations, decisions may be made by the highest manager. However, the interpretation and execution of this decision can be very different depending on the positions that actors hold. Any decision may involve diverse stakeholders with their own backgrounds, organizational roles, and personal agendas like senior managers, the finance and human resources department, and labor representatives. Needless to say, individuals representing these groups tend to have different viewpoints regarding a decision and different action inclinations. In sum, the experience gained by taking action and obtaining evidence from multiple sources can combine to form quality managerial decisions and subsequent action. In times of considerable uncertainty, existing knowledge may be difficult to apply, while the common alternative – intuition – may be too unreliable to succeed. So then, what can academics and practitioners do to improve organizational actions under uncertainty?

46

M. Mensmann et al.

Making Knowledge Actionable and Turning Action into Knowledge In the spirit of “it takes two to tango,” this chapter presents two starting points to reconcile the need to be knowledge-driven on the one hand and able to act on the other: (1) making knowledge actionable and (2) turning action into knowledge.

Starting Point 1: Making Knowledge Actionable – A Task Scholars Can Initiate The Practical Value of Knowledge Practice and the conditions affecting it tend to receive little scholarly attention. Organizational scholars often shy away from what should be a primary goal: Generating knowledge that informs practice. To be of practical value, knowledge needs to be interpretable by practitioners, so they can easily process and implement it. All too often, the practical value of a research project gets lost in translation or is never translated at all (Pearce and Huang 2012). The academic preference for advancing theory, and the necessity (especially) for untenured junior scholars to enter theoretical debates in order to advance their careers, may be too limiting (Hambrick 2007). This approach fails to create knowledge of practical relevance: a “sexy topic” need not yield useful takeaways for practice. To counter these problems, scholars may tap practitioner challenges to inform their research questions, consistent with Van de Ven’s (2007) advocacy of engaged scholarship. This activity is aided by quality relations and partnership between scholars and practitioners. Where is evidence lacking on a key organizational decision? What decisions are frequently made in suboptimal ways? Researchers may want to engage with practitioners to identify problems that can benefit from scientific insights. When the process of knowledge creation begins with a practical problem, odds go up that the knowledge generated can be translated into guidance for practice. However, the most important issue may not be knowledge development per se. Often, numerous studies exist to inform practitioner questions (Rousseau 2012b). Still, they offer few actionable solutions, tending to be overly abstract and ignoring contextual issues. Scholars should therefore aim for more practice-oriented research to better inform practice implementation. Practice-oriented research is a joint effort between scholars and practitioners. Such broadening of scholarship to embrace practice-oriented research exists in medicine, where the bench science of disease conditions and treatment is increasingly supplemented by what has been called “patient-oriented evidence that matters,” referred to as POEMS (Slawson et al. 1997). POEMS address questions regarding practice and practice conditions. An example is research to understand why physicians overprescribe antibiotics, often giving these drugs to patients whose disease conditions are not treatable by antibiotics. Research in the USA indicates that overprescription often occurs in emergency rooms, where many Americans receive their primary healthcare. Emergency Department physicians treating patients with

3

Evidence-Based Management

47

chest colds cannot be sure the patient will return if the condition worsens, and thus prescribe drugs “just in case.” Recognition of this practice led to the creation of a test to determine whether the individual had a bacterial infection that could be administered on the spot, thereby allowing the Emergency Department physician to make an informed decision. Organizational practice is replete with conditions under which managers behave in suboptimal ways because the practice environment makes it difficult for them to diagnose what is really happening. Research that aids diagnostic capabilities could improve decision quality. To make evidence more actionable in organizations, scholars need to consider how to provide knowledge that is action-oriented, not merely descriptive reports of observed phenomena. Descriptive research, including qualitative methods like ethnography, is indispensable for understanding organizational contexts. However, in nonroutine situations that demand adopting a new course, managers benefit from scientific evidence that tells them whether a certain course of action is useful. Consider two concerns: Does forcing employees to wear face masks at work result in a reduced infection rate within the organization, reduced communication, and/or reduced performance? How might organizations counter the negative psychological effects of working from home, due to reduced human contact and increased job insecurity? Answers to these questions can be found by conducting randomized controlled field experiments (Shadish et al. 2002). Field experiments can assess the effect of a treatment in the organizational setting while controlling for factors that might influence the investigated outcome. Such approaches garnered considerable attention when Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer won the 2019 Nobel in Economics for field experiments to alleviate poverty around the world. In their impressive research program, these researchers gave hands-on advice for improving the lives of the poor – including deworming school children in developing countries to increase school participation (Miguel and Kremer 2004). The usefulness of field experiments is not restricted to poverty reduction (or medicine, where these trials originate): Field experiments have given insights into ways to improve organizational or entrepreneurial practice (e.g., Campos et al. 2017; Eden 2017). Attention to null results is another way to support effective organizational practice. Scientists often overlook the usefulness of null results, and even prestigious journals decreasingly report them (Fanelli 2012). Null results allow for various alternative explanations (such as power issues or a low reliability of the measures used) and are more difficult to interpret. Thus, many researchers tend to consider them useless. Papers reporting significant findings can result in a number of “Dos.” However, what is missing is a set of “Don’ts” – that is, evidence of tested organizational practices that fail to have significant impact. Knowing what does not work helps practitioners act in more intelligent ways and aids better understanding the world. Identifying customer relationship management strategies that have no impact on customer loyalty can focus attention on other strategies that are more likely to work, creating better informed experimentation with ways to keep a business’ customer base – for example, in times of COVID-19. Thus, an academic system that embraces null results contributes to more managerial action guided by evidence.

48

M. Mensmann et al.

Possible starting points for such a system are the publication of null results (Kepes and McDaniel 2013) and the practice of publishing pre-analysis research plans that commit to reporting results of all prespecified hypotheses (Aguinis et al. 2020). Last, research that provides evidence on the mechanisms that underlie observed effects is a critical guide to practice. Understanding the mechanisms behind interventions of known effectiveness – from goal setting, where goal acceptance is a key mechanism (Locke and Latham 2002) to change implementation, where skills, participation, and practice supports from teams and leaders are key (Zamboni et al. 2020) – can aid practitioners in developing effective action plans that suit their context and stakeholders.

Knowledge Communication Another precondition for making knowledge actionable is the effective translation and communication of scientific knowledge for practitioners. Even if scientific findings could inform managerial action, practitioners may not always be interested in them (Rynes and Bartunek 2017). Evidence, particularly scientific evidence, can be perceived as far too complex and difficult to understand. In fact, scientific evidence often has to be complex, as it needs to integrate a number of context conditions and constraints. To be able to do this, it ideally comprises a number of studies conducted with different theoretical lenses and scientific methods, as well as meta-analytic studies (Rosenthal and DiMatteo 2001). Yet, the resulting complex and potentially ambiguous research findings need to be communicated in ways designed to be understood beyond academia. User-friendly summaries of the aggregated knowledge, such as systematic reviews, help to make scientific knowledge actionable. In communicating their research results, scholars should aim for “speaking the language of practice.” This poses a challenge, particularly when scientists develop and execute research ideas in the ivory tower rather than in collaboration with practitioners (Grossmann-Hensel and Seidl 2021). In addition, after having formulated evidence in a practice-friendly manner, scientists need to help transfer these guiding principles to the organizational context. There are different ways to do this, ranging from offering training (for example, in the context of university teaching), publications in outlets that practitioners read (such as Harvard Business Review, Organizational Dynamics, and others), plain-language research summaries for practitioners presented online or in podcasts (such as https:// scienceforwork.com), and making accessible easy-to-use decision aids.

Starting Point 2: Turning Action into Knowledge – A Task Practitioners Can Initiate The Need for Informed Action: Reflection and Absorptive Capacity Turning action into useful evidence requires practitioners to reflect on their actions and abstract insights in order to provide a base for new knowledge. To do this, they need a certain absorptive capacity – that is, the capability to recognize the usefulness of and use the information provided by action (Cohen and Levinthal 1990).

3

Evidence-Based Management

49

Absorptive capacity is dependent on prior related knowledge, which may include scientific knowledge on a given topic, basic procedural knowledge and skills, or the mastery of relevant terminology. Organizations may enhance absorptive capacity of individual decision-makers, for example, by providing access to relevant knowledge and a culture of knowledge sharing (Criado-Perez et al. 2020). The memory system is self-reinforcing in a way that the more information gets in, the easier additional information on the same subject can be stored and later applied. Thus, the more managers know about a certain topic (e.g., about leadership in times of crisis), the easier it gets for them to plan and interpret their own actions and improve future actions in the same context (e.g., did a particular leadership style lead to a proactive crisis management of employees?). A profound academic background and regular exchange between academic scholars and practitioners may therefore contribute to new knowledge generated through action. It provides practitioners with the ability to use the “known” while navigating the “unknown,” and to turn action in unknown situations into future knowledge. However, the acquisition of such academic knowledge fundamentally depends on the manager’s motivation to do so. Management is not a profession (Trank and Rynes 2003), which leads to limited motivation to seek knowledge from the scientific literature (Cascio 2007) – although evidence shows that managers would be interested in accessing scientific research if they knew how to find it (Barends et al. 2017). Managers and other organizational practitioners must make conscious effort to acquire basic knowledge from scientific research if they seek to take high-quality action. Practitioners need to acquire knowledge on how to approach and address problems in a scientific way in order to improve the quality of their actions. Research in the context of entrepreneurship, for example, shows that a scientific approach to business idea generation and implementation outperforms intuitive entrepreneurial practice (Camuffo et al. 2020). Moreover, there are large differences in usefulness between mental models developed by experienced entrepreneurs and those developed by less experienced ones (Baron and Ensley 2006).

The Role of Deliberate Practice: Action Focused on Learning Deliberate practice is another precondition for turning action into knowledge. This means that practitioners should act with the goal to improve current performance (Ericsson et al. 1993). Deliberate practice requires self-regulation that promotes selfdirected informal learning. Especially in dynamic environments, in which conditions always change, deliberate practice is needed to turn action into knowledge (Keith et al. 2016). Organizational practitioners, particularly managers and entrepreneurs, often operate in dynamic environments and face unexpected conditions (such as a pandemic forcing them to conduct business while implementing novel personal protection practices). Under conditions of high uncertainty, practitioners benefit from integrating deliberate practice into their actions, which allows them to act, assess, reflect, and learn. Purposeful learning to enlarge one’s knowledge base for future actions demands focused effort and an attitude of experimentation and non-defensiveness. It also requires an openness towards fallibility and readiness to learn from one’s own errors,

50

M. Mensmann et al.

a challenge in positions of power and under conditions of risk (Frese and Keith 2015). When managers derive learnings from their actions, they may want to consider what effects they create over time, instead of overinterpreting one-time outcomes, as a track record of effects constitutes more reliable information (Rousseau 2012b).

Balancing Knowledge and Action Finding the right combination of taking up scientific results in one’s professional practice and relying on personal judgment is a central task in the harmonization of knowledge and action. In reality, most practitioners have a tendency to rely on previously implemented solutions or act on even less mindful intuition, both of which bias decisions to the small N of experience. Some practitioners attempt to be purely driven by external evidence, leaving little room for harnessing insights from their own practice. Combining scientific evidence and learning from action provides managers the best of both worlds when deciding how to act: The more reliable scientific evidence based on large sample sizes and rigorous methods on the one hand, the more contextualized and flexible knowledge gathered through action on the other. Per Voltaire’s insight that the best is the enemy of the good, knowledgegenerating actions should aim for good but not perfect practice. Evidence, no matter from which source, leads to further knowledge, but often increases the complexity of actions.

Looking Back and Moving Forward: Merging Knowledge and Action So far, this chapter has described the practice of EBM and identified some of its central challenges, in relation to connecting scientific knowledge and managerial actions to better navigate organizational uncertainty. In this context, it builds on three core approaches: reflection, critical realism, and praxis. Reflection implies that one is able to reflect on previous actions and on how these can be improved. Critical realism implies that one’s constructs of reality are anchored to some degree in reality, not just in people’s minds. Praxis implies that the ultimate test of reality is acting on an environment. By acting, one finds truth. Management is action-oriented, albeit too often based on intuition with little regard for context or learning. This chapter advances a holistic application of these three approaches. This application means that one can use knowledge, ask the questions that follow from knowledge, perform small experiments, and then learn from them, including from one’s own errors. EBM practice is likely to become increasingly relevant in the future. One important reason for this is the availability of more and more diverse information in the age of “Big Data” and the possibility to apply machine learning to generate evidence. While more evidence from a wide variety of sources may facilitate managerial decision-making, practitioners may also face additional practical challenges, like the need to acquire advanced programming skills to make sense of data or to interpret a vast amount of complex and potentially conflicting data in a local

3

Evidence-Based Management

51

context (cf. Simsek et al. 2019). EBM practices turning rigorous evidence into action and deriving useful evidence from action that enriches decontextualized data will be of particular importance to seize the opportunities and deal with the challenges of Big Data for managerial practice. A fundamental remaining question is how the strategies underlying EBM can be supported in a systematic way. The literature on EBM stresses the role played by business school education. As Simon (1967) notes, business schools need to have one foot in science and one in practice, which makes the simultaneous teaching of scientific theory, managerial practice, and the connection of the two a key requirement of business school education (Rousseau 2012a). Scholars have since suggested different ways to link knowledge and practice. Briner and Walshe (2014) argue that students need to learn systematic review skills that help them to inform their future managerial action. Dietz et al. (2014) stress that business schools should teach their students key scientific skills (including problem definition and experimentation) to produce “local” evidence in organizations. Such guidance has value but must be complemented with a broader systematic approach connecting knowledge and action. The vast majority of managers and business owners have no business school education, restricting them to developing useful local evidence through experience. Experience alone does not necessarily lead to effective action (Sonnentag 2000). Building and testing practices through networks linking local practitioners and academics may support evidence co-creation (Rynes and Bartunek 2017). A central task for further advancing EBM is therefore to create innovative arrangements – from industry-university partnerships to communities of practice – that systematically merge knowledge and managerial action beyond the business school to ensure broad cross-fertilization of evidence and practice.

Cross-References ▶ Critical Inquiry ▶ Problematizing the Relation Between Management Research and Practice ▶ Realist Inquiry

References Aguinis H, Banks GC, Rogelberg SG, Cascio WF (2020) Actionable recommendations for narrowing the science-practice gap in open science. Organ Behav Hum Decis Processes 158: 27–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2020.02.007 Baird L, Holland P, Deacon S (1999) Learning from action: imbedding more learning into the performance fast enough to make a difference. Organ Dyn 27(4):19–32. https://doi.org/10.1016/ S0090-2616(99)90027-X Barends E, Briner RB (2014) Teaching evidence-based practice: lessons from the pioneers. Acad Manag Learn Edu 13(3):476–483. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2014.0136 Barends E, Rousseau DM (2018) Evidence-based management: how to use evidence to make better organisational decisions. Kogan Page Publishers, London

52

M. Mensmann et al.

Barends E, Villanueva J, Rousseau DM, Briner RB, Jepsen DM, Houghton E, ten Have S (2017) Managerial attitudes and perceived barriers regarding evidence-based practice: an international survey. PLoS One 12(10):e0184594. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0184594 Baron RA, Ensley MD (2006) Opportunity recognition as the detection of meaningful patterns: Evidence from comparisons of novice and experienced entrepreneurs. Manag Sci 52(9): 1331–1344. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1060.0538 Bhaskar R (1975) Forms of realism. Philosophica 15(1):99–127 Briner RB, Walshe ND (2014) From passively received wisdom to actively constructed knowledge: teaching systematic review skills as a foundation of evidence-based management. Acad Manag Learn Edu 13(3):415–432. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2013.0222 Bunge M (1962) Intuition and science. Greenwood Press, West Port Campos F, Frese M, Goldstein M, Iacovone L, Johnson HC, McKenzie D, Mensmann M (2017) Teaching personal initiative beats traditional training in boosting small business in West Africa. Science 357(6357):1287–1290. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aan5329 Camuffo A, Cordova A, Gambardella A, Spina C (2020) A scientific approach to entrepreneurial decision making: evidence from a randomized control trial. Manag Sci 66(2):564–586. https:// doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2018.3249 Cascio WF (2007) Evidence-based management and the marketplace for ideas. Acad Manag J 50(5):1009–1012. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.27151942 Castle J (2017) Common practice is not always evidence-based. https://s4be.cochrane.org/blog/ 2017/06/29/common-practice-is-not-always-evidence-based/ Cohen WM, Levinthal DA (1990) Absorptive capacity: a new perspective on learning and innovation. Adm Sci Q 35(1):128–152. https://doi.org/10.2307/2393553 Cramton CD (2002) Finding common ground in dispersed collaboration. Organ Dyn 30(4): 356–367 Criado-Perez C, Collins CG, Jackson C (2020) Enablers of evidence-based management: clues from the absorptive capacity literature. Aust J Manag:0312896220919784. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0312896220919784 Dietz J, Antonakis J, Hoffrage U, Krings F, Marewski JN, Zehnder C (2014) Teaching evidencebased management with a focus on producing local evidence. Acad Manag Learn Edu 13(3): 397–414. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2013.0197 Eden D (2017) Field experiments in organisations. Annu Rev Organ Psychol Organ Behav 4: 91–122. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-041015-062400 Engels F (1940) On historical materialism. International Publishers Company, New York Ericsson KA, Krampe RT, Tesch-Römer C (1993) The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychol Rev 100(3):363–406 Fanelli D (2012) Negative results are disappearing from most disciplines and countries. Scientometrics 90(3):891–904. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0494-7 Flavell JH (1979) Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: a new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. Am Psychol 34(10):906–911 Frese M, Keith N (2015) Action errors, error management, and learning in organisations. Annu Rev Psychol 66(1):661–687. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010814-015205 Gendronneau C, Wiśniowski A, Yidez D, Zagheni E, Fiorio L, Hsiao Y, Stepanek M, Weber I, Abel G, Hoorents S (2019) Measuring labour mobility and migration using big data publications. Office of the European Union, Luxembourg. https://doi.org/10.2767/474282 Gollwitzer PM, Heckhausen H, Steller B (1990) Deliberative and implemental mind-sets: Cognitive tuning toward congruous thoughts and information. J Pers Soc Psychol 59(6):1119–1127. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.59.6.1119 Grossmann-Hensel B, Seidl D (2021) Problematizing the Relation Between Management Research and Practice. In: Neesham, C. (eds) Handbook of Philosophy of Management. Handbooks in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48352-8_57-1 Hambrick DC (2007) The field of management's devotion to theory: too much of a good thing? Acad Manag J 50(6):1346–1352. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.28166119

3

Evidence-Based Management

53

Heath C, Larrick RP, Klayman J (1998) Cognitive repairs: how organisations compensate for the shortcoming of individual learners. Res Organ Behav 20:1–37 Kahneman D, Klein G (2009) Conditions for intuitive expertise: a failure to disagree. Am Psychol 64(6):515–526 Kärreman D (2021) Critical Inquiry. In: Neesham C et al. (eds) Handbook of Philosophy of Management. Handbooks in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-31948352-8_55-1 Keith N, Frese M (2008) Effectiveness of error management training: a meta-analysis. J Appl Psychol 93(1):59–69. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.93.1.59 Keith N, Frese M (2011) Enhancing firm performance and innovativeness through error management culture. In: Ashkanasy NM, Wilderom CPM, Peterson MF (eds) The handbook of organisational culture climate, 2nd edn. Sage, Thousand Oaks, pp 137–157 Keith N, Unger JM, Rauch A, Frese M (2016) Informal learning and entrepreneurial success: a longitudinal study of deliberate practice among small business owners. Appl Psychol 65(3): 515–540. https://doi.org/10.1111/apps.12054 Kepes S, McDaniel MA (2013) How trustworthy is the scientific literature in industrial and organisational psychology? Ind Organ Psychol 6(3):252–268. https://doi.org/10.1111/iops. 12045 Koumakhov R, Daoud A (2020) Decisions and structures: a dialogue between Herbert Simon and Critical Realists. Br J Manag, 32(4):1404–1420 Locke EA, Latham GP (2002) Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: a 35-year odyssey. Am Psychol 57(9):705–717 Miguel E, Kremer M (2004) Worms: identifying impacts on education and health in the presence of treatment externalities. Econometrica 72(1):159–217. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0262. 2004.00481.x Mintzberg H (1971) Managerial work: analysis from observation. Manag Sci 18(2):B-97–B-110. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.18.2.B97 Morrell K, Learmonth M (2015) Against evidence-based management, for management learning. Acad Manag Learn Edu 14(4):520–533. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2014.0346 Pearce JL, Huang L (2012) The decreasing value of our research to management education. Acad Manag Learn Edu 11(2):247–262. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2011.0554 Pfeffer J, Sutton RI (2007) Suppose we took evidence-based management seriously: Implications for reading and writing management. Acad Manag Learn Edu 6(1):153–155. https://doi.org/10. 5465/amle.2007.24401715 Popper KR (1962) Conjectures and refutations: the growth of scientific knowledge. Basic Books, New York Reihlen M, Habersang S, Nikolova N (2022) Realist Inquiry. In: Neesham C, Reihlen M, Schoeneborn D (eds) Handbook of Philosophy of Management. Handbooks in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48352-8_51-1 Rosenthal R, DiMatteo MR (2001) Meta-analysis: recent developments in quantitative methods for literature review. Annu Rev Psychol 52:59–82 Rousseau DM (2006) Is there such a thing as “Evidence-Based Management”? Acad Manag Rev 31(2):256–269. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2006.20208679 Rousseau DM (2012a) Designing a better business school: channelling Herbert Simon, addressing the critics, and developing actionable knowledge for professionalizing managers. J Manag Stud 49(3):600–618. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2011.01041.x Rousseau DM (2012b) Envisioning evidence-based management. In: Rousseau DM (ed) The Oxford handbook of evidence-based management. Oxford University Press, Oxford. https:// doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199763986.013.0001 Rousseau DM (2018) Making evidence-based organisational decisions in an uncertain world. Organ Dyn 47(3):135–146 Rousseau DM (2020) The realist rationality of evidence-based management. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 19(3):415–424

54

M. Mensmann et al.

Rousseau DM, Gunia BC (2016) Evidence-based practice: the psychology of EBP implementation. Annu Rev Psychol 67(1):667–692. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033336 Rousseau DM, Manning J, Denyer D (2008) Evidence in management and organisational science: assembling the field’s full weight of scientific knowledge through syntheses. Acad Manag Ann 2(1):475–515 Rynes SL, Bartunek JM (2017) Evidence-based management: foundations, development, controversies and future. Annu Rev Organ Psychol Organ Behav 4(1):235–261. https://doi.org/10. 1146/annurev-orgpsych-032516-113306 Schmidt FL, Hunter JE (1998) The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings. Psychol Bull 124(2): 262–274 Shadish WR, Cook TD, Campbell DT (2002) Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for generalized causal inference. Houghton Mifflin, Boston Simon HA (1947/1997) Administrative behavior: a study of decision-making processes in administrative organisation. Free Press, New York Simon HA (1967) The business school a problem in organisational design. J Manag Stud 4(1):1–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.1967.tb00569.x Simsek Z, Vaara E, Paruchuri S, Nadkarni S (2019) New ways of seeing big data. Acad Manag J 62(4):971–978. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2019.4004 Slawson DC, Ebell MH, Barry HC (1997) Mastering medical information and the role of POEMS – Patient-Oriented Evidence that Matters. J Fam Pract 45(3):195–197 Sonnentag S (2000) Expertise at work: experience and excellent performance. Int Rev Ind Organ Psychol 15:223–264 Staw BM, Sandelands LE, Dutton JE (1981) Threat rigidity effects in organisational behavior: a multilevel analysis. Adm Sci Q 26(4):501–524. https://doi.org/10.2307/2392337 Trank CQ, Rynes SL (2003) Who moved our cheese? Reclaiming professionalism in business education. Acad Manag Learn Edu 2(2):189–205. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2003.9901678 Van de Ven AH (2007) Engaged scholarship: a guide for organisational and social research. Oxford University Press on Demand, Oxford van Der Linden D, Sonnentag S, Frese M, van Dyck C (2001) Exploration strategies, performance, and error consequences when learning a complex computer task. Behav Inform Technol 20(3): 189–198. https://doi.org/10.1080/01449290120662 von Mises L (1996) Human action: a treatise on economics, 1949. Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn von Mises L (2003) Epistemological problems of economics. Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn Yates JF (2003) Decision management: How to assure better decisions in your company, vol 29. Wiley, New York Zacher H, Frese M (2018) Action regulation theory: foundations, current knowledge and future directions. In: Ones DS, Anderson C, Viswesvaran C, Sinangil HK (eds) The SAGE handbook of industrial, work & organisational psychology, vol 2, 2nd edn. Sage Reference, London, pp 122–144 Zamboni K, Baker U, Tyagi M, Schellenberg J, Hill Z, Hanson C (2020) How and under what circumstances do quality improvement collaboratives lead to better outcomes? A systematic review. Implement Sci 15:1–20

4

Realist Inquiry Markus Reihlen, Stefanie Habersang, and Natalia Nikolova

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Realism in Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Empirical to Critical Realism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scientific Realism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Management Studies from a Realist View: Key Themes and Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Realism and the Nature of Management and Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Realism and the Study of Management and Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Realism and the Science-Practice Link: Technology, Design Science, and Engaged Scholarship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Avenues for Future Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Realism and the Study of Grand Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Realism and New Theorizing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Realism and New Methodologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

56 57 57 59 63 65 67 70 72 72 73 73 73 74 74

Abstract

Realism has become an influential philosophical foundation that has increasingly informed research in management studies. Realism, which assumes that the world external to the subject is mind-independent, offers a particularly attractive way M. Reihlen (*) School of Management and Technology, Institute of Management and Organization, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] S. Habersang School of Management and Technology, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] N. Nikolova UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_51

55

56

M. Reihlen et al.

out of the anthropocentrism and idealism in much contemporary research in management studies that detaches theorizing from its material conditions. This becomes especially problematic when understanding and handling the “Grand Challenges” closely connected with our material existence in the world. In this chapter, three different versions of realism – empirical, critical, and scientific realism – are introduced, and it is discussed how the latter two have informed management studies in terms of ontology, epistemology, and praxeology. Finally, some recommendations for future research are summarized. Keywords

Epistemology · Realism · Systemism · Emergent materialism · Design science · Engaged scholarship

Introduction Realism as a philosophical position has become increasingly popular among management scholars. It is “the view that the external world exists independently of our sense experience, ideation, and volition, and that it can be known [to some extent]” (Bunge 1993, p. 229). For researchers like McKelvey (1997), a “realistic turn” has already taken place for some time, albeit rather tacitly, and has replaced the dominance of positivism as “a horse thirty years dead” (McKelvey 2003, p. 69). Other researchers, like Reed (2005) and Hunt (2005), motivate and defend a “realist turn” against its positivist and constructivist rivals – albeit from different directions.. The former reduces reality to experience, while the latter suggests that all or certain objects of social reality are human constructions. This “realist turn” has entered a new phase of intellectual reorientation in management studies, despite claims to the contrary (Contu and Willmott 2005). This is indicated by the proliferation of more recent works, for instance, on a realist theory of entrepreneurship (Ramoglou and Tsang 2016), a realist-inspired systems perspective on paradox theory (Schad and Bansal 2018), as well as on phenomena such as organizational failure (Habersang et al. 2019), oppression and resistance in organizations (O’Mahoney et al. 2018), IT-based organizational change (Volkoff and Strong 2013), organizational attention (Bansal et al. 2018), sociotechnical transitions (Sorrell 2018), and the reorientation of the science-praxis link based on engaged scholarship (Van de Ven 2007) and design science (van Aken 2004, 2005). Furthermore, the book by Edwards et al. (2014) translates the philosophical debate on critical realism into a very useful practical handbook for conducting realist-inspired research. A “realist turn” in the philosophy of science gained momentum in the 1970s. It initiated a noticeable shift away from positivism, especially in the natural sciences (see also Psillos 2018). This development has been contested in the social sciences and has taken a different route, strongly influenced by the cultural turn. As Mader et al. (2017, p. 7, own translation) argue, “[the] cultural turn [in the social sciences] has not overcome the anthropocentrism of modern Western philosophy, despite statements to the contrary, but has rather taken it to the extreme by making the reality of things dependent on human interpretations. In this way, it has

4

Realist Inquiry

57

become impossible to provide meaningful answers to powerful ‘materialities’ such as the economic crisis, (para)military violence, or climate change, which are among the most pressing problems of the present day.”

Realism offers a particularly useful way out of anthropocentrism (the view that the material world only has value when serving human interests) and idealism (the view that asserts the primacy of ideas over matter). Both views, which have a strong presence in contemporary philosophy, are conducive to a separation of theorizing from its material conditions. Realism helps to restore this lost connection and to explore the interlinkages of two kinds of orders – the order of nature (cosmos) and the order of society (polis). Toulmin (1990) refers to these two interlinked orders as cosmopolis. Society and organizations are not independent of the cosmos, which is the natural habitat of society. Understanding the systemic nature of our cosmopolis seems to be more critical for organizations and managers today, as well as for social scientists seeking to make sense of new material realities. However, the potential of realism as an intellectual movement has not been fully leveraged in management studies because it is either confused with positivism or reduced to one form of realism, in particular Roy Bhaskar’s and his followers’ version of critical realism (e.g., Bhaskar 1975/2008, 1979/1998; Reed 2009a; Edwards et al. 2014; Archer et al. 1998). Management scholars could benefit from opening up to a broader range of realist positions, including scientific realism as proposed by Mario Bunge, to strengthen their philosophical stance and at the same time stimulate a debate on different directions of a “realist turn” in management studies. This chapter is structured as follows. In response to Niiniluoto (1999, p. 1) who states that “‘[r]ealism’ is one of the most overstrained catchwords in philosophy,” the following section is dedicated to reconstructing three versions of realism: empirical, critical, and scientific realism. Building upon this foundation, key themes are reflected that have dominated the contemporary debate on realism in management studies – in particular, (1) how realism shapes our understanding of management and organizations, (2) how realism informs us in our study of management and organizations, and (3) how realism contributes to the science-praxis relation. Finally, this chapter discusses recommendations for future research.

Realism in Philosophy From the perspective of a realist, science is a matter of striving to create true accounts about the world. While this premise is shared across most realists, it is helpful to distinguish three versions of realism: empirical, critical, and scientific realism.

From Empirical to Critical Realism Empirical realism assumes that reality is as we perceive and experience it. For empirical realists, reality appears in our sensations, and experience is considered the gateway to reality. A prominent protagonist of empirical realism is positivism.

58

M. Reihlen et al.

Positivists claim to gain knowledge by sticking to and exploring empirical data seen as expressions of facts. George Berkeley, one of the early radical empiricists, suggested that reality manifests itself in appearances, and this assumption was for him commonsensical because it reflects the human experience. Similarly, as Carnap (1928/1967, p. 92), one of the prominent figures of the Vienna Circle, puts it: “all physical objects can be reduced to psychological ones.” In short, empirical realism assumes that the experiential route is the only viable pathway to reality. However, this assumption is problematic. Empirical realism overlooks the fact that “reality always transcends the limits of the experiential status quo” (Rescher 2010, p. 4) because sensations are only skin-deep and may sometimes be false, and some facts (such as atoms or radiation, for example) could never be studied simply by recourse to appearance. Real existence, therefore, involves unobservable facts that transcend direct human experience. Critical realism emerged during the 1970s with the works of Roy Bhaskar, Margaret Archer, Andrew Sayer, and Dave Elder-Vass, among others. Bhaskar’s books, “A Realist Theory of Science” (1975/2008) and “The Possibility of Naturalism” (1979/1998), could be seen as the founding works of this stream. The original core of critical realism was built around three key arguments. First, ontology, or the philosophical study of being, is distinct from and cannot be reduced to epistemology, the philosophical study of knowing. Critical realists, therefore, attack positivism for disregarding questions about the nature of the world. For Bhaskar, this has been a serious epistemic fallacy because researchers should explicate their epistemological assumptions and show how they understand the nature of things they study. In other words, they should reveal their ontological assumptions. Therefore, Archer (1998, p. 195) urges us not to confuse “what is with what we take to be. Conversely, the realist insists that what is the case places limitations upon how we can construe it.” Second, Bhaskar offers a materialist ontology allowing for structure, difference, and change in the world, which is distinct from the flat ontology of (observable) events implicit in the Humean theory of causal laws. For Hume, causation does not belong to things as material objects of the world but, instead, discretely reflects distinct atomistic events. While we may see regularities in patterns of events, any attribution of a causal connection between these events can only be achieved by our mind – or, in Kant’s terms, by the use of pure reason. As such, causation is a matter of our minds and not an inherent property of things. In contrast with Hume’s event ontology, critical realism emphasizes that “[t]he world consists of things, not events” (Bhaskar 1975/2008, p. 51). Critical realists argue that causation happens in complex concrete objects. These complex objects, such as social organizations or markets, have an inner structure and emergent properties driven by causal processes. To understand reality, critical realists suggest that an explanation has to identify the multiple causal powers – for instance, social structures and underlying generative mechanisms – accountable for the creation of events that either maintain or change the status quo. In contrast to empirical realists, who mainly pay attention to observable phenomena, critical realists emphasize mechanism-based explanations. Yet, since mechanisms are often hard to observe or may even be unobservable, researchers must engage in deep theorizing that goes

4

Realist Inquiry

59

beyond the level of appearance. Thus, ontology and epistemology are closely linked in critical realism, because what we assume about how these things are is essential for how we gain knowledge about them. Realist inquiry is therefore based on what Bhaskar calls the “holy trinity of critical realism that entails the compatibility of ontological realism, epistemological relativism and judgmental rationality” (Bhaskar 2010, p. 1). Third, critical realism has emerged as a distinctive stream that offers a rationale for articulating critical explanations of social practices (Sayer 1997). The focus on critique is important because it gives social research (and social science more generally) “a potentially emancipatory character” (Sayer 1997, p. 473). An explanatory critique identifies false beliefs or frustrated needs and their sources, critiques those sources, and then outlines actions that remove those sources (unless conflicting and overriding needs make it unwise to remove the initial problem and its sources). According to Sayer (1997, p. 484), however, the “difficulty and contestability of normative judgements are downplayed” in critical realism. Normative considerations represent an area that requires further investigation. Inspired by the works of Bhaskar and his followers, a whole stream of differentiated contributions based on critical realism has emerged, especially to redirect social sciences away from their positivist heritage, on the one hand, and their hermeneutic heritage, on the other (see especially Archer et al. 1998). While critical realism shows the way forward, it is from a methodological perspective less elaborated in its standards than scientific realism which is discussed next (Bunge 2006).

Scientific Realism Scientific realism is a “refined version of critical realism” (Bunge 1993, p. 231). As Niiniluoto’s notion of Critical Scientific Realism (1999) indicates, sometimes it may be difficult to clearly distinguish between the two. Similar to debates around critical realism, we will find many nuances and controversies concerning the nature of scientific realism (e.g., Rescher 1987). Below we mainly build upon a particular, prominent scientific realist perspective, namely that of Mario Bunge. In his treatise on basic philosophy (Bunge 1974–1989) – which covers semantics, ontology, epistemology and methodology, and ethics – Bunge developed an up-to date, science-based realist philosophy. He also applied his philosophy to various scientific disciplines as well as technologies, including the philosophy of physics (Bunge 1973), biology (Mahner and Bunge 1997), psychology (Bunge and Ardila 1987), social sciences (Bunge 1996, 1998), political philosophy (Bunge 2009), and more recently, medical philosophy (Bunge 2013). Unfortunately, critical realists have rather ignored his body of work, which is a significant loss, in our view: Not only is Bunge’s work highly compatible with their enterprise, but it also extends their work in many ways, as it offers one of the most comprehensive realist philosophies to date. Below the main contours of scientific realism are presented by discussing four aspects of realist inquiry: (1) ontological, (2) epistemological, (3) semantic, and (4) methodological realism.

60

M. Reihlen et al.

Ontological realism posits that “there is a domain of mind-independent existence and that we can obtain some reliable knowledge of it” (Rescher 1987, p. 1). Since “epistemology and ontology should match each another” (Bunge 2010, p. 19), Bunge’s emergent materialism, as an underlying ontology, helps us to clarify what this material existence means. In particular, a materialist ontology assumes that everything in the world, from stones to thoughts, is concrete and material (Bunge 1979, 1981, 1996, 1998). In Bunge’s emergent materialism, ideas are not decoupled from living brains, and society is not detached from its ecological conditions. He regards human nature in its totality (with its needs, wants, ideas, and social behavior), without reducing the social to biological, economic, political, or cultural factors. All ideas are comprehended as neurological processes, and all social systems – the cultural ones included – are concrete, material systems that consist of real, flesh-andbone people and not of disembodied ideas (Bunge 1996). Social systems are described as a quadruple consisting of components, environments, mechanisms, and structures (the CEMS-model) and are composed of four subsystems: biological, economic, political, and cultural (the BEPC-model of society). The biological subsystem is natural, while the remaining three are the creation of human action. Therefore, culture is not understood as a sphere with an autonomous existence, a world of ideas, or a World 3 in Popper’s sense (Popper 1972), but as one of the three artificial subsystems of society – namely, economy, culture, and polity, which cannot be regarded independently of each other (Bunge 1996, p. 303). Consequently, Bunge specifies complex material things (including living forms, such as animals, and social organizations) as systems. He argues that “[a]ny philosophy compatible with factual science will be materialist. To be sure, social relations pass through the heads of people, but it is such heads, not immaterial minds, that do the feeling, perceiving, thinking, and the like. [. . .] The materialist view of ideas helps to explain why some knowledge of the world is adequate [. . .]” (Bunge 1996, p. 303–304). Bunge’s ontology builds upon a systemic approach. To understand this approach, it is best to define what it is not and to distinguish it from holism and individualism. Holism, also termed collectivism, maintains that society transcends its members. Holism takes an impersonal view that leaves little room for individual agency. On the contrary, individualism is a no-society view, downplaying social structures that influence individual thinking and behavior. Consequently, both views face limitations in the study of social facts because they account for only half of the story. Bhaskar too emphasizes this aspect in his relational conception of the subject. The alternative to both collectivism and individualism is systemism, which follows the credo: “we shape society, and it shapes us” (Bunge 1996, pp. 241–281; see for a discussion Reihlen et al. 2007). Epistemological realism is the view that the world can be known partially, and often only indirectly. Only radical skeptics would argue that the world is unknown or unknowable, which would leave us, as human beings, incapable of understanding. Instead, realists argue that genuine knowledge of the world is in principle possible, and that this knowledge is distinguished from mere opinion by its degree of (theoretical and empirical) justification. Consequently, we can know something, but this knowledge is bound to error (fallibilism) and subject to improvement

4

Realist Inquiry

61

(meliorism). Moreover, Bunge advocates that knowledge from everyday experience is insufficient because “most of reality is hidden to the senses, to get to know anything worth knowing we must imagine conjectures in addition to making observations” (Bunge 2009, p. 26). The problem of unobservables, therefore, becomes a vital issue for scientific realism. How do we understand a reality that we cannot directly experience? The realist answer to this question is twofold: First, making sense of unobservables, such as individual intentions or social structures, requires the invention of theories that investigate unobservable things or properties. Therefore, data are not enough to suggest deep theoretical relations; rather, these relations have to be invented. Second, theoretical conjectures about unobservables should be checked by inventing suitable measures and indicators that can be considered as adequate proxies of unobservable facts. Inquiring into reality, therefore, means that deep knowing goes beyond observation and experience. Much of reality, from quarks to transaction costs, is unobservable and therefore demands deeper theorizing. While reality is the ontological yardstick in the search for truth, realists like Rescher advocate that researchers’ own intellectual commitments make epistemological pluralism and dissensus in a complex world unavoidable (Rescher 1993). People have incomplete information about reality and build their beliefs and evaluations on a diversity of experiences and a variety of cognitive values. Consequently, different social, temporal, and historical situations provide people with different cognitive outcomes. As a result, epistemological realism suggests that any set of facts can, at least in principle, be represented by alternative theories. It is important to note that this position differs from relativism of a postmodern nature in two respects. First, following Rescher (1993), a viable position only exists when rationally justified, moving us from a position of indifference to one of being rationally grounded. Briefly, rational pluralism means that any scientific field is naturally pluralistic in terms of research streams and perspectives, as it involves different scientists with divergent experiences, views, and norms. However, at the level of the individual scientist/researcher, this pluralism does not apply. This would lead to contradictions in one’s own position and views, which are not tolerable from a rational point of view. Second, justifying one’s own position is not a matter of personal taste and subjectivity. Instead, a realist needs to produce impersonal (objective) knowledge backed by sound theory (a theory that others can test) and solid evidence reflecting up-to-date standards of scientific inquiry. Finally, realists like Bunge suggest that the fundamental dilemma of whether science can and should be value-neutral or value-bound is partly resolved by distinguishing between scientific and technological knowledge production. While basic science should be valueneutral (just committed to the search for truth), technology cannot be so because it addresses practical problems and policies with different consequences for different stakeholders who are likely to value the outcomes differently (Bunge 1996). In sum, epistemological realism “accounts for the conceptual components of scientific research without being rationalist, and for its empirical components without being empiricist. It encourages doubt without falling into [. . .] destructive skepticism; it admits intuition but rejects intuitionism, as well as convention, but not conventionalism” (Bunge 1996, p. 323).

62

M. Reihlen et al.

Semantic realism refers to the relation between linguistic expressions and reality. Following Wittgenstein (1953), scientific communities are constituted as linguistic communities by sharing language and meaning through what he calls “language games.” Yet, as Niiniluoto (1999, p. 44) argues, these “language games are not only intralinguistic ‘indoor games’, as some Wittgensteinian philosophers would argue, but also ‘outdoor’ games for establishing connections between language and reality.” Following Bunge, semantic realism is about the representational role of language. Accordingly, some propositions refer to or represent facts (for example, larger organizations tend to formalize their behavior), and some of these factual propositions are approximately true (Bunge 2006, p. 257). Protagonists of the linguistic turn reject this representational role of language. Derrida, for instance, argues that every symbol only refers to other symbols but not to facts outside of our world of language. With his famous statement, “there is nothing outside the text” (Derrida 1967/1997, p. 163), he becomes an indoor player. On the contrary, semantic realism advocates that scientific statements refer to real things by establishing a representational relation between conceptual items and the real world. For instance, the conceptual attributes of error cultures, such as error resilience, are represented by specific error-handling practices in real organizations, such as air traffic control teams. The assumption that our theoretical statements refer to real things and are not just “intralinguistic language games” is essential for the idea that statements have a truth value. Most people tacitly assume that the search for truth is essential to many professions, from scientists who seek to understand the outbreak patterns of a pandemic to judges evaluating testimonies in a criminal trial. For realists, a theoretical statement is true if it represents or corresponds to its facts. However, it would be unrealistic to assume that a statement is simply true or false “because factual truth can be legitimately attributed only on the strength of truth tests” (Bunge 2006, p. 259). If these conceptual and empirical truth tests have not been performed, a statement may be imaginative but not necessarily true (Bunge 1996). Further, with the progress of science, a statement that was considered true in the first place may be reconsidered as false in light of contemporary theoretical and empirical evidence. In short, realists assume that factual truth is a representational relation between statements and reality and can, in principle, be approximately achieved through theoretical reasoning and empirical testing. The occurrence of errors during our inquiries offers unexpected support for semantic realism, as Bunge suggests. The very idea that errors happen during our scientific investigations, whether these are conceptual or empirical, “presupposes the real existence of the entity or feature in question” (Bunge 2006, p. 262). Methodological realism is committed to progress in methodology and the use of theoretical and empirical evidence for reality checks. Methodological studies aim to find and improve methods and procedures for advancing a scientific field. It is helpful to contrast methodological realism with what it is not. Methodological realism opposes methodological relativism. In contrast with an “anything goes” (Feyerabend 1975) attitude, methodological realism suggests that

4

Realist Inquiry

63

the choice of methods is not arbitrary but, instead, informed by the up-to-date body of methodological knowledge. This body of knowledge offers methodological norms for proper scientific inquiry, including norms for theoretical reasoning, grounded theorizing, as well as reality checks for empirical testing. These conventions are essential to ensure scientific rigor and the possibility to build upon one another’s works. Yet, methodological realism partly aligns with Feyerabend’s (1975) critique in that it acknowledges that methodological progress does not occur through a “law-and-order” regime (i.e., one that just follows conventions) but needs to be open to a plurality of methodological innovations in order to avoid conventionalism. Methodological realism also differs from the hermeneutics. Dilthey (1957) and his followers emphasize that the social world is constituted by sensemaking and subjective meaning. From a methodological point of view, he proposes that subjective meanings are elucidated through a form of intuitive understanding. Methodological realists agree that subjectivity has a role in social life but their approach is different. Instead of Verstehen (i.e., a particular form of understanding) the subjective meaning, realists see the need for an objective study of subjectivity – that is, a study based on methodological norms for proper scientific inquiry into cognitions and feelings through well-grounded theories and empirical evidence. This raises one more remark concerning Popper’s methodological principle of falsification. For him, theories cannot be confirmed by empirical evidence but can only be disproved or falsified. Yet, as Bunge argues, falsification unfortunately reduces the role of empirical evidence in the research process to its justification stage. This devalues the role of empirical evidence in discovering new theory as is the case in grounded theorizing, for instance. Therefore, methodological realism assumes the dual role of empirical evidence, in both discovery and justification of a theory. To sum up, methodological realism stipulates that, for those interested in reliable and truth-like knowledge, methodologies of science offer the best strategies for our epistemic endeavors, which are certainly imperfect and bound to error but subject to ongoing open debates and improvement. Table 1 summarizes the critical distinctions between empirical, critical, and scientific realism.

Management Studies from a Realist View: Key Themes and Contributions Three key questions related to a realist position in management studies can be outlined: (1) How does realism understand the nature of management and organizations? (2) How does realism suggest that one should study management and organizations? (3) How does realism shape managerial practice? The first question is related to its underlying ontology, the second is epistemological and methodological in nature, and the third relates to the science-practice link.

64

M. Reihlen et al.

Table 1 Three versions of realism: empirical, critical, and scientific realism Ontology

Epistemology

Empirical Realism • Reality exists as series of discrete events (event ontology)

Critical Realism • Reality exists as a complex relational, stratified material entity (relational materialism)

• Focus: Empirical world • Only sensational appearances exist and can be known (phenomenalism) • Knowledge is subject to change ( fallibilism)

• Focus: Generative Mechanisms • Appearance
Reality (the problem of unobservables)

• Experience as the sole source and test of knowledge (empiricism)

• Reason and experience as sources of knowledge (ratio-empiricism)

• All knowledge of facts is incomplete and bound to error ( fallibilism)

• Reality can be represented by alternative theories (epistemological relativism) • Explanatory critique as emancipation (normative inquiry)

Semantics

Methodology

• Language as representation of experience • Truth can be achieved by the test of experience

• Primacy of quantitative methodologies such as experimental research, survey research, etc.

• Language as representation of facts • Factual truth can be approximately achieved and improved • But representations of facts are intertwined with value judgements • Pragmatic, but informed use of methods to facilitate intensive (e.g., case study, action research) or extensive research designs (e.g., survey)

Scientific Realism • Reality exists as a complex material system in a multi-level world of systems (emergent materialism) • Focus: Systems, incl. mechanisms • Appearance
Reality (the problem of unobservables) • All knowledge of facts is incomplete and bound to error ( fallibilism) • Reason and experience as sources of knowledge (ratioempiricism) • Reality can be represented by alternative theories (epistemological relativism) • While science should be value-neutral, technology is valuebound (valueboundedness) • Language as representation of facts • Factual truth can be approximately achieved and improved

• Scientific, by addressing knowledge problems based on plausible worldviews in the light of the scientific background with methods that are rigorously checked conceptually or empirically, and with goals that are both attainable and nontrivial (scientism).

4

Realist Inquiry

65

Realism and the Nature of Management and Organizations Organizations as Multilevel (Open) Systems Realists assume that reality is layered rather than flat. Accordingly, things assemble into systems, and every system has emergent properties that its components lack (Bunge 2010). New entities emerge from “the complex interplay between mechanisms and entities located and operating at different and irreducible levels of reality” (Reed 2009b, p. 431). Hence, systems comprise of subsystems, which further nest in other subsystems. Each subsystem performs specific functions and has its own dynamics. Such multilevel system thinking assumes that organizational entities reside in nested arrangements (Hitt et al. 2007). For example, individuals are nested in work groups, which in turn are nested in larger organizational units, such as divisions or business units. Those units are part of what we call organizations, which in turn are nested in broader institutional contexts and embedded in the natural environment. Each layer of reality has its distinctive features and properties that cannot be collapsed or reduced to each other (Reed 2009b). The interplay of these levels generates new phenomena exhibiting properties that are distinct from those they originate from. For instance, interruptions at the organizational team level (e.g., group-thinking) may collide with interruptions at the field level (e.g., changing norms of consumption) and can cause, over time, an organizational system to fail (Habersang et al. 2019). Realists reject an understanding that only incorporates single-level dynamics and, with it, an overly holistic or an overly individualistic conceptualization of management and organizations. Organizations are too complex to neglect either the individual agency that shapes environmental structures or the social dynamics that arise on the macrolevel and influence individual thinking and behavior. Consequently, realists advocate a systemic perspective in order to capture the various layers of reality in which organizations, as emergent multilevel systems, are embedded. Causality, Social Structure, and Agency A key theme discussed by realists is the nature of social structure and, in particular, how far we can ascribe structures with causal powers. Realists have been divided over this issue because different positions base their arguments implicitly or explicitly on other social ontologies. Critical realists like Reed (2009a, b) follow the Bhaskarian approach of a relational ontology. Accordingly, “[i]n social life only relations endure” (Bhaskar 1979/1998, p. 45) because social structures define social positions giving individuals access to resources as well as social roles institutionalizing behavior expectations. In this sense, what defines an organization is less who belongs to it and more how relations are characterized within and across the organization. Consequently, organizations are understood as having a social structure “with innate causal powers [. . .] that can only be creatively activated and mobilized by corporate agents in pursuit of their collective interests and values” (Reed 2009a, p. 59). Analytically, critical realists distinguish between agential activities and social structures. They assume that structure is not internal, hence represented in actors’ memory traces, but rather external to them. Consequently, critical realists claim that social structure has an independent causal power that

66

M. Reihlen et al.

preexists (and therefore defines) enduring social relations and social positions into which individuals fit. Non-Bhaskarian realists, however, have questioned this approach to social structure. By attributing causal powers to structures, they argue, we run the risk of reification, or, as Varela (2007, p. 201) puts it, “the agentification of social structure.” Implicitly, this critique is based on a different social ontology. Bunge’s systemic ontology, which is a version of an action-systems theory, represents the most elaborate alternative to Bhaskar’s relational ontology. For Bunge (1996, p. 273), defining relations without relata would be considered a logical fallacy because social relations only exist between specific individuals or groups. Following this line of reasoning, social structure can only exercise power in concert with, and by also mobilizing, individual agency. From a systemic ontology perspective, a structure is a property of a system, but not a thing in itself. Therefore, it cannot have causal power. It only exists because of relations among members of a social system, and between them and environmental actors. As Wan (2011, p. 129) explains: “causal powers ‘derive from’ interrelated individuals.” Therefore, we can explain the “emergence of causal powers of a social entity [like a firm] in terms of its constituents and their relations. Accordingly, social structures do not have causal power per se but only through [the] actions of agents. In this sense, structures in themselves do not produce change.” In sum, structure contributes to enabling or constraining change by forming individual beliefs, values, and intentions, leading to the emergence of agents’ social action.

The Systemic Nature of Managing Organizations face issues with increasingly significant societal implications, such as the climate crisis, digitalization, and market and government failures. Such problems cause real systemic challenges for society and organizations (Schad and Bansal 2018). Systemic challenges are characterized by complex spatiotemporal dynamics spanning various subsystems, i.e., the natural, biopsychological, economic, political, and cultural environment. Such complex spatiotemporal dynamics emerge because reality is an open system with connections between a potentially undefinable number of properties rather than a bundle of closed or controlled systems with limited properties (Schad and Bansal 2018; Van de Ven 2007). Recent examples that point to an understanding of managerial problems as systemic challenges can be found in the literature on organizational paradoxes and climate change (Schad and Bansal 2018). For instance, drawing on Bhaskar’s critical realism, Schad and Bansal (2018) advocate an open system perspective on paradoxes that prioritizes ontological rather than epistemological tensions associated with the climate crisis. They argue for shifting the focus from perceived managerial tensions (epistemological dimension) to “real” tensions embedded in systems (ontological dimension). Such focus on “real” structures and events helps uncover the complex dynamics that produce generative mechanisms in both natural and social worlds and may only partially appear in the organizations’ and managers’ epistemological experience (Bansal et al. 2018). Complex dynamics involve spatiotemporal relationships that have different properties within various subsystems. For example,

4

Realist Inquiry

67

lower-level phenomena tend to have more rapid but less severe dynamics than higher-level phenomena, which emerge more slowly but potentially produce more severe consequences (Klein and Kozlowski 2000). A local coal factory may be responsible for a rapid rise in air pollution in a specific region but only accounts for marginal emissions on the global scale. In contrast, climate change as a large-scale phenomenon may take years to become detectable through extreme weather events caused by complex dynamics in the biophysical system (Schad and Bansal 2018). Following a realist agenda means that management and organization studies research becomes sensitive to complex ontological dynamics that cause systemic managerial challenges.

Realism and the Study of Management and Organizations Role of Reasoning and Experiencing One of the central themes of realist inquiry addresses the role of reasoning and experiencing, or the interaction between theory and data in the search for the best explanation. Realists reject empiricism because “data does not speak for itself” and may spare original thoughts. They also refuse apriorism, especially favored by radical constructivists, because of its primacy of theory over data (Bunge 1996). This also leads realists to refuse inductivism and deductivism as modes of reasoning in their pure form, the former because any kind of inductive study starts with problems and is guided by conceptual frameworks; the latter is important but equally insufficient because deductivism, and especially its extreme form of Popper’s refutationalism (Popper 1962), downplays the role of evidence as it is used only to falsify hypotheses. In contrast, evidence can also help to discover new hypotheses. Most realists have therefore taken a middle ground position by following what Peirce called “abduction” – an act of fallible insight (e.g., Ackroyd and Karlsson 2014; Van de Ven 2007). Abduction is built upon a reciprocal relationship between theory and data, where theory is the interpretative backdrop for making sense of data, and data indicates that something is actually happening. Let us illustrate this form of reasoning based on the study of organizational failure by Habersang et al. (2019). It entails three components. First, from reviewing the existing literature on organizational failure, the authors identified nine dominant theories with more than 100 key constructs. Each theory and construct offers a “glimpse of the possible” when making sense of data. Second, the empirical material used for this study comprises 43 organizational failure cases that the authors reanalyzed by conducting a qualitative meta-study. Identifying and analyzing patterns in the 43 failure cases followed an abductive interplay of using theory-induced constructs and making sense of the data by looking for new theoretical explanations. However, this step of creating theoretical accounts from the patterning of data is an eminently creative act. As Langley (1999, p. 691) puts it, “no analysis strategy will produce theory without an uncodifiable creative leap.” Abduction as fallible insight requires doubt, by searching and analyzing counterevidence and rival explanations. In sum, abduction is the search for the “best” or “most accurate” explanation for a particular problem

68

M. Reihlen et al.

(Bunge 2006, p. 168) by combining both gateways to reality – theorizing and experiencing – and urging us to leave room for doubts, errors, and improvements.

Nature of Explanation The second theme is concerned with the nature of explanation in management studies. How are social facts, such as organizational change, best explained? Reed (2005), for example, argues that proper scientific explanations have to identify underlying generative mechanisms that explain patterns of events. “To explain a thing,” as Bunge (1996, p. 137) writes, “is to show how it works, and to explain a fact is to show how it came to be.” For instance, in their highly influential article, Van de Ven and Poole (1995) suggest that organizational change and development is driven by one (or a combination) of the following four mechanisms, each drawing on different schools of thoughts: immanent program of life-cycle theory, purposeful enactment of teleological theory, conflict and synthesis of dialectical theory, or competitive selection of evolutionary theory. The identification of a generative mechanism or several interacting mechanisms distinguishes, as Hedström and Swedberg (1998, pp. 8–9) write, “between genuine causality and coincidental association, and it increases the understanding of why we observe what we observe.” In this way, realist management scholars deviate from both interpretivist and positivist colleagues. Interpretivists reject the idea of explanation altogether, as management studies should account for human behavior in terms of its meaning being best elucidated by hermeneutical Verstehen. Realists also deviate from the “covering law model” of explanation as proposed by Popper (1959) and Hempel (1965), which derives logical conclusions from a set of premises. Yet, the logical validity of an explanation is necessary – but insufficient. Hence, realists argue for strong explanations by disentangling the causal influences on the world, and they do so by incorporating factual mechanism(s) into their explanations. For instance, if we want to understand how firms can facilitate radical status change, realists argue that we need to reveal the underlying mechanisms employed by firms – such as category detachment, category emulation, and category sublimation – to explain change from low to high status (Delmestri and Greenwood 2016). Developing mechanism-based explanations can be challenging because the underlying mechanisms that make a system tick are frequently unobservable; hence, they cannot be elucidated directly from empirical data. The problem of unobservables, which is at the heart of many core theories in management studies, has become a key concern for management scholars. For example, Godfrey and Hill (1995) illustrate this issue with three theories: transaction cost theory, agency theory, and the resource-based theory of the firm. Their key argument is that all three theories apply constructs about specific states that are unobservable. For instance, the resource-based view of the firm argues that a sustainable competitive advantage of a firm is based on the inimitability of a resource. This inimitability may, for instance, be due to causal ambiguity that raises barriers to imitation. Similarly, in transaction cost economics, a key mechanism that drives transaction costs is opportunism. While opportunism is an individual’s engagement in self-interest seeking

4

Realist Inquiry

69

with guile, it cannot be observed until it has occurred. Even when it has occurred, it may be challenging to realize that it has actually happened, due to asymmetric knowledge, complexity, and uncertainty.

Methodological Implications The final theme is related to the methodological choices offered by realism. As Ackroyd and Karlsson (2014, p. 22) suggest, realists “do not conceive of research in orthodox ways. Realists may be fairly described as having a ‘beg, steal and borrow’ approach to research techniques.” More positively, realists favor a pluralistic methodology for advancing knowledge by utilizing different research strategies, designs, and particular data gathering and analysis methods. They reject the quantitative versus qualitative research divide because quantitative measures can complement a qualitative research design and vice versa. Despite realism’s openness toward plurality, it has a couple of essential implications for designing one’s research. First, taking a layered ontology seriously requires using a multilevel research design. Such a design views “organizational entities resid[ing] in nested arrangements” (Hitt et al. 2007, p. 1387) and seeks to interrelate different levels of analysis rather than to reduce them downward (microreduction) or upward (macroreduction). For instance, in their study of error management in accounting firms, Seckler et al. (2017) use a multilevel research design to study the upward interlinkages between error management practices and organizational structures and systems, as well as the downward interlinkages between these practices and individual error orientation. While a multilevel study is challenging, it offers opportunities for collaboration across disciplines and helps to address major real-world problems with a more suitable study design. Second, realists have been concerned with how to handle the problem of unobservables empirically. Two strategies have been proposed: One looks for better measurements, the other for more intensive research designs. The measuring strategy seems to contradict critical principles of realism because researchers seek to measure the unobservable. However, since many unobservables are structures (such as shared cultural beliefs, norms, and values) or mechanisms (such as learning hidden in people’s heads), realists seek reliable indicator hypotheses of unobservable properties (Bunge 1996). For example, while error cultures are not directly observable, scholars employ indicator items or proxies such as: “For us, errors are very useful for improving the work process” or “[i]f something went wrong, people take the time to think it through”). These indicators help to evaluate whether an error culture in a particular organization is present (van Dyck et al. 2005). Similarly, researchers propose to identify the consequences of unobservable mechanisms and define appropriate measures to predict whether these changes materialize (Godfrey and Hill 1995). The existence of unobservables should not be used as an excuse to stop looking for better indicators and measurement instruments. As we know from advancements of science, constructs that were first considered unobservable (e.g., germ-based disease infections) became observable due to better instruments (e.g., microbiological tests).

70

M. Reihlen et al.

The second strategy calls for a different, more intensive research design. The very nature of unobservable constructs gives strong impetus to qualitative methodologies, such as case study research and ethnographic studies. Using multiple data sources, placing constructs in context, and using multiple triangulation strategies may “represent the best way forward in observing the effects of otherwise unobservable, idiosyncratic effects [. . .]” (Godfrey and Hill 1995, p. 531). Consequently, critical realists propose a retroductive strategy, which implies working back “from the identification of certain phenomena, to theoretically postulated mechanisms or structures” (Reed 2009b, p. 438). As O’Mahoney et al. (2017, p. 785) put it: “Retroduction seeks to ascertain what the world must be like in order for our observations to be as they are and not otherwise.” Intensive field-work retroduction is a powerful strategy for linking structures and generative mechanisms with specific observable events (see also Reihlen et al. 2022).

Realism and the Science-Practice Link: Technology, Design Science, and Engaged Scholarship Since their foundation, management studies have attempted to come to terms with the problem of how to become practical and, at the same time, not to lose contact with basic and applied science. Enlightenment combined with science-based participation of academics in research design practice has been a major goal. Yet, the problem of how science and practice can and should interact has been subject to intense debate. Positions range from transferring “proven” academic knowledge to the field of practice, to understanding academia and practice as distinctive, incommensurable forms of knowing, and to joint knowledge production for practical problem solving (Van de Ven 2007). Prominent realists from the field of management studies such as van Aken (2004, 2005) and Van de Ven (2007) have become strong protagonists within this third position by propagating a “design science” and, respectively, “engaged scholarship” approach. Both design science and engaged scholarship have become highly influential in management and can be considered a form of technological research. Technologies have their own ontology and independent epistemology, methodology, axiology, and ethics (Bunge 1996). For instance, technological solutions are not evaluated for their truth-value but rather for usefulness, or lack thereof, for stakeholders. According to Bunge, the difference between science and technology is: “whereas science [. . .] studies the world, technology devises ways to change it: it is the art and science of getting things done in the most efficient way. [. . .] In particular, whereas in science theories are expected to model reality, in technology they are tools for altering reality – for better or for worse” (Bunge 1998, p. 298). The scientization of a knowledge field has become an essential developmental step to move from an experience-based craft to a prototechnology and later mature technology. Following Kipping and Üsdiken (2008), this step was initiated in the USA from the later 1950s onward, by grounding management studies in such disciplines as psychology, social psychology, sociology, and later

4

Realist Inquiry

71

economics – which slowly turned management from a trade school craft into an emerging technology with an expanding body of theoretical and empirical research. Following Bunge (1996), knowledge fields are characterized as technologies if they produce knowledge that (1) is compatible with contemporary science, and (2) is used to transform or create natural or social things or processes. Focusing on this sciencepractice nexus, Pettigrew (1997) argues that good management research should fulfill the “double hurdles” of rigor and relevance (see also Hodgkinson and Starkey 2011). The mission of management studies as technology that is similar to other sociotechnologies, such as education or normative economics, is to invent new artifacts, such as organizational strategies; new ways of using old artifacts, such as putting an old production site into new operation; and plans for realizing and evaluating them. All these activities require the production of valid and useful knowledge for solving a particular organizational problem. Technological research is practiced in collaborative learning communities and is “[. . .] a participative form of research for obtaining the advice and perspectives of key stakeholders (researchers, users, clients, sponsors, and practitioners) to understand a complex social problem” (Van de Ven 2007, p. ix). To profit from knowledge arbitrage between different epistemic communities and to engage in transdisciplinary knowledge production, these learning communities, as Van de Ven suggests, are composed of diverse members with diverse backgrounds and views on a problem domain, for instance, professionals and users as relative insiders of the case under investigation, and academics and other stakeholders as relative outsiders. Beside diagnosing problems, creating design models and plans, testing them on small-scale pilot studies, and putting them into action, these learning communities engage in improving their underlying conceptual frameworks, methods, and procedures. Thus, the body of design knowledge is not just a tool for practical problem solving but an epistemic tool that is also subject to a continuous learning process (Reihlen and Sikora 2001). In rare cases, conceptual frameworks are revolutionized as a byproduct of radical innovations. In particular, van Aken, building upon Bunge’s philosophy of technology, suggests that the core of design science is the invention, improvement, and application of technological rules as general solutions to different types of problems (van Aken 2005, p. 24). These technological rules link intervention (such as implementing a new organizational structure) with an expected outcome (such as improved efficiency, innovation, and/or employee well-being). While any technological process is eminently creative and inventive, requiring intuition and experience, we have to ask then what is the role of science in such a process. Science can contribute essential ingredients to a design science process. Based on a synthesis of previous research (Rousseau et al. 2008), science can offer design models that take the form of “ideal types” (McKelvey 1997) or “solution concepts” (van Aken 2005, p. 20). For instance, Mintzberg’s (1979) organizational configurations can be considered as generalized design models, which serve an essential heuristic function in providing practitioners with design repertoires of organizational forms. These general design repertoires can be translated and individualized to the context-specific conditions of a unique case at hand

72

M. Reihlen et al.

(van Aken 2004). In this sense, a technological design process oscillates between different knowledge arbitrages (Van de Ven 2007): Science offers general design models based on what we know concerning a knowledge domain, and praxis offers specific, contextualized experiences located in a particular situation. During the technological process aiming to solve a practical problem, both domains are linked in reflective conversations. Since technological rules are the key focus in design science, realists do not handle them with an “anything goes” attitude. Design science problems are best addressed by combining reasoning with experiencing, namely inventing design theories and testing them in field studies. As such, van Aken recommends that these technological rules should be first grounded theoretically in generative mechanisms. For instance, Osterloh and Frey (2000) show that incentivizing particular behavior based on pay for performance can undermine employees’ intrinsic motivation and joint team production because of a crowding-out effect (i.e., extrinsic incentives tend to crowd out intrinsic motivation). As the study indicates, if team production is central and we are aware of this crowding-out mechanism, we should align the reward system accordingly to avoid unintended consequences. In short, existing theory helps us to conjecture a particular mechanism at work and its underlying performance effect. Yet, whether this effect is empirically evident or not draws us to the second issue of what should be the field-testing of managerial rules to explore their actual performance effects. Van Aken (2004, p. 234) argues that “such evaluation research follows an intervention-outcome logic and is by its very nature testing-in-context.” The evaluation follows the “basic realist formula: mechanism + context ¼ outcome” (ibid.; p. 234). While realism offers useful philosophical grounding for conceptualizing the science-praxis nexus, the relation between scientific and practitioner communities in solving practical problems is still contested.

Avenues for Future Research Realism and the Study of Grand Challenges Some of the world’s most pressing problems are the “Grand Societal Challenges,” such as global warming, urban poverty, and global migration (see George et al. 2016). Discovering and handling these wicked problems demand that researchers work across disciplinary boundaries, combine science with technology, and take the interaction between our cosmos and our polis, or the entanglement of nature and society seriously. Realism offers a worldview that helps us to study the real causes of these “Grand Challenges” because they are part of our real existence in the world, so we need to study them as real objects. Future research may benefit from engaging more with different materialist ontologies, including Bunge’s systemic materialism, and using them as a platform for studying management and organizations as they intersect with nature.

4

Realist Inquiry

73

Realism and New Theorizing By assuming that a social fact, such as an organization responding to the challenges of global warming, is a system, scholars have to identify in their theorizing its components, environment, mechanisms, and structures (recall the CEMS-model). Furthermore, all social systems are composed of a biopsychological, economic, political, and cultural subsystem (remember the BEPC-model). This implies that the social is neither devoid of humans nor reducible, for instance, to culture or politics, because the social is complex and intertwined. It comes with environmental, biopsychological, economic, political, and cultural properties, dimensions, and interrelations. We agree with Schad and Bansal (2018) in encouraging future research to be more systemic in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the interlinkages and multilevel nature of real-world problems.

Realism and New Methodologies Realism offers a fruitful platform for new methodological developments. For example, researchers have recently become interested in systematically synthesizing qualitative findings by conducting qualitative meta-studies (Hoon 2013; Habersang et al. 2019). In a qualitative meta-study, new theory is developed by discovering and theorizing on new patterns in the empirical data that goes beyond each study’s purpose and scope. By building upon longer traditions in qualitative research (Miles and Huberman 1994; Maxwell 2012), realism has emerged as an influential midwife facilitating the development of qualitative metastudy methodology (Habersang et al. 2019; Habersang and Reihlen 2018). Since this is a relatively new methodological field for management studies, many questions, such as establishing standards about methodological transparency and rigor, are still in the making. We therefore encourage scholars to join this vivid debate as it offers new, mostly untapped opportunities for theory building and evidence-based management.

Conclusion This chapter makes a case for realism as a philosophical foundation in management studies. The intellectual project of a “realist turn” in management studies has gained momentum, as indicated by a growing interest in searching for a “third way” between positivism and constructivism. For realist inquiry, which seems to be more urgent than ever in times of “Grand Challenges,” we have, as Rescher (2000) emphasizes, no alternative but to commit ourselves to a mind-independent reality. This commitment is a necessary presupposition of inquiry and not a result of it. It allows us to use evidence, such as observational data or measurements, as sources of information in our search for reality. Realist inquiry has much to offer in our search for truth and useful practical solutions to our problems in management

74

M. Reihlen et al.

and organizations. Since there are different streams of realist philosophy, we encourage a broader debate in management studies about different directions of a “realist turn” (Reed 2005). We hope that our chapter stimulates this exciting and necessary enterprise.

Cross-References ▶ Evidence-Based Management ▶ Interpretive Inquiry ▶ Problematizing the Relation Between Management Research and Practice ▶ The Epistemology of Management: An Introduction

References Ackroyd S, Karlsson JC (2014) Critical realism as an empirical project: a beginner’s guide. In: Edwards PK, O’Mahoney J, Vincent S (eds) Studying organizations using critical realism: a practical guide. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 21–45 Archer M (1998) Introduction: realism in the social science. In: Archer M, Bhaskar R, Collier A, Lawson T, Norrie A (eds) Critical realism: essential readings. Routledge, London, pp 189–205 Archer M, Bhaskar R, Collier A, Lawson T, Norrie A (eds) (1998) Critical realism: essential readings. Routledge, London Bansal P, Kim A, Wood MO (2018) Hidden in plain sight: the importance of scale in organizations’ attention to issues. Acad Manag Rev 43(2):217–241 Bhaskar R (1975/2008) A realist theory of science. Routledge, London Bhaskar R (1979/1998) The possibility of naturalism: a philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences, 3 edn. Routledge, New York Bhaskar R (2010) Contexts of interdisciplinarity interdisciplinarity and climate change. In: Bhaskar R, Frank C, Høyer KG, Næss P, Parker J (eds) Interdisciplinarity and climate change: transforming knowledge and practice for our global future. Routledge, London, pp 1–24 Bunge M (1973) Philosophy of physics (Synthese library). Reidel, Dordrecht/Boston Bunge M (1974–1989) Treatise on basic philosophy, vol 1–8. Reidel, Dordrecht Bunge M (1979) Treatise on basic philosophy, vol 4, ontology II: a world of systems. Reidel, Dordrecht Bunge M (1981) Scientific materialism (Episteme; vol 9). D. Reidel, Dordrecht et al. Bunge M (1993) Realism and antirealism in social science. Theor Decis 35(3):207–235 Bunge M (1996) Finding philosophy in social science. Yale University Press, New Haven/London Bunge M (1998) Social science under debate. University of Toronto Press, Toronto Bunge M (2006) Chasing reality: strife over realism. University of Toronto Press, Toronto Bunge M (2009) Political philosophy: fact, fiction, and vision. Transaction, Somerset/London Bunge M (2010) Matter and mind: a philosophical inquiry. Springer, Dordrecht Bunge M (2013) Medical philosophy: conceptual issues in medicine. World Scientific Publishing, Singapore Bunge M, Ardila R (1987) Philosophy of psychology. Springer, New York Carnap R (1928/1967) The logical structure of the world. University of California Press, Berkeley Contu A, Willmott H (2005) You spin me round: The realist turn in organization and management studies. Journal of Management Studies 42(8):1645–1662

4

Realist Inquiry

75

Delmestri G, Greenwood R (2016) How Cinderella became a queen: theorizing radical status change. Adm Sci Q 61(4):507–550 Derrida J (1967/1997) Of grammatology (translation and corrected edition). The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore Dilthey W (1957) Gesammelte Schriften. Teubner, Stuttgart Edwards PK, O’Mahoney J, Vincent S (eds) (2014) Studying organizations using critical realism: a practical guide. Oxford University Press, Oxford Feyerabend P (1975) Against method. Outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge. Verso, London George G, Howard-Grenville J, Joshi A, Tihanyi L (2016) Understanding and tackling societal grand challenges through management research. Acad Manag J 59(6):1880–1895 Godfrey PC, Hill CW (1995) The problem of unobservables in strategic management research. Strateg Manag J 16(7):519–533 Habersang S, Reihlen M (2018) Advancing qualitative meta-analyses: A realist and a constructivist approach. Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2018, No. 1, p. 14206). Briarcliff Manor, NY: Academy of Management. Habersang S, Küberling-Jost J, Reihlen M, Seckler C (2019) A process perspective on organizational failure: a qualitative meta-analysis. J Manag Stud 56(1):19–56 Hedström P, Swedberg R (1998) Social mechanisms: an introductory essay. In: Social mechanisms: an analytical approach to social theory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 1–31 Hempel CG (1965) Aspects of scientific explanation. Free Press, New York Hitt MA, Beamish PW, Jackson SE, Mathieu JE (2007) Building theoretical and empirical bridges across levels: multilevel research in management. Acad Manag J 50(6):1385–1399 Hodgkinson GP, Starkey K (2011) Not simply returning to the same answer over and over again: reframing relevance. Br J Manag 22(3):355–369 Hoon C (2013) Meta-synthesis of qualitative case studies: an approach to theory building. Organ Res Methods 16(4):522–556 Hunt SD (2005) For truth and realism in management research. Journal of Management Inquiry 14(2):127–138 Kipping M, Üsdiken B (2008) Business history and management studies. In: Jones G, Zeitlin J (eds) The Oxford handbook of business history. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 96–119 Klein KJ, Kozlowski SW (2000) From micro to meso: critical steps in conceptualizing and conducting multi-level research. Organ Res Methods 3(3):211–236 Langley A (1999) Strategies for theorizing from process data. Acad Manag Rev 24(4):691–710 Mader D, Lindner U, Pühretmayer H (2017) Einleitung: critical realism als Philosophie der Sozialwissenschaften. In: Lindner U, Mader D (eds) Critical Realism meets kritische Sozialtheorie: Ontologie, Erklärung und Kritik in den Sozialwissenschaften. Transcript, Bielefeld, pp 7–73 Mahner M, Bunge MA (1997) Foundations of biophilosophy. Springer, Berlin Maxwell JA (2012) A realist approach for qualitative research. Sage, Thousand Oaks McKelvey B (1997) Quasi-natural organization science. Organ Sci 8(4):351–380 McKelvey B (2003) From fields to science: can organization studies make the transition. In: Westwood RI, Clegg S (eds) Point/counterpoint: central debates in organisation theory. Blackwell, Oxford, pp 47–73 Miles MB, Huberman AM (1994) Qualitative data analysis: an expanded sourcebook, 2nd edn. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks Mintzberg H (1979) The structuring of organizations: a synthesis of the research (the theory of management policy series). Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs Niiniluoto I (1999) Critical scientific realism. Oxford University Press, Oxford O’Mahoney J, O’Mahoney H, Al-Amoudi I (2017) How can the loggerhead sea-turtle survive? Exploring the journeys of the Caretta caretta using ANT and critical realism. Organization 24(6): 781–799 O’Mahoney J, Vincent S, Harley B (2018) Realist studies of oppression, emancipation and resistance. Organization 25(5):575–584

76

M. Reihlen et al.

Osterloh M, Frey BS (2000) Motivation, knowledge transfer, and organizational forms. Organ Sci 11(5):538–550 Pettigrew AM (1997) The double hurdles for management research. In: Clarke T (ed) Advancement in organizational behaviour: essays in honour of Derek S. Pugh. Dartmouth Press, London, pp 277–296 Popper KR (1959) The logic of scientific discovery. Basic Books, New York Popper KR (1962) Conjectures and refutations: the growth of scientific knowledge. Basic Books, New York Popper KR (1972) Objective knowledge. Oxford University Press, Oxford, Oxford Psillos S (2018) The realist turn in the philosophy of science. In: Saatsi J (ed) The Routledge handbook of scientific realism. Routledge, London, pp 20–34 Ramoglou S, Tsang EW (2016) A realist perspective of entrepreneurship: opportunities as propensities. Acad Manag Rev 41(3):410–434 Reed M (2005) Reflections on the ‘realist turn’ in organization and management studies. J Manag Stud 42(8):1621–1644 Reed M (2009a) Critical realism in critical management studies. In: Alvesson M, Bridgman T, Willmott H (eds) The Oxford handbook of critical management studies. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 52–75 Reed M (2009b) Critical realism: philosophy, method, or philosophy in search of a method? In: Buchanan DA, Bryman A (eds) The sage handbook of organizational research methods. Sage, Los Angeles, pp 430–448 Reihlen M, Sikora K (2001) Phänomenologischer versus technologischer Ansatz für das Wissensmanagement in Unternehmen - Eine kritisch-konstruktive Auseinandersetzung mit J.-C. Spenders Konzept der knowledge-based theory of the firm. In: Schreyögg G (ed) Wissen in Unternehmen: Konzepte, Maßnahmen, Methoden. Erich Schmidt, Berlin, pp 119–159 Reihlen M, Klaas-Wissing T, Ringberg T (2007) Metatheories in management studies: reflections upon individualism, holism, and systemism. M@n@gement 10(3):49–69 Reihlen M, Schlapfner J-F, Seeger M, Trittin-Ulbrich H (2022) Strategic venturing as legitimacy creation: the case of sustainability. J Manag Stud 59(2):417–459 Rescher N (1987) Scientific realism: a critical reappraisal (the University of Western Ontario series in philosophy of science, vol 40). D. Reidel, Dordrecht Rescher N (1993) Pluralism: against the demand for consensus (Clarendon library of logic and philosophy). Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York Rescher N (2000) Realistic pragmatism: an introduction to pragmatic philosophy (SUNY series in philosophy). State University of New York Press, Albany Rescher N (2010) Reality and its appearance. Continuum International, London Rousseau DM, Manning J, Denyer D (2008) Evidence in management and organizational science: assembling the field’s full weight of scientific knowledge through syntheses. Acad Manag Ann 2(1):475–515 Sayer A (1997) Critical realism and the limits to critical social science. J Theory Soc Behav 27(4): 473–488 Schad J, Bansal P (2018) Seeing the forest and the trees: how a systems perspective informs paradox research. J Manag Stud 55(8):1490–1506 Seckler C, Gronewold U, Reihlen M (2017) An error management perspective on audit quality: toward a multi-level model. Acc Organ Soc 62:21–42 Sorrell S (2018) Explaining sociotechnical transitions: a critical realist perspective. Res Policy 47(7):1267–1282 Toulmin SE (1990) Cosmopolis: the hidden agenda of modernity. Free Press, New York van Aken JE (2004) Management research based on the paradigm of the design sciences: the quest for field-tested and grounded technological rules. J Manag Stud 41(2):219–246 van Aken JE (2005) Management research as a design science: articulating the research products of mode 2 knowledge production in management. Br J Manag 16(1):19–36

4

Realist Inquiry

77

Van de Ven AH (2007) Engaged scholarship: a guide for organizational and social research. Oxford University Press, Oxford Van de Ven AH, Poole MS (1995) Explaining development and change in organizations. Acad Manag Rev 20(3):510–540 van Dyck C, Frese M, Baer M, Sonnentag S (2005) Organizational error management culture and its impact on performance: a two-study replication. J Appl Psychol 90(6):1228–1240 Varela C (2007) Elder-Vass’s move and Giddens’s call. J Theory Soc Behav 37(2):201–210 Volkoff O, Strong DM (2013) Critical realism and affordances: theorizing it-associated organizational change processes. MIS Q 37(3):819–834 Wan PY-Z (2011) Reframing the social: emergentist systemism and social theory. Ashgate, Surrey Wittgenstein L (1953) Philosophical investigations (Anscombe, GEM, Trans.). B. Blackwell, Oxford

5

Interpretive Inquiry Blagoy Blagoev and Jana Costas

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Is Interpretive Inquiry and How Does It Relate to Constructivism? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Impact of Interpretive Inquiry on Management and Organization Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Application and Implications for Research Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

80 81 86 89 92 94 94

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of interpretive inquiry as an important research approach for management and organizational studies. We review the roots of interpretive inquiry in the philosophical tradition of constructivism and point to the sociological, historical, cognitive, and linguistic foundations thereof. Based on this overview, we point to key research areas that interpretive inquiry particularly influenced and develop epistemological consequences for research practice. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some common criticisms of social constructivism as a philosophical foundation of interpretive inquiry. Keywords

Epistemology · Constructivism · Verstehen · Hermeneutics · Linguistic turn

B. Blagoev (*) Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany e-mail: [email protected] J. Costas Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Europa Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_52

79

80

B. Blagoev and J. Costas

Introduction Epistemological differences matter. How we as researchers approach the world, and the knowledge that we can generate about it, has implications for how we do research ourselves and how we assess the research of others. This became painfully clear during the review process of the paper “The Bored Self in Knowledge Work” (Costas and Kärreman 2016), co-authored by one of us. This chapter takes an interest in understanding why consultants of two companies describe themselves being bored, in stark contrast to the official narrative of consulting as highly challenging, engaging, creative, and compelling. Consider the following reviewer comments: 1. For the article to transcend the anecdotal, there needs to be a decent set of statistics. How many people were interviewed out of how large a pool? From what levels within the two companies were the responses drawn? The article implies that the more junior you are, the more you will complain about boredom. But this, in my opinion, needs to be quantified 2. Can you trust an individual’s self-diagnosis of boredom? You wouldn’t necessarily trust an individual’s self-diagnosis of a cold if you were a physician. The BPN aims to get round the problem of self-diagnosis by repeated questioning without using the term boredom. This article needs a tool, a questionnaire like the BPN, that will get round the problem of self-diagnosis. (emphases added)

At the face of it, the issue is one of quantitative versus qualitative research. However, behind the call for a “decent set of statistics,” “quantified” evidence, “a tool, a questionnaire” lies the clash between (post-)positivism and interpretive inquiry. The reviewer expected quantitative measures that diagnose whether the consultants are truly, objectively bored. This, however, is neither our aim nor our approach. We do not want to impose our meanings onto the consultants’ everyday lifeworld. Instead, our focus is on their social constructions of their work reality. Put differently, we want to understand how they make sense of their work. Therefore, the paper does not pursue the question of whether consultants are objectively bored or not but rather how and why they construct themselves as bored. This brief anecdote points to a more general problem in debates about methodology in management and organization studies (MOS). Often, such debates are framed by the implicit assumption that methods are simply “means to an end,” i.e., neutral tools that enable scholars to address a given research question. However, as our anecdote illustrates, the very research questions we ask depend on the epistemological stance we take. Methods do not merely follow research questions. Instead, they are tied to specific epistemological assumptions. It is within this debate that we seek to situate interpretive inquiry to understand its unique contribution to MOS. This chapter provides a necessarily selective overview of interpretive inquiry and its constructivist foundations in MOS. We address the following question: What does it mean to do management and organizational research from an interpretive stance, and why is this stance worth pursuing? In addressing this question, we will explore how interpretive inquiry has enabled scholars to challenge many taken-forgranted assumptions about seemingly natural organizational phenomena and, even

5

Interpretive Inquiry

81

more importantly, to develop alternative interpretations and theorizations thereof (Prasad and Prasad 2002; Hatch and Yanow 2003). We begin with a brief overview of the constructivist foundations of interpretive inquiry and then discuss why and how this epistemological stance matters for MOS. We then point to some of the critical areas of MOS in which interpretive inquiry has been most widely used and, based on that, discuss issues related to its practical application. We conclude by engaging with some of the recent criticisms of interpretive inquiry, especially in relation to the rise of ideas about “alternative facts” and “post-truth.”

What Is Interpretive Inquiry and How Does It Relate to Constructivism? Interpretive inquiry is an umbrella term for a wide range of (qualitative) research strategies which argue “that the social world cannot be understood in the same way as the natural and physical worlds” (Hatch and Yanow 2003, p. 65). At the heart of interpretive inquiry is the aim to generate an understanding of the meanings that actors attach to actions and interactions, experiences, and phenomena. Even though interpretive inquiry is often equated with qualitative research, the two overlap only partially. Qualitative research is a much broader term that includes (post-)positivistic approaches that adopt an objectivist epistemology, i.e., they try to “uncover facts and compare facts to hypotheses or prior findings in an attempt to falsify prior hypotheses or to contradict previous knowledge” (Gephart 2004, p. 456). Indeed, a single case is enough to falsify a hypothesis. (Post-)positivistic qualitative scholars typically try to find cases that explicitly contradict existing theories or hypotheses and use these cases as an opportunity to develop new theories or hypotheses. (Post-)positivist qualitative methods include, for instance, variancebased case studies and some versions of grounded theory research (for an overview of positivist qualitative methods, see, e.g., Su 2018). By contrast, interpretive inquiry follows the philosophical tradition of constructivism. We intentionally avoid a philosophical discussion about whether constructivism should be understood as an ontology or an epistemology, as this goes well beyond our scope. Therefore, in this chapter, we speak of constructivism as a philosophical tradition. Our view is that constructivism is best described as an “onto-epistemology” (Moeller 2012) in the sense that it highlights the inseparability of epistemological and ontological assumptions. While constructivism itself is a multifaceted tradition of thought, its various versions share an understanding of “social reality as a constructed world built in and through meaningful interpretation” (Prasad and Prasad 2002, p. 7). It does not aim to discover a given world out there but seeks to “understand [the] process of symbolic ‘worldmaking’ [. . .] through which the social world is ongoingly accomplished” (Prasad and Prasad 2002, p. 7). While an exhaustive genealogy of constructivism is beyond the scope of this chapter, we do want to highlight several important foundations.

82

B. Blagoev and J. Costas

Perhaps the most well-known foundation is a sociological one: Berger and Luckmann’s (1967) influential book The Social Construction of Reality. It outlined a conceptual framework for a sociology of knowledge which “must first of all concern itself with what people know as reality in their everyday [. . .] lives” (Berger and Luckmann 1967, p. 27). Thereby they decidedly left epistemological and methodological issues aside, to instead focus on “how [. . .] subjective meanings become objective facticities” (Berger and Luckmann 1967, p. 30) through processes of objectification, institutionalization, and legitimation. Berger and Luckmann’s book profoundly impacted the social sciences and inspired several influential traditions within MOS, such as neo-institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). One of its most important implications is that even the most “self-evident” and taken-for-granted facts need to be considered as elements of socially constructed realities, i.e., as “brought into existence or shaped by social events, forces, history, all of which could well have been different” (Hacking 1999, p. 6). Importantly, saying that something is socially constructed does not mean it is not real. On the contrary, reality is “a quality appertaining to phenomena that we recognize as having a being independent of our own volition (we cannot ‘wish them away’)” (Berger and Luckmann 1967, p. 13). In this sense, socially constructed reality is both subjective and objective at the same time. It is subjective or, more precisely, intersubjective, because it is constructed through processes of interpretation and the negotiation of meaning among social actors. It is objective, because once subjective experiences become institutionalized and sedimented within the social order, they might appear as objective facticities that cannot be wished away. Another important foundation for constructivist thinking is a historical one. Historians of science like Kuhn (1996) and Fleck (1979) challenged prevailing notions of science as a process of progressive accumulation of objective facts, each new one allegedly bringing us closer to a complete understanding of the fundamental laws that govern reality. Instead, they demonstrated both the historical contingency of what counts as a fact and science’s dependence on “paradigms” (Kuhn) or “thought styles” (Fleck). Kuhn notoriously used the concept of a paradigm inconsistently. Still, the gist of his argument was that certain fundamental beliefs, which are shared and largely unquestioned within a research community, and embodied in exemplary pieces of research, guide how members of this community define research problems, choose methods, and, most importantly, interpret empirical “evidence.” According to him, paradigms guide research activity by providing scholars with puzzles that need to be resolved and expectations of what the solutions to the puzzles should be like. As a result, scientists become blind to anomalies that do not fit into the established set of beliefs, and, even worse, “normally [do not] aim to invent new theories, and [. . .] are often intolerant of those invented by others” (Kuhn 1996, p. 24). Ludwik Fleck (1979) made a similar argument several decades before Kuhn in his book Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, initially published in German in 1935. Instead of paradigms, Fleck speaks of thought styles carried by thought collectives, i.e., “a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction [. . .] that [. . .] also provides the special ‘carrier’ for the

5

Interpretive Inquiry

83

historical development of any field of thought, as well as for the given stock of knowledge and level of culture” (Fleck 1979, p. 39). Fleck’s thinking is an important antecedent of constructivism because his concept of a thought style essentially paves the way for understanding cognition as a social rather than an individual psychological process. In his own words, “[c]ognition is the most socially-conditioned activity of man, and knowledge is the paramount social creation” (Fleck 1979, p. 42). Thought styles frame the very way in which actors perceive reality, defining what they can observe and what they have to remain blind to, essentially making contradictions to the prevailing thought style appear unthinkable: Neither the particular coloration of concepts nor this or that way of relating them constitutes a thought style. It is a definite constraint on thought, and even more; it is the entirety of intellectual preparedness or readiness for one particular way of seeing and acting and no other. The dependence of any scientific fact upon thought style is therefore evident. (Fleck 1979, p. 65)

Fleck shows how any attempt to decide whether a given empirical observation is “true” or “false” cannot be separated from the historical and cultural context in which it was made. What counts as a fact is less a matter of correspondence to an external reality but rather a question of consistency with the presuppositions of the prevailing thought style of a given collective. A third important foundation for constructivist thinking is tied to questions of cognition. It refers to the so-called school of radical constructivism, which was popularized by psychologists like Watzlawick (1983) and philosophers such as von Glasersfeld (2007) and von Foerster (2003). Their version of constructivism is radical to the extent that it denies any possibility for accessing a reality that is independent of the cognizing system, whether the latter is an individual consciousness or a social system. Radical constructivism argues that our access to reality is never pure or unfiltered because the very act of observation presupposes some kind of frame of reference or distinction that enables us to make sense of – that is, to interpret – what we perceive: The thing to remember in this context is that observations are made by an experiencing subject and therefore depend on that subject’s ways of perceiving and conceiving. Observation isolates elements of experience, not elements of an objective world. (von Glasersfeld 2007, p. 22, emphasis added)

In this sense, observation is interpretation. As pointed out by von Foerster (2003), our sensory experience of reality is “uncoded” in the sense that it does not contain any information about the qualities of whatever triggered this experience: “[e]ncoded is only ‘how much’ at this point on my body, but not ‘what’” (von Foerster 2003, p. 215). By implication, sensory experience needs interpretation. We have no choice but to construct meaning out of it by relating it to previous experience and the observed experience of others. Consequently, radical constructivists argue that what we construct as “reality emerges as an effect of contingent modes of cognitive observation” (Moeller 2012, p. 83). Knowing reality, in turn, must be

84

B. Blagoev and J. Costas

seen as an active process of construction rather than as an accurate, neutral depiction of observer-independent phenomena. A core methodological implication of radical constructivism is that, instead of trying to observe or even measure reality objectively, social scientists are better advised to focus on observing how others observe reality (second-order observation): Constructivism [. . .] does not deny that reality exists. However, it assumes that the world is not an object but rather a horizon [. . .]. It is, in other words, inaccessible. And this is why there is no possibility other than to construct reality and perhaps to observe observers as they construct reality. (Luhmann 2000, p. 6)

“Observing observers as they construct reality” basically implies a focus on the semantic distinctions they use: for example, do managers construct an expenditure as a cost or as an investment, and why? Constructivist thinking thus underlines the importance of language as a core medium in the social construction of reality. This leads us to a fourth important foundation of constructivism: the linguistic one. Language, social constructivists argue, is not simply a mirror of reality; it actively produces reality, for instance, by defining what can and cannot be said and by providing social actors with a repertoire of words, concepts, and labels that condition how actors make sense of their experience. Such concepts are not neutral. They carry meaning and produce meaning. This point has been particularly stressed by poststructuralists like Foucault (2009), philosophers like Rorty (1979), social constructionists like Gergen (1999), as well as speech act theorists (Searle 1995). Many of these scholars develop an understanding of “language as a self-contained system, where the meaning of each term depends on its relationship to other terms” (Gergen 1999, p. 29) rather than its correspondence to things in an external, language-independent reality. The consequences of this “linguistic turn” for MOS are vast: No longer then is something like an organization or, for that matter, an atom or quark thought to come first while our understandings, models or representations of an organization, atom or quark come second. Rather, our representations may well come first, allowing us to see selectively what we have described. (Van Maanen 1995, p. 134)

The point here is that we cannot treat language as “a transparent medium for the transport of meaning” (Alvesson and Kärreman 2000, p. 141), neither in our theorizing nor in our analytical strategies. Notably, the constructivist interest in language, meaning-making, and symbolism should not be confused with a form of philosophical idealism. Many constructivists have a strong interest in artifacts, material objects, and nonhuman actors, which they see as equally involved in the social construction of reality (Latour and Woolgar 1986). Instead, the point is that material artifacts and human action should be treated as “texts” in need of interpretation, an interpretation that is always context-specific. Put differently, “[f]or something to be, it needs to show up as something, in the context of a practice world [. . .]. Objects come with descriptions already attached” (Knight and Tsoukas 2019, p. 186, emphasis in the original). Constructivist thinking

5

Interpretive Inquiry

85

is concerned precisely with how the descriptions attached to specific material objects come into being, become recognized, negotiated, transformed, and maintained. This brief overview of constructivism’s sociological, historical, cognitive, and linguistic foundations shows how diverse perspectives share several common concerns. The first and most fundamental one is skepticism toward the possibility of any direct access to an observer-independent reality. If reality is inaccessible, then establishing correspondence – even in the sense of approximation – between claims and facts becomes impossible, no matter what research method is used: “There is no language-independent test of the accuracy of correspondence of a statement with a chunk of the world” (Knight and Tsoukas 2019, p. 186). We can only compare interpretations – always contingent on a specific historical and cultural context, bound by the rules of a specific language game, and dependent on necessarily selective semantic distinctions – with other interpretations. This insight challenges traditional understandings of objective truth. An alternative is to replace the criterion of correspondence (between knowledge and reality) with that of viability (von Glasersfeld 2007), i.e., “the capacity to successfully cope with the ‘real’ world” (Grand et al. 2015, p. 80). By implication, there are always multiple (but not unlimited) viable ways of knowing – or constructing – the world. Reality is open for interpretation, but only a limited number of interpretations might be viable in specific contexts. This brings us to the second paramount concern of constructivist perspectives: interpretation as a core element of constructing knowledge and research inquiry. Empirical phenomena are understood as open to and in need of interpretation. Interpretation denotes the process through which actors develop and attach meanings to their actions and experiences and those of others. Interpretation depends on foregrounding some aspects while backgrounding others. By implication, every time we try to measure a particular phenomenon – be it boredom, motivation, or financial performance – we already operate within a specific interpretive frame, a theory of what should be foregrounded and what can be backgrounded, that we impute onto empirical observations. In so doing, we risk overlooking the specific meanings actors attach to these phenomena in their social context and how these meanings shape their actions and experiences. In this sense, constructivism urges us to adopt an interpretive approach to social inquiry, i.e., focus on actors’ and collectives’ local and lived experience, practices, discourses – or their reality constructions – as core sources of knowledge. That is, we need to understand and reconstruct actors’ and collectives’ emic concepts, their local, context-specific, intersubjective understandings and definitions of reality. Such an inquiry attempts to “describe how different meanings held by different persons or groups produce and sustain a sense of truth, particularly in the face of competing definitions of reality” (Gephart 2004, p. 457). The purpose of such an inquiry is to build, on the basis of actor’s first-order, emic concepts, second-order, etic concepts. Such second-order concepts do not claim to have more privileged access to the world. They remain interpretations of interpretations with their own blind spots. Instead, their value is that they enable us to see and understand what people do and how they think in novel and unexpected ways. The goal is to develop novel and richly contextualized

86

B. Blagoev and J. Costas

theoretical knowledge rather than to test hypotheses deduced from existing theory in a decontextualized manner. A third and final concern of constructivism is the collapse of the boundary between subject and object, between researcher and researched. This concern is vividly illustrated by Giddens’ (1993) concept of the double hermeneutic, the idea that the concepts and theories developed by social scientists can become appropriated and incorporated into the everyday activities of social actors and collectives. As pointed out by Giddens (1993, p. 15), “[o]ne consequence of the double hermeneutic is that original ideas and findings in social science tend to ‘disappear’ to the degree to which they are incorporated within the familiar components of practical activities.” Interpreting the socially constructed reality is not a neutral activity; it can change this very reality, e.g., because new interpretive frames open novel ways of constructing reality. Because social reality changes every time it is reinterpreted, we cannot expect to find general causal laws governing social reality like physicists have formulated laws of quantum mechanics or general relativity. This insight also poses constraints on the generalizability of social scientific knowledge and on our understanding of what makes a theory “true.” A social theory can become true not because it provides an accurate description of reality but because people start to use it in their everyday practices (MacKenzie and Millo 2003). Constructivist thinking, therefore, invites us to consider alternatives to the traditional correspondence theory of truth. Such alternatives include, e.g., pragmatic (“a theory is true as long as it works”) and consensual (“a theory is true as long as it is regarded as true in a given scientific community”) concepts of truth. On the bright side, however, this also means that theories produced by social science have the potential to change the world, albeit not necessarily in the ways intended or envisioned by researchers.

The Impact of Interpretive Inquiry on Management and Organization Studies Interpretive inquiry has had a vast impact on MOS since the 1970s (Hatch and Yanow 2003). Perhaps the most obvious one is its contribution to establishing qualitative research as a legitimate and highly valuable methodology in management and organization studies (Gephart 2004; Bansal and Corley 2011). Even though qualitative research does not always adopt an interpretive stance, the latter has triggered interest in many previously poorly understood organizational and managerial phenomena, which often call for a qualitative-interpretive methodology. This methodology has been mainly instrumental in identifying and problematizing several issues that have been largely neglected by scholars operating within a (post-) positivistic perspective. To illustrate this impact, we want to highlight four particularly influential sub-streams of (primarily) interpretive inquiry in MOS. The first area is organizational culture. According to Hatch and Yanow (2003, p. 71), “[t]he topics of organizational culture and symbolism provided the broadest initial exploration of interpretive perspectives within organizational studies.” Early

5

Interpretive Inquiry

87

contributions in this field advanced a view of organizations as “speech communities sharing socially constructed systems of meaning that allow members to make sense of their immediate, and perhaps not so immediate, environment” (Barley 1983, p. 393). Drawing explicitly on social constructivism and anthropology (Smircich 1983), the cultural view of organization contributed significantly to understanding the informal side of organizations, i.e., the unwritten and often invisible and takenfor-granted rules, assumptions, values, and norms that shape how organizational members think, feel, and act (Alvesson 2002). The point was not simply to say that organizations have a culture, an additional managerial variable sitting next to structure or strategy, but rather to look at an organization as cultures, using culture as a root metaphor for organizations. As pointed out by Smircich (1983, p. 353), this shift of emphasis is quite profound: When culture is a root metaphor, the researcher’s attention shifts from concerns about what do organizations accomplish and how may they accomplish it more efficiently, to how is organization accomplished and what does it mean to be organized?

Research on organizational culture had a lasting impact on MOS. Its attention to interpretation, symbolism, rituals, and the collective construction of meaning in organizations still informs various research fields, such as identity research (Alvesson et al. 2008b), research on organizational space (Dale and Burrell 2008), micro-institutional theory (Kellogg 2011), or research on power and control (Fleming and Spicer 2014). A second and closely related stream of research has focused on organizational storytelling, rhetoric, narratives, discourse, and communication. Primarily drawing on the linguistic turn in MOS (Alvesson and Kärreman 2000), as well as on poststructuralism (Boje et al. 2004) and literary theory (Czarniawska 2004), this stream of research has significantly advanced our understanding of the active role played by language and discourse in the constitution of organizational realities. Building on organizational culture scholars’ interest in stories as expressive of underlying values, norms, and assumptions, this line of inquiry “shifted the emphasis from content (the stories themselves) to process (the performance of telling stories)” (Hatch and Yanow 2003, p. 78). It advanced an understanding of organizations as “material practices of text and talk set in currents of political economy and sociohistory—in time and space” (Boje et al. 2004, p. 571). Taking as their starting point the assumption that social and organizational reality is communicated into existence, scholars have, for example, elucidated the role of language and discourse in, e.g., processes of (de-)institutionalization (Maguire and Hardy 2009), strategy (Vaara et al. 2004), as well as the use of history as an interpretive resource in organizing (Blagoev et al. 2018). The main thrust of this line of research has been that communication needs to be studied as a situated performance, including attention to material objects, artifacts, and bodies (Ashcraft et al. 2009). This argument is particularly stressed by scholars who view communication as constitutive of organization (Schoeneborn et al. 2019). We see this communication-centered perspective as one of the most promising avenues for advancing organization theory and making

88

B. Blagoev and J. Costas

it capable of addressing novel and emergent forms of organizing beyond traditional bureaucratic organizations (Blagoev et al. 2019). A third research area entails (strong) process- and practice-based management and organization studies. Though distinct in their theoretical roots, these two traditions are connected by their explicit attention to processes rather than entities (Tsoukas and Chia 2002; Nicolini 2013; Hernes 2014). A key characteristic of these traditions is their understanding of “organizational phenomena [. . .] as (re)created through interacting agents embedded in socio-material practices, whose actions are mediated by institutional, linguistic, and objectual artifacts” (Langley and Tsoukas 2010, p. 9). Strong process and practice scholars thus build on constructivist ideas about the constitution of social order as an ongoing performative accomplishment that results from interpretation, sensemaking, and the negotiation of shared understandings. Process organization studies tend to focus on time and temporality (Hernes 2014), whereas practice scholars foreground the importance of situated action and its patterning. In both cases, organization is not understood as an entity but as a process of “becoming” (Tsoukas and Chia 2002). Accordingly, it cannot be decomposed into multiple parts and measured in terms of variables, as is often done in (post-)positivistic variance-based theorizing. The latter tends to black-box the underlying processual dynamics, which explain how certain phenomena and relationships are brought about, sustained, and transformed (Langley 1999). Interest in process and practice approaches continues to grow in areas as diverse as strategy (Vaara and Whittington 2012), identity (Schultz and Hernes 2013), innovation (Garud et al. 2013), and routine dynamics (Feldman et al. 2016). A final area of research that has been invigorated by interpretive inquiry is research on work, technology, and occupations (Barley and Kunda 2001; Anteby et al. 2016). Closely related to practice approaches discussed above, this research tradition also emphasizes “the importance of systematically investigating the concrete activities that constitute the routines of organizing” (Barley and Kunda 2001, p. 84), thereby criticizing overly structural theories of organization that are detached from situated social practice. Studying work and occupations is arguably becoming increasingly important in times of waning organizational affiliation, contingent employment relationships, and boundaryless careers (Anteby et al. 2016). That is, how people organize their work might be more strongly informed by occupational-level identities, knowledge, and understandings than by organizational-level factors. Much research on work and occupations also pays close attention to technology (Barley 1986). Constructivist thinking has enabled scholars within this tradition to elucidate the “interpretive flexibility” of technological artifacts, i.e., the “flexibility in the design, use, and interpretation of technology” (Orlikowski 1992, p. 409). Highlighting the embeddedness of technology in specific work practices (Orlikowski 2000), this line of inquiry essentially enhanced our understanding of how technology is socially constructed in a specific organizational context. It revealed how social dynamics could shape the adoption, implementation, use, and meaning of technology and, by implication, how identical technologies can trigger entirely different dynamics and outcomes in different organizations. More recently, this line of inquiry has evolved in research on

5

Interpretive Inquiry

89

sociomateriality and affordance (Orlikowski and Scott 2008; Leonardi 2013). These approaches challenge the separation of what we usually call “the social” – i.e., the sphere of human activity – from the world of the material. By elucidating their mutual entanglement, they appear to be particularly well-suited for addressing pressing issues surrounding the integration of new and emerging technologies, such as algorithms, robots, or artificial intelligence, into organizational and work practices. In sum, interpretive inquiry has had a lasting impact on MOS. It has enabled scholars to challenge traditional theoretical understandings – often developed in abstract, decontextualized ways – by foregrounding how organizational realities are brought about, negotiated, transformed, and sustained in everyday life. Its epistemic surplus lies precisely in its capacity to problematize established taken-for-granted assumptions and generate empirically grounded theoretical alternatives that prioritize contextualization and situated knowledge. It has shown that many important organizational phenomena cannot be fully understood without investigating the underlying meanings actors attribute to them. In so doing, it has enabled us to open the “black box” of management and organizations in ways that continue to inform our thinking today.

Application and Implications for Research Practice The constructivist foundations of interpretive inquiry have implications not only for our theorizing but also for our methods. Perhaps the most important one is that the study of management and organizations needs to go beyond a detached, purely structural analysis and theorizing “in the abstract” and, instead, should be anchored in concrete, lived, intersubjective experience, recurrent social practice, and discourse. If we approach organizations only with ready-made theoretical concepts, we will risk overlooking how organizational reality is constructed in everyday life. As put by Morgan and Smircich (1980, p. 498, emphasis added): scientists can no longer remain as external observers, measuring what they see; they must move to investigate from within the subject of study and employ research techniques appropriate to that task

The research techniques most appropriate to such a research perspective are primarily qualitative. Interpretive inquiry builds on a long tradition of methodologies that can be traced, among others, to hermeneutic methods of interpreting text, Max Weber’s “Verstehen” sociology, interpretive ethnography, as well as approaches such as grounded theory and ethnomethodology. Below, we highlight what we see as the core methodological features of interpretive inquiry in MOS. First, interpretive inquiry focuses on different types of research questions compared with (post-)positivist research. Since interpretive scholars do not seek to test hypotheses by confronting them with empirical “facts,” their research questions tend to be more open and less hypothesis-like. Typically, the emphasis is on “how” questions seeking to reconstruct, and in some cases, deconstruct, taken-for-granted

90

B. Blagoev and J. Costas

interpretations of empirical phenomena. For example, in one of our papers, we were interested in understanding how coworking spaces – typically understood as somewhat fluid and loose social communities – can achieve an organizational character (Blagoev et al. 2019). This question was rather exploratory, and our analysis was focused mainly on describing the rituals, routines, and social control mechanisms enacted by the members of a popular coworking space in Berlin. Nevertheless, interpretive research can be explanatory, too. For example, the paper on boredom cited above was focused on explaining why knowledge workers report boredom despite widespread portrayals of their work as creative, motivating, and engaging (Costas and Kärreman 2016). Here, the purpose was to explain a puzzling empirical phenomenon (Alvesson and Kärreman 2007) that traditional theories about work design and motivation could not account for. In both cases, the research questions were formulated in ways that challenged taken-for-granted assumptions about the phenomenon of study. Second, interpretive scholars usually view their research design as an iterative and open-ended process rather than a detailed and fixed plan. They tend to put much effort into choosing an adequate and promising research context for their study. Critical decisions, such as those about who should be interviewed, what should be observed, and how to analyze the empirical material, are made on the go while the researcher is in the field. The researcher typically tries to remain open to novel and unexpected findings throughout the research process and often adjusts or even changes key parameters of the evolving research design, including the research question. For example, an interpretive, ethnographic study coauthored by one of us began as an exploration of extreme work hours among elite management consultants. Over time, however, the focus of the study shifted to processes of temporal coordination and, eventually, to the temporal coordination of organizational routines (Kremser and Blagoev 2021). Such shifts are not a bug but a feature of interpretive inquiry. They enable scholars to remain flexible and adjust the research design as their interpretations of the research context become deeper and more nuanced. Third, this iterative approach usually goes hand in hand with an inductive or abductive logic of reasoning. Induction refers to the process of abstracting and generalizing based on observations and interpretations of the particular. Its goal is to produce general claims based on observing only a few instances of a given phenomenon. Whereas the feasibility of a purely inductive approach is debatable, it is often regarded as adequate when there is little or no existing knowledge about the phenomenon of study or when the phenomenon is a “talking pig” (Siggelkow 2007), i.e., so unique and puzzling that studying it appears necessary in its own right. By contrast, the abductive approach, which builds on the work of the pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, challenges the assumption of induction that researchers can approach data without any prior knowledge. As Alvesson and Kärreman (2007, p. 1265) put it, “[da]ata are inextricably fused with theory.” At the same time, abduction differs from deduction as it does not aim to confirm existing knowledge but rather to generate novel insights by confronting existing knowledge with empirical material that contradicts or even questions given

5

Interpretive Inquiry

91

assumptions. Abduction thus moves from a logic of validation (deduction) to one of discovery (Van Maanen et al. 2007). Abductive research often begins with an empirical mystery, a puzzling phenomenon that existing theory cannot adequately account for. This produces a breakdown of understanding from the point of view of the researcher (Alvesson and Kärreman 2007). Notably, such mystery is not simply discovered in the data; it needs to be actively constructed by the researchers, e.g., by generating rich empirical material, searching for material that does not confirm existing knowledge, and approaching the material from different theoretical perspectives. The researcher attempts to resolve this empirical mystery by furthering the empirical and theoretical study. If the mystery, however, persists, then the researcher develops second-order concepts – new concepts, metaphors, or theories – to resolve the empirical mystery and relate their solution to existing knowledge within the field. Thus, “abduction begins with an unmet expectation and works backward to invent a plausible world or a theory that would make the surprise meaningful” (Van Maanen et al. 2007, p. 1149). Fourth, and in line with constructivism’s rejection of objectivity, interpretive inquiry calls for high levels of reflexivity about the role of the researcher in the research process (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2017). Since knowledge and interpretation are seen relative to the observer’s perspective, researchers need to reflect on how their role in the field, their relation to the research participants, and, more generally, their perspectives, assumptions, and theories shape the knowledge they produce about the researched. As Chia (Chia 1996, p. 32) put it, “if it is true, as many metatheorists maintain, that all organizational accounts are paradigmatically circumscribed, this must reflexively apply to their own accounts.” Reflexivity thus means that scholars need “to explore the situated nature of knowledge; the institutional, social and political processes whereby research is conducted and knowledge is produced; the dubious position of the researcher; and the constructive effects of language” (Alvesson et al. 2008a, p. 480). Different textual practices can be employed to do this throughout the research process, such as the use of multiple theoretical perspectives, the inclusion of multiple voices in the empirical analysis (rather than privileging the researcher’s voice), the reflection of one’s position within the larger academic field, and the destabilization of the unreflexive practices of others. Fifth, a common characteristic of interpretive research is the status ascribed to empirical data. In line with constructivism, these are not seen as evidence that mirrors empirical reality. Reality and truth are not simply “in the data,” waiting to be discovered. Instead, the data are seen as constructions themselves. Some interpretive scholars prefer to speak of data generation rather than collection, and empirical material rather than data, to underscore the active role played by the researcher in the construction of this material. This point has been vividly illustrated by Alvesson (2003, p. 17) who argues that we need “to see the interview as a site for exploring issues broader than talk in an interview situation, without falling too deeply into the trap of viewing interview talk as a representation of the interiors of subjects or the exteriors of the social worlds in which they participate.” Interpretive scholars thus try to be reflexive about the empirical material they generate, for

92

B. Blagoev and J. Costas

instance, by looking at it from multiple angles, with multiple different lenses, and by reflecting on the social context within which this material has been generated. Sixth, interpretive inquiry views the analysis of empirical material as a process that can lead to multiple possible interpretations. Many interpretive scholars apply coding techniques, often derived from the tradition of grounded theory. Still, they refuse to frame the process of data analysis as the discovery of a more or less objective “data structure” hidden in the empirical material as suggested by more (post-)positivistic qualitative researchers (Gioia et al. 2013). Coding might be a valuable practice for organizing data, making the data analysis more transparent, increasing the plausibility of the analytical strategy, separating first- and secondorder concepts, and, importantly, gaining legitimacy in the eyes of reviewers and editors. Yet, it is unlikely to produce valuable novel theoretical insights without what Langley (1999, p. 797, emphasis added) has called “an uncodifiable step that relies on the insight and imagination of the researcher.” This uncodifiable step and not the strict application of a coding template is what ultimately accounts for a novel and exciting interpretation of empirical material (Locke et al. 2020). Finally, interpretive inquiry calls for reflexivity concerning writing, the language used in this writing, and the multiple possible readings that texts afford (GoldenBiddle and Locke 2007). As pointed out by Hatch and Yanow (2003, p. 77), “[t]he understanding that scientific writing constructs organizational realities led to explicit attention to writerly practices as rhetorical acts intended to persuade readers of an argument’s veracity.” Interpretive scholars, therefore, need to be reflexive about the genre of their writing and its conventions, on how they make their voice as well as the voices of the researched heard in their accounts, and on the overall style of the stories they want to tell (Van Maanen 2011). Overall, interpretive scholars view writing as one of the most critical steps of the research process. New analytical insights often might only emerge once the researchers begin writing up their findings.

Conclusion To conclude this chapter, we now turn to three critical objections that have been raised by critics of the constructivist foundations of interpretive inquiry. According to the first one, interpretive scholars tend to overemphasize language, cognition, and human agency at the expense of matter, materiality, and nonhuman agency. For example, Barad accuses constructivism of adopting a representationalist view of language, i.e., the “belief in the power of words to mirror preexisting phenomena” (Barad 2003, p. 802), and, thus, ignoring the performativity of material-discursive practices. Our view is that this criticism is directed at a strawman. As we showed above, constructivist thinking seeks to question precisely this “mirror” or representationalist view of language by arguing that language – through its performativity – actively brings about social reality. When it comes to matter and materiality, we believe that attention to these issues is fully compatible with the constructivist

5

Interpretive Inquiry

93

thinking underlying interpretive inquiry, as discussed above and demonstrated by, for instance, social studies of science and technology (Latour and Woolgar 1986). A second, more radical criticism accuses constructivism of being antirealist. Czarniawska (2003, p. 130 f.) provides a summary of this argument by recounting a telling anecdote about “a distinguished astrophysicist who never fails to ask [. . .] whether a deconstructionist (a subspecies of constructionists) would survive a fall from a high tower using deconstruction.” We concur with her refutation of that and the related “[f]urniture argument [. . .] consisting of banging the table (or shoving a rock through the window) to prove that there does exist a ‘real’ world” (Czarniawska 2003, p. 131). The argument, in its attempt to demonstrate the existence of objective reality, ends up reinforcing the main point of constructivism: that our access to reality is conditioned and mediated by socially accepted practices of knowing – such as demonstration – that cannot be detached from the thought style that they belong to. Constructivism is not about denying the existence of reality; it is about how we get to understand it, construct it, and change our constructions of it. The third and most recent criticism accuses constructivist thinking – and its denial of the existence of objective facts – as an amoral, or even immoral, philosophical position which has paved the way for populist political movements and has brought about a world of “alternative facts” and “post-truth.” For example, Prasad (2019, p. 1222) has argued that “the rhetoric underlying the conservative denial of climate change is intellectually foregrounded in the rejection of an objective reality, which [. . .] is to be found in the works of social constructionists and various critical theorists.” Without going into a discussion about climate change, we would like to point out why constructivism, or at least our reading of it, does not go hand in hand with a denial of climate change or with the acceptance of “alternative facts” or “fake news.” As discussed above, constructivists, while rejecting objectivity, argue that knowledge can be viable to different degrees. Given the level of consistency of research findings from climate science, it is unlikely that any constructivist would question the viability of the theory of anthropogenic climate change; there seems to be too broad of a consensus about its merits in the academic community. Conversely, whoever rejects this view would need to demonstrate the viability of their alternative constructions. This task is likely to run into obstacles in terms of both coherence and a consensus theory of truth. The same applies to Trump’s alternative facts and fake news. Put bluntly, a lie continues to be a lie in constructivism both because it is not viable vis-à-vis the world and because it does not emerge in dialogue with others. As Knight and Tsoukas (2019, p. 188) point out, constructivist thinking can contribute to a better understanding of novel phenomena such as alternative facts because facts cannot be separated from the language games in which they emerge and are interpreted. We would even go further in arguing that it is precisely an understanding of reality as unitary and objectively true that creates “a world in which there exists a constant battle for supremacy” (Stern 2019, p. 194) about whose version will prevail. In such a world, whoever has the most power is likely to establish “the facts.” A purely objectivist world might quickly turn into a world of oppression. Not constructivism but a stubborn belief in objective reality and a single truth makes Trump and his post-truth world possible, because it enables him to claim that there

94

B. Blagoev and J. Costas

are objective, indisputable facts and these facts are on his side, while everyone else is lying; his truth is the only truth, no alternative is allowed. In conclusion, we believe that the constructivist thinking underlying interpretive inquiry is needed more than ever in the age of alternative facts and post-truth. It enables us to critically question how facts are constructed and to what ends. In this sense, we also believe that, when it comes to doing research, the points of agreement among different epistemological positions need to be stressed more strongly than their divergence. As constructivists, we value the diversity of epistemological positions and methodologies. We believe that harnessing this diversity, rather than trying to settle on the one true way of doing research, is what we need to reaffirm the importance of science and the merit of the knowledge it produces.

Cross-References ▶ Critical Inquiry ▶ Realist Inquiry

References Alvesson M (2002) Understanding organizational culture. Sage, London/Thousand Oaks Alvesson M (2003) Beyond neopositivists, romantics, and localists: a reflexive approach to interviews in organizational research. Acad Manag Rev 28:13–33 https://doi.org/10.5465/amr. 2003.8925191 Alvesson M, Kärreman D (2000) Taking the linguistic turn in organizational research: challenges, responses, consequences. J Appl Behav Sci 36:136–158. https://doi.org/10/bmbwdc Alvesson M, Kärreman D (2007) Constructing mystery: empirical matters in theory development. Acad Manage Rev 32:1265–1281. https://doi.org/10/ctksd5 Alvesson M, Sköldberg K (2017) Reflexive methodology. Sage, London/Thousand Oaks Alvesson M, Hardy C, Harley B (2008a) Reflecting on reflexivity: reflexive textual practices in organization and management theory. J Manag Stud 45:480–501. https://doi.org/10/dptp5h Alvesson M, Lee Ashcraft K, Thomas R (2008b) Identity matters: reflections on the construction of identity scholarship in organization studies. Organization 15:5–28. https://doi.org/10/b29p7b Anteby M, Chan CK, DiBenigno J (2016) Three lenses on occupations and professions in organizations: becoming, doing, and relating. Acad Manag Ann 10:183–244. https://doi.org/ 10/ghbrrw Ashcraft KL, Kuhn TR, Cooren F (2009) 1 constitutional amendments: “materializing” organizational communication. Acad Manag Ann 3:1–64. https://doi.org/10/gg3bwp Bansal PT, Corley K (2011) The coming of age for qualitative research: embracing the diversity of qualitative methods. Acad Manage J 54:233–237. https://doi.org/10/dzbpm9 Barad K (2003) Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs J Women Cult Soc 28:801–831. https://doi.org/10.1086/345321 Barley SR (1983) Semiotics and the study of occupational and organizational cultures. Adm Sci Q 28:393. https://doi.org/10/bhtt66 Barley SR (1986) Technology as an occasion for structuring: evidence from observations of CT scanners and the social order of radiology departments. Adm Sci Q 31:78–108 https://doi.org/ 10.2307/2392767

5

Interpretive Inquiry

95

Barley SR, Kunda G (2001) Bringing work Back in. Organ Sci 12:76–95. https://doi.org/10/c7bjvt Berger P, Luckmann T (1967) The social construction of reality: a treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Penguin, London et al Blagoev B, Felten S, Kahn R (2018) The career of a catalogue: organizational memory, materiality and the dual nature of the past at the British museum (1970–today). Organ Stud 39:1757–1783. https://doi.org/10/gfzssq Blagoev B, Costas J, Kärreman D (2019) ‘We are all herd animals’: community and organizationality in coworking spaces. Organization 26:894–916. https://doi.org/10/gfzssr Boje DM, Oswick C, Ford JD (2004) Introduction to special topic forum: language and organization: the doing of discourse. Acad Manag Rev 29:571. https://doi.org/10/fhvbs3 Chia R (1996) The problem of reflexivity in organizational research: towards a postmodern science of organization. Organization 3:31–59. https://doi.org/10/cprzjb Costas J, Kärreman D (2016) The bored self in knowledge work. Hum Relat 69:61–83. https://doi. org/10.1177/0018726715579736 Czarniawska B (2003) Social constructionism and organization studies. In: Westwood R, Clegg S (eds) Debating organization: point-counterpoint in organization studies. Blackwell, Malden, pp 128–139 Czarniawska B (2004) Narratives in social science research. Sage, London/Thousand Oaks Dale K, Burrell G (2008) The spaces of organisation and the organisation of space. Palgrave/ Macmillan, Basingstoke/Hampshire DiMaggio PJ, Powell WW (1983) The iron cage revisited: institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. Am Sociol Rev 48:147. https://doi.org/10/b5rpwp Feldman MS, Pentland BT, D’Adderio L, Lazaric N (2016) Beyond routines as things: introduction to the special issue on routine dynamics. Organ Sci 27:505–513. https://doi.org/10/gfzswq Fleck L (1979) Genesis and development of a scientific fact. University of Chicago Press, Chicago/London Fleming P, Spicer A (2014) Power in management and organization science. Acad Manag Ann 8: 237–298. https://doi.org/10/gg9625 Foucault M (2009) The order of things. Routledge, London et al Garud R, Tuertscher P, Van de Ven AH (2013) Perspectives on innovation processes. Acad Manag Ann 7:775–819. https://doi.org/10/gd7f85 Gephart RP (2004) Qualitative research and the academy of management journal. Acad Manage J 47:454–462. https://doi.org/10/b5gz4k Gergen KJ (1999) An invitation to social construction. Sage, London/Thousand Oaks Giddens A (1993) New rules of sociological method: a positive critique of interpretative sociologies, 2nd rev. edn, repr. Polity Press, Cambridge Gioia DA, Corley KG, Hamilton AL (2013) Seeking qualitative rigor in inductive research: notes on the Gioia methodology. Organ Res Methods 16:15–31. https://doi.org/10/gcpz72 Golden-Biddle K, Locke K (2007) Composing qualitative research, 2nd edn. Sage, London/ Thousand Oaks Grand S, von Arx W, Rüegg-Stürm J (2015) Constructivist paradigms: implications for strategy-aspractice research. In: Golsorkhi D, Rouleau L, Seidl D, Vaara E (eds) Cambridge handbook of strategy as practice, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 78–94 Hacking I (1999) The social construction of what? Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Hatch MJ, Yanow D (2003) Organization theory as an interpretative science. In: Knudsen C, Tsoukas H (eds) The Oxford handbook of organization theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York, pp 63–87 Hernes T (2014) A process theory of organization, 1st edn. Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York Kellogg KC (2011) Challenging operations: medical reform and resistance in surgery. University of Chicago Press, London/Chicago Knight E, Tsoukas H (2019) When fiction trumps truth: what ‘post-truth’ and ‘alternative facts’ mean for management studies. Organ Stud 40:183–197. https://doi.org/10/gfj324

96

B. Blagoev and J. Costas

Kremser W, Blagoev B (2021) The dynamics of prioritizing: how actors temporally pattern complex role–routine ecologies. Adm Sci Q 66:339–379. https://doi.org/10/ghdrpm Kuhn TS (1996) The structure of scientific revolutions, 3rd edn. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Langley A (1999) Strategies for theorizing from process data. Acad Manag Rev 24:691–710. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1999.2553248 Langley A, Tsoukas H (2010) Introducing “perspectives on process organization studies”. In: Hernes T, Maitlis S (eds) Process, Sensemaking, and organizing. Oxford University Press, pp 1–26 Latour B, Woolgar S (1986) Laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts. Princeton University Press, Princeton Leonardi PM (2013) Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality. Inf Organ 23:59–76. https://doi.org/10/f4zdhn Locke K, Feldman M, Golden-Biddle K (2020) Coding practices and Iterativity: beyond templates for analyzing qualitative data. Organ Res Methods 109442812094860. https://doi.org/10/ gg87n3 Luhmann N (2000) The reality of the mass media. Stanford University Press, Stanford MacKenzie D, Millo Y (2003) Constructing a market, performing theory: the historical sociology of a financial derivatives exchange. Am J Sociol 109:107–145. https://doi.org/10/dcq52j Maguire S, Hardy C (2009) Discourse and deinstitutionalization: the decline of DDT. Acad Manage J 52:148–178. https://doi.org/10/dh68s2 Moeller H-G (2012) The radical Luhmann. Columbia University Press, New York Morgan G, Smircich L (1980) The case for qualitative research. Acad Manag Rev 5:491. https://doi. org/10.2307/257453 Nicolini D (2013) Practice theory, work, and organization: an introduction, 1st edn. Oxford University Press, Oxford Orlikowski WJ (1992) The duality of technology: rethinking the concept of technology in organizations. Organ Sci 3:398–427. https://doi.org/10/crmq3r Orlikowski WJ (2000) Using technology and constituting structures: a practice lens for studying technology in organizations. Organ Sci 11:26. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.11.4.404.14600 Orlikowski WJ, Scott SV (2008) 10 sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization. Acad Manag Ann 2:433–474. https://doi.org/10/gf9n5t Prasad A (2019) Denying anthropogenic climate change: or, how our rejection of objective reality gave intellectual legitimacy to fake news. Sociol Forum socf12546 https://doi.org/10.1111/socf. 12546 Prasad A, Prasad P (2002) The coming of age of interpretive organizational research. Organ Res Methods 5:4–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428102051002 Rorty R (1979) Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton University Press, Princeton Schoeneborn D, Kuhn TR, Kärreman D (2019) The communicative constitution of organization, organizing, and organizationality. Organ Stud 40:475–496. https://doi.org/10/gfzs7p Schultz M, Hernes T (2013) A temporal perspective on organizational identity. Organ Sci 24:1–21. https://doi.org/10/gfbxt5 Searle JR (1995) The construction of social reality. The Free Press, New York Siggelkow N (2007) Persuasion with case studies. Acad Manag J 50:20–24. https://doi.org/10/ cp9x5n Smircich L (1983) Concepts of culture and organizational analysis. Adm Sci Q 28:339–358. https:// doi.org/10.2307/2392246?ref¼no-x-route:31fa20c9446fb7d03c9c88871dc74132 Stern DB (2019) Constructivism in the age of trump: truth, lies, and knowing the difference. Psychoanal Dialogues 29:189–196. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2019.1587996 Su N (2018) Positivist qualitative methods. In: Cassell C, Cunliffe AL, Grandy G (eds) The Sage handbook of qualitative business and management research methods. Sage, Los Angeles et al., pp 17–32

5

Interpretive Inquiry

97

Tsoukas H, Chia R (2002) On organizational becoming: rethinking organizational change. Organ Sci 13:567–582. https://doi.org/10/d32z2j Vaara E, Kleymann B, Seristo H (2004) Strategies as Discursive Constructions: The Case of Airline Alliances. J. Manag. Stud 41:1–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2004.00419.x Vaara E, Whittington R (2012) Strategy-as-practice: taking social practices seriously. Acad Manag Ann 6:285–336. https://doi.org/10/ggvd6b Van Maanen J (1995) Crossroads style as theory. Organ Sci 6:133–143. https://doi.org/10/df6m49 Van Maanen J (2011) Tales of the field: on writing ethnography, 2nd edn. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Van Maanen J, Sørensen JB, Mitchell TR (2007) The interplay between theory and method. Acad Manage Rev 32:1145–1154. https://doi.org/10/dfx87s von Foerster H (2003) Understanding understanding: essays on cybernetics and cognition. Springer, New York et al von Glasersfeld E (2007) Key works in radical constructivism. Sense, Rottterdam Watzlawick P (1983) How real is real?: confusion, disinformation, communication, 1st edn. Souvenir Press, London

6

A Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice Silvia Gherardi

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Epistemology of Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Sociomateriality of Managing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Managing and Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Applications of Humanist Practice Epistemologies in Management and Organization Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

100 101 104 108 111 117 118

Abstract

This chapter illustrates the contribution of practice epistemology to the study of management and organization. It argues that practice theories are particularly suited to answer a simple question: What do managers “do” when they manage? The nature of managerial work is still an open question, and a posthumanist practice theory addresses it by blurring the boundaries between epistemology and ontology. In other words, the researcher’s epistemic practices (and ethics) shape the object of knowledge. A practice epistemology focuses on managerial work as a collective knowledgeable doing, framing managing in relation to sociomateriality and agency achieved within the agencement of practice elements. The chapter illustrates the applications of a humanist and posthumanist practice epistemology in order to show the respective implications on methodology. The challenge of a posthumanist epistemology for future research is seen in terms of inventing postqualitative methods based on the concept of entanglement of human and more-than-human elements.

S. Gherardi (*) University of Trento, Trento, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_53

99

100

S. Gherardi

Keywords

Agencement · Entanglement · Managerial work · Practice epistemology · Sociomateriality

Introduction The aim of this chapter is to introduce a practice epistemology and to illustrate the contribution that a practice approach offers to management and organization studies (MOS). There is a specific theme in MOS on which a practice epistemology contributes a distinctive interpretation: What do managers “do” when they manage? This simple question implies that management practices are as opaque to managers as they are to researchers, and for this reason the description and reflection on the everydayness of practices of managing are a potential means to empower practitioners. It has been already 20 years since MOS rediscovered practice theories, and now contemporary practice theorists are reinterpreting the concept of practice rather than simply returning to classical practice theories. The journal Organization has been a precursor of the turn to practice, since it published, in 2000, a special issue on “Practice-based theorizing on Learning and Knowing in Organizations,” (Gherardi 2000) in which several practice theories are engaged in a conversation about their commonalities in theorizing practice, notwithstanding their different vocabulary and epistemology. Since then, the literature has grown considerably, and several specialized books (Gherardi 2019; Nicolini 2012; Shove et al. 2012) and literature reviews (Erden et al. 2014; Guzman 2013; Jarzabkowski and Spee 2009; Vaara and Whittington 2012) are readily available. At the beginning, it was important to create a bandwagon effect to consolidate what were called “practice-based studies,” and thus internal differences were downplayed. However, now, distinctions can be made, and differences may be appreciated. One relevant line of difference can be drawn between humanist and posthumanist practice approaches. Humanist approaches start from human beings as the main (or only) source of agency and methodologically study “humans and their practices” positioning the material world in relation to, but outside, practice. The so-called second wave of practice theorists (Bourdieu, Foucault, Garfinkel, Giddens, and Schatzki) are still part of a humanist paradigm. Posthumanism (Braidotti 2013) is concerned with overcoming the limits of how our humanness has been theorized in dualist categories that privilege one term over the other (nature/culture, subject/object, mind/body, masculinity/femininity, and so on). A posthumanist practice theory assumes a relational epistemology, thus joining contemporary debates on a family of postepistemologies – new feminist materialisms, relational sociologies, affect theory, and postqualitative methodologies – that blur the boundaries between ontology and epistemology. Following the linguistic turn, once we assume that the nature of objects (ontology) is done through linguistic and discursive practices, then epistemic

6

A Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice

101

practices enact the object of study. The terms onto-epistemology and ethico-ontoepistemology (Barad 2007) signal an approach in which the object of knowledge takes form from epistemic practices, and ethics contribute to form it. In this chapter, I introduce the concept of the epistemology of practice as it made its appearance in 1999 in the work by Cook and Brown, and which was further elaborated in the concept of knowing-in-practice. Following this first section, the chapter discusses management as a collective knowledgeable doing and later focuses on the sociomateriality and agency of managing. The chapter continues with an illustration of different applications of practice epistemology, both within a humanist and a posthumanist approach, and concludes by discussing the challenges that a posthumanist practice epistemology poses to future research.

The Epistemology of Practice The categorization of what constitutes “managerial work” has always been a controversial topic, and assuming a historical perspective it is possible to see how, since the 1950s, there have been four broad research approaches to understanding managerial work that differ substantially in both analytical subjects and methodological orientation: “essence of management”; “categorisation of behaviours”; “power; conflict and control”; and “meaningful ordinary activity” (Korica et al. 2017). Despite the attention to and the centrality of the discourse on managerial work, the empirical practices of managerial work have too frequently been analyzed via the same set of dominant categories, and thus ordinary managerial activities, in their processual, material, relational, and historical dimensions, have often been overlooked. Practice-based studies, on the contrary, are theoretically well positioned to focus on the everydayness and creativity of managerial work and are positioned “as promising means of addressing some of the short-comings of existing approaches, aimed at facilitating the making of novel connections” (Korica et al. 2017, p. 152). Therefore, managerial work may be framed as a practiced craft whose knowledge is developed and kept within situated practices of managing. Within MOS, interest for studying everyday practices originated in a pervasive dissatisfaction with abstract descriptions and prescriptions of work and a need to know how work “really” takes place. Working practices were therefore individuated as the realm of everyday life. There was a dual motivation: (i) to study real activities as they are being performed, and (ii) to pin down slippery knowledge somehow circulating within a community of practitioners and located within a certain way of practicing. The epistemology of practice made its appearance in MOS as the “other” to an epistemology of possession. While an epistemology of possession treats knowledge as something an individual (or an organization) has, an epistemology of practice stresses that not all of what is known is captured by this understanding of knowledge, and there is more epistemic work being done in what we know how to do that cannot be accounted for in terms of the knowledge possessed. Thus, knowledge and

102

S. Gherardi

knowing are interrelated, and knowing and doing are not temporally separated. Cook and Brown (1999, p. 382) give a telling example: To say, for example, “Robert is fixing cars” points not only to knowledge he possesses but also to things he is doing. To give an account of what Robert knows, we claim, calls for an understanding of the epistemic work done, which needs to include both the knowledge he possesses and the actions he carries out.

In this example, we can notice how the epistemology of possession (knowledge) does not contradict an epistemology of practice (knowing), and both knowledge and knowing constitute what is called epistemic work: Both are “done” while “fixing cars.” The knowledge is used in action and the knowing as part of action form what Cook and Brown (1999, p. 383) call a generative dance: “the source of new knowledge and knowing lies in the use of knowledge as a tool of knowing within situated interaction in the social and physical world.” It is worth noting that traditional epistemology has been mainly concerned with knowledge as possession, thus omitting the practical matter of knowing. As Rescher (2003, p. xvii) writes: we have not only the (trivial) circumstance that knowledge is required for effective practice, but also the reverse, that practical and pragmatic considerations are crucially at work in the way in which human knowledge comes to be secured.

Hence, not only knowledge is indispensably useful for practicing, but also knowledge development is itself a practice in which knowledge is constituted and validated. Epistemology of practice offers a rationale for looking at managerial work as collective and knowledgeable doing. First, it introduces a new conception of knowledge as an activity, rather than as an object (Gherardi 2019). Second, it connects management with the corpus of knowledge that has been socially and historically elaborated and will be further elaborated while being practiced. Here we can appreciate the epistemological move from knowledge as a noun to knowing as a verb, and the displacement of knowledge from the cognitive domain to the domain of performativity. This change from noun to verb entails a process approach to knowing. Moreover, the collective activity of knowing takes place in situated practices, and, in practicing, the social and historical knowledgeability of management as a practice domain is performed. Along with the shift from knowledge to knowing, an epistemology of practice assumes the shift from management to managing. In moving from the noun to the verb, we also move from issues of ontology (what management is) to issues of epistemology (how management is done) to issues of onto-epistemology, that is, how the researcher’s language and epistemic practices construct management as an object of inquiry. As the term onto-epistemology (Barad 2003) signals the inseparability of ontology from epistemology, the move described here implies that the researcher focuses their attention not only on what managers “do” but also on how

6

A Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice

103

their epistemic apparatuses for noticing what managers “do” become part of the object under study. To fully understand this change in the nature of knowledge, we can recall the concept of situated knowledge as formulated by Donna Haraway (1988) in feminist studies and by Lucy Suchman (1987) in relation to situated action. The expression “situated knowledge” comes from the feminist critique of knowledge “from nowhere,” a critique to what that Donna Haraway (1991, p. 193) calls “ways of being nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively.” It is therefore necessary to replace this claim of universal knowledge with “views from somewhere,” with a located accountability (Suchman 1994) and with partial, locatable, and critical knowledges. Knowledge always has to do with circumscribed domains, not with transcendence and a subject/object dichotomy. Moreover, one of the reasons for assuming practice as the unit of analysis (instead of structures or agencies) is to overcome the dichotomy between knowing and doing. Therefore, situated knowledge is entangled with situated action. Lucy Suchman (1987), in her book significantly entitled Plans and Situated Action, affirms that plans – as something located in the actor’s head, and which directs their behavior – should not be confused with situated actions. Before action, plans have only a predictive or organizational purpose; after action, plans serve to justify the actions undertaken. In contrast, to illustrate the distinction between management as a plan and management as a situated action, we can refer to Suchman’s example of “canoeing down a river.” Before setting off, the canoeist may plan a course for descending the river, but when they reach the rapids, they set the plan aside and resort to all their skills to act in context and succeed in the respective task. Hence a plan is an ingredient of practical action, in the sense that it is an artifact that helps one to reason on the action, but it is not a mechanism generative of the action. Therefore, framing managing as situated action means considering the organization of the action as emerging in situ from the dynamic of interactions. Central to the paradigm of situated action is a revised conception of context as no longer a container of action but a situation in which the interests of the actors involved and the opportunities in the environment meet and are reciprocally defined. Therefore, of central importance in studying managing are interactions with others, situated communication, the construction of situations, the relationship with the physical environment and the objects in it, and especially the idea that these elements are “held together” and express a contingent, practical logic embedded in the situation. A field of inquiry that has contributed significantly to the debate on the logic of practice (Lave and Gomes 2019) is education studies. It has provided evidence that abstract knowledge is not transferable to the real world, and that there is a substantial difference between knowing in everyday situations and decontextualized knowing. This means that abstract knowledge acquired through management education is by nature different from managerial knowing-in-practice. The challenge posed by the concept of situated knowledge to MOS is illustrated in the exemplary articles by Sandberg and Tsoukas (2011) and Vaara and Whittington (2012). According to the former, management theories are not relevant

104

S. Gherardi

to practice since they are formulated within the framework of scientific rationality, which is profoundly different from practical (i.e., situated) rationality. The main point of difference is, unlike the logic of science, the logic of practice is based on the fact that the primordial mode of human engagement with a practice is being-in-theworld, where the epistemological subject/object separation is blurred. These authors’ argument is driven by a strong motivation to rediscover practice theories and thus move away from traditional epistemology. The latter article, by Vaara and Whittington (2012), is representative of the literature on strategy-as-practice but also critiques it by arguing that it has not realized its full potential. Initially focused on practices at top management level, this literature is yet to recognize that its strength lies in the practice perspective, especially through its illustration of how practices are embedded in broader societal or macroinstitutional contexts. Examined through the lens of situated knowing, management practices are described in relation to situated actions, situated knowledges, and situated embodiment, whereby managers are not the central source from which knowledgeable doings come, but rather, they are sociomaterially situated, with their embodiment differentially marked by gender, race, class, age, sexual orientation, and all other possible power signifiers. The collapse of boundaries between the human and the more-than-human, the animate and the inanimate, proposes a shift from social to ecological epistemology – according to Hughes and Lury (2013) – to account for how we live in relation to a more- and other-than-human world. An ecological epistemology is necessarily process oriented, focused on how things change rather than how things are, so it requires a nonessentialist understanding of the identity of things, in which it is relations between an entity and its environment that are constitutive of what something is and what it can be. In this section, in order to introduce what is specific about the onto-epistemology of practice, a conception of managerial work as practiced craft, based on situated knowledge, situated action, and situated embodiment, is mobilized. This emphasizes how a practice ecological epistemology not only renders problematic the dualist conceptions of subject/object, nature/culture, human/nonhuman, and life/nonlife, but also frames theoretically the relationship between management, sustainability, and inclusivity as a practice phenomenon. In other words, management practices are not only concerned with what managers “do,” but also with the consequences of their “doings,” and thus responsible managing is inscribed within situated practices of responsibility, sustainability, and ethics (Price et al. 2020). The following section focuses on the fact that managing, as a collective knowledgeable doing, is accomplished in a material world, with artifacts and technologies being regarded as sociomaterial.

The Sociomateriality of Managing The study of managing as an ongoing practical accomplishment entails the idea that managers are not the only nor the main source of meaning, action, or knowledge. Rather, managers too are performed within materially heterogeneous practices,

6

A Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice

105

including documents, devices, people, discourses, buildings, and money. Thus, “managers” and “organizations” are the effects of organizing practices rather than its source. This shift from entities that have agency to relations that perform entities is at the core of any practice theory as the principle of a relational thinking (Østerlund and Carlile 2005, p. 92) that “is neither a theory nor a method in itself, but rather, a loosely structured framework or scaffold around which various practice theories and methods are being developed.” For illustrating how the collapse of the divide between humans and nonhumans, material and discursive, has consequences for a relational epistemology of practice, let us refer to the principle of symmetry between humans and nonhumans, which has its roots in Actor-Network Theory and its relational epistemology (Law 1992). A relational epistemology, namely one that prioritizes the ever-evolving “relations” over “entities,” is present (albeit in different nuances) in most of the current posthumanist conversations that seek to de-center the human subject and in the new (feminist) materialisms that question the notion of agency. While many kinds of distinctions can be drawn within the family of new materialisms, they all have in common a “turn to matter” and a focus on social production rather than social construction. While social construction focuses on the role of language in the interpretation and shaping of phenomena, social production focuses on their material production. The term “new” in new materialisms is intended to differentiate these perspectives from the “old” historical materialisms, rejecting the earlier materialism’s deterministic explanations of social action. According to Fox and Alldred (2017, pp. 2–3), among the radical claims of new materialist theorists – are the propositions that: (i) the material world and its contents are not fixed, stable entities, but relational, uneven processes in constant flux; (ii) “nature” and “culture” should not to be treated as distinct realms but as parts of a continuum of materiality; and (iii) a capacity for “agency,” i.e., the actions that produce the social world, extend, beyond human actors, to the nonhuman and inanimate. Posthumanist practice theory takes part in the ongoing conversation among Actor-Network Theory, Affect theory, performativity, and sociomateriality. Sociomateriality is a key research topic in MOS, following in the footsteps of socio-technical literature, which has established an interest in connecting the social with the technological since the 1970s. The concept of sociomateriality also has a long history in the study of working practices connected to information systems (Cecez-Kecmanovic et al. 2014) and in education studies (Fenwick et al. 2015). Within these fields of research, “the material” in sociomateriality is mainly technological but not only. In new feminist materialisms, for instance, “the material” and the “vibrant matter” are connected to the body, embodiment, and intercorporeality (Bennett 2010). The two ways to grasp sociomateriality (via technology and, respectively, corporeality) do not contradict each other: It is important to consider both at the same time, in their relationality and in the intimacy that many technologies establish with the interior of all bodies and their functioning. The physical “matter” of the body, its material-discursive production, its sensible knowing, and its choreography of becoming are all instances of embodiment as irreducibly material, social, and emplaced in practices.

106

S. Gherardi

Embodiment is in fact a key concept in practice theories. Reich and Hager (2014) consider it one of the six threads of the literature on practice – the others being: knowing-in-practice, sociomateriality of practices, relationality, historical and social shaping of practices, and the emergent nature of practices. The term “sociomateriality” was introduced into organization studies by (Orlikowski 2007, 2010) in reference to the feminist onto-epistemology of Barad (2003), and by Orlikowski and Scott (Orlikowski and Scott 2008; Scott and Orlikowski 2014). These authors use the concepts of “entanglement” and “generative entanglement” and adopt a relational ontology akin to the relational materialism discussed by Law (1992) and the performativity assumed by Actor-Network Theory. These concepts indicate that, within managing, meaning, and matter, the social and the technological are inseparable and do not have inherently determinate boundaries and properties. They are constituted as relational effects performed in a texture of situated managing practices. Sociomateriality can be understood in different ways. Based on a literature review of the 140 journal articles where sociomateriality has been discussed since 2007, Jones (2014) distinguishes between strong and weak sociomateriality. Strong sociomateriality implies materiality, inseparability, relationality, performativity, and practices – in other words, all aspects discussed by Orlikowski (2010). In contrast, weak sociomateriality takes, selectively, only some of those concepts. MOS literature also distinguishes between sociomateriality as entanglement of the social and the material, on the one hand, and materiality as imbricated in human practices, on the other hand. The metaphor of imbrication, as in the overlapping of tiles (Leonardi 2013), is based on a substantialist ontology whereby imbrication of the social and the material is used to treat a technological artifact’s materiality as something that exists apart from the people who create and use it. This contrasts with the concept of “entanglement,” where the separation between subject and object disappears. The theme of materiality is, in effect, the watershed between two different strands of practice theory – namely, between human-centered theories and posthumanist perspectives. For the former, materiality is something that mediates human activities and is external to practice, whereas for the other it is viewed as constitutive of practice, thus overcoming the dualism between the social and the material. According to Barad (2007), to be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, selfcontained existence. This author defines her epistemological position as agential realism: . . .as an epistemological-ontological-ethical framework that provides an understanding of the role of human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other social-material practices, thereby moving such considerations beyond the well-worn debates that pit constructivism against realism, agency against structure, and idealism against materialism. (Barad 2007, p. 26)

Hence, reality is defined as things-in-phenomena and not as things-in-themselves. In fact, “phenomena” are considered as the primary ontological units, recalling Bohr’s

6

A Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice

107

definition of phenomena as observations under specific circumstances that include an account of the whole experimental arrangement. In the absence of a given apparatus, there is no unambiguous way to differentiate between the object and the agencies of observation: An apparatus must be introduced to resolve the ambiguity, but then the apparatus must be understood as part of what is being described. Both Haraway and Barad’s works are reflections on epistemic practices, and both talk of a way of knowing in which the knower is not external or preexisting to the world; rather, the knower and “things” do not preexist their interactions but emerge through, and as part of, their material-discursive intrarelating. Also, the contemporary debate on new materialisms reminds us that materiality is always more than matter: It is an excessive energy, a vitality, and a relationality that makes matter active in what happens within a practice (Coole and Frost, 2010). These assumptions allow us to reformulate the notion of agency and to transcend the duality of social versus material agency, human versus more-than-human agency, and material versus discursive agency. An illustration of empirical research engaged with sociomateriality is Tuana’s (2008, p. 188) case study of Hurricane Katrina, which describes the “urgency of embracing an ontology that rematerializes the social and takes seriously the agency of the natural” (emphasis in the original). This natural disaster made New Orleans visible as a complex material-semiotic site. Historically, in order to create usable land, water was pumped out of the area, which in turn caused the ground to sink even lower. The sediments added by the Mississippi River created areas of “natural levees” that transformed the local geology and hydrology. This example shows how local geology and hydrology emerge from complex social vectors: Human consumption and re-use practices resulted in altered flora habitats, which in turn altered human interests. Material agency, in its heterogeneous forms, interacted in complex ways. In all these instances, agency was not an antecedent to but emerged from the situated interactions. The viscous porosity between human and nonhumans also occurred at deeper levels into the urban habitat of New Orleans: The hurricane left the city flooded in a “toxic soup” as water reached toxic waste sites in the so-called “Cancer Alley” corridor, where many types of industry clustered together with support from government policies. Tuana (ibid, p. 199) describes the viscous porosity between plastic industries and “my flesh and the flesh of the world,” emphasizing that the flesh made visible by Hurricane Katrina was the flesh of the poverty, the racialized world, and the disability that suddenly appeared in the media and had hitherto been prevented or denied. The author interprets this flesh made visible as the materialization of ignorance. In fact, the epistemic practices of the researchers involved in studying Katrina contributed to produce the phenomenon “Katrina.” Tuana (2008, p. 196) advises that: our epistemic practices must thus be attuned to this manifold agency and emergent interplay, which means that we cannot be epistemically responsible and divide the humanities from the sciences, or the study of culture from the study of nature.

108

S. Gherardi

Furthermore, the Katrina phenomenon tells us something about managing and its agency within a texture of past and present practices – and about how, in studying management, epistemic analysis cannot be separated from ethical analysis, since the researchers’ theoretical categories are enacted in social practices and are responsible for what they conceal as well as what they reveal.

Managing and Agency As previously mentioned, a managerial practice (be it a human relation or a risk communication practice, the adoption of a new information system, or a new strategic plan) may be conceived of as a collective knowledgeable doing, whereby “the collective” is made up of entanglements of humans and nonhumans (including more-than-human, more-than-living beings) working together. This section introduces the notions of normativity and agencement to describe how all the practice elements hold together in a way that is recognized as belonging to the practice of managing and that is socially sustained (ethically, esthetically, and emotionally) as the appropriate “way of doing things together.” According to Rouse (2007, p. 653), practices are a source of normativity because they are constituted in terms of the mutual accountability of their constituent performances: Normativity involves a complex pattern of interrelations among performances through time. Such performances are normative when they are directed toward one another as mutually accountable to common stakes, albeit stakes whose correct formulation is always at issue within the practice.

Normativity is thus an answer to the question of what keeps “a” practice together and/or more practices waved together into a texture of practices. Another way of framing this question is to ask how agency is achieved by a practice, or how a practice becomes performative, given that being a human subject is not a precondition for agency. The process of agencement illustrates how those elements, within a practice or within a texture of practices, connect and acquire agency through their connectedness. Hence, a practice is not viewed as a unit circumscribed by given boundaries and constituted by defined elements but rather as a connection-in-action, that is, as an agencement (Gherardi 2016) of elements which achieve agency by being interconnected. Agencement is a word currently used in French as a synonym for “arrangement,” “fitting,” or “fixing,” and it has been used as a philosophical term by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) with the meaning of “in connection with.” For Deleuze and Guattari, a philosophical concept never operates in isolation but comes to its sense through the connection with other senses. This meaning of “being in connection with” gives a first good approximation of the term. The problem, however, is its translation into English as “assemblage,” which has changed the original meaning. The meaning in use in English is thus different, and there is a tension implied in the

6

A Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice

109

respective uses of the term assemblage (as a final state) and agencement (as the process of connecting). While the English term assemblage may be used to refer to final or stable states, thus emphasizing “thingness,” the French term agencement works as an evocation of agency, emergence, and heterogeneity, thus emphasizing process and dynamics. In empirical research, the concept of agencement has been applied in relation to financial markets by Hardie and MacKenzie (2007, p. 77): a hedge fund is a legal entity, and the law of contract attributes agency to it, not to the individuals who comprise it: the trader may speak or type the words, but it is the fund, not him as individual, which makes a deal and takes on a commitment.

An economic actor illustrates well the ambivalent meaning of the term agencement, since this individual is “an actor” in the sense of a sociotechnical assemblage and, at the same time, he or she has agence, in the process-dynamic sense of agency. Similarly, when we look at a practice, we can see how the sociomaterial relations that tie bodies, artifacts, discourses, technologies, and rules together are performed within it, and how agency emerges as its effect. Another example of applying the concept of agencement is Callon et al. (2013) collection of studies on “marketization” (agencement marchand), which has opened up a wide discussion of this concept. Marketization is the effect of the dynamics of agencement marchand, and it is part of a larger process of economization. Beside the web of connections producing marketization, there are other forms of agencement, i.e., scientific, technological, political, and organizational. We can also study the failures of agencement, the process of its wear and tear, its maintenance, and its alternatives. If we describe managing as the process of agencement of heterogeneous materials, we can say that all the resources necessary for practicing are the elements of what is connected. It is difficult to enumerate all the elements that come in connection within a practice, since a resource for practicing becomes a resource only within an assemblage of relationships. The concept of agencement can prove useful for a practice-based study of managing because, in studying a practice, the researcher may empirically follow and describe the process whereby humans, artifacts, rules, technologies, sensible knowledge, legitimacy, discourses, and any other practice resource become connected due to a collective knowledgeable doing. At the same time, any single and situated practice is connected to other practices, and it is the process of agencement itself that makes a texture of practices agential. When studying the process of managing, both materiality and the process of construction matter, since multiple realities may be enacted through different spacings, timings, and actings. The challenge is to produce narratives of agencements that capture the materiality, the passions and beliefs, the practices of attraction, and engagement within these complex nests of associations. The advantage of using the concept of agencement in a posthumanist practice theory of managing is in the reformulation of agency as the outcome of the process of establishing associations and material-discursive relationships from which humans and nonhumans emerge,

110

S. Gherardi

since they (humans and nonhumans) are not a sort of a priori with respect to their associations. We can now inquire into how the entangled elements within an agencement either change or persist or, more generally, flow into their becoming, into their being practiced. We have two concepts that may interpret this process: formativeness and affect, which will be discussed further below. But first, it should be noted that one of the main concerns of the study of managing as situated working practices is to discern the situated logic of the agencement connecting the inner intra-actions of the elements of these working practices and, on this basis, to prefigure the performance of the practice as an ongoing accomplishment. Knowing-in-practice is a contingent ordering of provisional connections, the effect of the ability of practitioners to find their bearings using the context as a resource and to articulate the matter of the world (objects, artifacts, technologies, and discourses) within a form. In order to see how materiality is embedded in an ongoing project and to investigate the process whereby doing and knowing unite into a form, we can turn to organizational esthetics (Strati 1999), and particularly to Pareyson’s (1960) concept of formativeness, which influences the philosophical foundations of materiality. Formativeness is defined as “a doing” such that, while it does, it invents the “way of doing.” Thus, “simultaneously invented in doing is the “way of doing”: realization is only achieved by proceeding to the result by trial and error, thus producing works that are forms” (Pareyson 1960, vi). Forming also implies a relationship with materiality, i.e., forming a material, and the resulting work is nothing other than formed material. In the process of the formation of matter, the work also acts as a former, i.e., creator of forms, even before it exists as formed, i.e., created form. Formativeness illustrates how, in knowing-in-practice, practitioners develop and invent new ways of establishing connections, and in this process, the agencement of the practice elements is transformed, reconnected, or just dis-connected: They are always in flux. When the researcher is interested in understanding the becoming of managing, the term “formativeness” can be used to describe how the object in the process of managing is formed and how, in its forming, the necessary knowledge is invented and deployed. Moreover, the concept of affect can be used to describe the force in motion that is mobilized to form the object. All matter within an agencement, be it human and nonhuman, is vital and has the capacity to affect and be affected (Massumi 2017). Therefore, how an agencement’s different capacities are produced depends on how the connections within a practice are formed and changed. Affect theory contributes to practice theory by elaborating a notion of affect as an energetic stream. To say that affect is an energetic stream is to insist on a force in motion even while speaking of “it” as a noun. As a verb, affect moves in a few ways. First, it touches and changes bodies, stirring them to feel, become, and do (Kuhn et al. 2017, p. 60). To think and talk of practice as an affective space (Gherardi 2017; Reckwitz 2017) is a recent and promising theme in practice theories.

6

A Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice

111

Applications of Humanist Practice Epistemologies in Management and Organization Studies For a more comprehensive overview of the applications of a practice epistemology to the field of MOS, let us consider here both humanist and posthumanist epistemologies, highlighting their differences and points of contact. Three streams of practice-based studies (phenomenological, pragmatist, and strategy-as-practice) have a humanist epistemology in common, since their point of departure is the human subject (albeit in different ways). Some empirical studies exemplifying each of these streams are discussed below. A simple and clear illustration of how phenomenology has influenced practicebased studies may be found in Sandberg and Tsoukas (2011), where they contend that most management theories are unable to capture the logic of practice because they are developed within the framework of scientific rationality. In order to delineate a framework for the logic of practice, they refer to Heidegger’s (1996) existential ontology, in which being-in-the-world, which is our entwinement with the world, comes before the subject-object separation. The latter becomes possible only insofar the ontological priority of being-in-the-world is assumed. Therefore, what constitutes the logic of practice is not the epistemological subject/object relation but the entwinement of ourselves, others, and things in a relational whole, in the sense that we are always already engaged in specific practices. The mode of engagement in a practice (whether absorbed coping, involved thematic deliberation, or theoretical detachment) is the main criterion for interpreting the logic of practice. Practitioners’ primary mode of engagement is absorbed coping, and only when their absorbed coping is significantly disrupted, practitioners shift to one of the two other modes, both of which are characterized, in varying degrees, by the nature of their subjectobject relation. When the disturbance is a temporary breakdown, practitioners shift to the involved thematic deliberation mode: Their relational whole comes into view, and they pay deliberate attention to what they do, while remaining practically involved in the task at hand. When the disturbance is more serious and takes the form of a complete breakdown, practitioners switch to theoretical detachment. Through this change in the mode of engagement, the entwined logic of practice becomes concealed, and instead, practice presents itself as an array of discrete entities with specific abstract properties (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2011, pp. 344– 345). On this basis, the authors delineate two strategies of research on the logic of practice: search for entwinement, and search for breakdowns. An empirical study that illustrates the phenomenological approach is O’Leary and Sandberg (2017), which focuses on how managers manage diversity in practice. The authors suggest that what defines the practice of managing diversity is not primarily diversity activities but rather people’s understandings, i.e., the meanings people attribute to “diversity” and “managing diversity.” Here, understanding is seen not as a cognitive activity but as an embodied skill or capacity that underlies and organizes activities into specific work performances. Nevertheless, in a practice

112

S. Gherardi

approach, the unit of analysis is not represented by activities or understandings but by the performance of the practice, that is, by how understandings and activities are enacted in practice. Therefore, the authors frame their research by asking: What understandings and activities are involved in managers’ practices of managing diversity, and how are they related in managers’ performances of managing diversity? In their methodology, they apply the practice perspective in conjunction with phenomenography as an interpretive approach. Phenomenography aspires to identify and describe people’s qualitatively different ways of understanding a given aspect of reality as faithfully as possible in order to better understand human practices in relation to this aspect of reality. Managers’ practices of managing diversity are constituted by four varying managerial understandings of managing diversity: identity blind, assimilation, inclusive differentiation, and equitable transformation. These four understandings of managing diversity distinguish and organize the core diversity activities (sourcing, interacting, designing jobs, and developing careers) into four different and increasingly comprehensive ways of managing diversity. These are hierarchically related, and increasingly effective, ways of performing managing diversity. This study focuses both on the description of ways of understanding and on the performance of the practice in terms of efficiency. The second approach in humanist practice theories is inspired by the classical philosophical tradition of pragmatism. Pragmatism has influenced practice-based studies (Buch and Schatzki 2018; Simpson 2009; Višňovský 2018), and also organization studies in general (Lorino 2018). It is mainly in reference to management education that a pragmatist practice theory has been developed, following Dewey’s definition of education as a deliberately conducted practice. Dewey’s ontology, abolishing the traditional dualism of nature as object and human as subject, captures the human condition through the concept of experience. Given that pragmatism was born out of a critique of Cartesian dualism, representationalism, and abstraction from experience, here experience is defined as an ultimate reality involving life and history. There is nothing for humans other than their experience within nature and nature within experience. Experience and nature continually intertwine, intersect, and mingle into each other “by means of organic and social interactions” (Dewey 1981/1929, viii, cited in Višňovský 2018, p. 38). Experience and inquiry (a method for constructing knowledge in a systematic way from experience), experimentalism, and instrumentalism are the main concepts that frame a pragmatist practice theory. These concepts cannot be taken apart, and their relation is established as follows: inquiry is an experimental method by which new experiences may be acquired not only through action but also by using ideas, concepts, hypotheses, and theories as “tools to think with” in an instrumental way. (Brandi and Elkjaer 2016, p. 199)

The contemporary imprint of pragmatism on management education is illustrated by Brandi and Elkjaer (2016) through a review of the most influential journals on management education. Also, on the basis of their own experience as teachers, the authors summarize the meaning of a pragmatist approach to management education

6

A Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice

113

practices in the following way: (i) all educational aspirations begin with an emotional sense that “something is not right”; (ii) a pragmatist perspective on management education includes an experimental, playful way in which inquiry into uncertain situations is the point of departure for having an experience that may be turned into knowledge through its infusion with ideas and concepts to make experience meaningful and communicable; and (iii) the transformation of an uncertain situation that triggers inquiry is dependent on the modification or change of the existing experience, and this transformation can only happen through experimentation with different solutions in the world. The authors’ suggestion for translating these principles into managerial education practices is to work with these felt “reallife” uncertainties and draw on an embodied concept of learning (which includes emotion and cognition), as well as the concepts of knowledge as open-ended (fallible), ethics (i.e., making organizations “better” places to work in), and politics (i.e., acknowledging that power “games” are always an inherent part of organizations). The authors show how a pragmatist practice theory takes a point of departure not in managers but “in management practicing organizational management practices” (p. 203). Phenomenological and pragmatist interpretations of practice theory are deeply grounded in a philosophical understanding of practice in which entwinement and experience are, respectively, the core concepts. In both concepts, the distinctions subject/object and culture/nature are somehow blurred, thus bringing them nearer to the concept of entanglement that is central to a posthumanist practice theory. The third stream of humanist practice-based studies, namely strategy as practice (SAP), although it has a different origin, is mentioned here for its high relevance to studying empirically what strategists actually do when they “do strategy.” SAP constitutes what Sandberg and Tsoukas (2015) call a domain-specific practice theory. The beginnings of SAP are simply about an understanding of strategy in analogy with practice, while the focus and the aim were to contribute to a renewal of strategy studies rather than practice theories. Therefore, many practice approaches have been indifferently applied to empirical research on practitioners’ activities: activity theory, structuration theory, ethnomethodology, sensemaking, or just atheoretical approaches. When the field expanded, the need for taking practice theory seriously was felt more deeply (Vaara and Whittington 2012). Historically, SAP’s primary audience have been strategic management scholars, attracted by the capacity of SAP research to bring in new theoretical resources and to go beyond the strategy discipline’s usual focus on economic performance per se. SAP has broadened the scope of organizational types in strategy research and has mobilized a variety of qualitative methods that were almost disregarded in this field of inquiry. By drawing primarily on sociological theories of practice rather than economic theories, SAP research aims to reveal a variety of practices that have significant enabling and constraining effects on strategy-making. Their research offers an alternative to the individualistic models of decision-making that still dominate the field of strategic management. Moreover, in contrast with the prescriptive ethos of the discipline, by putting practices and practitioners at the center of research, SAP promises to assist the MOS

114

S. Gherardi

quest for practical relevance, by emphasizing that the field’s relevance is not automatic but may be considerably enhanced only by close engagement with practitioners, for instance, through action research and collaboration. In a call for taking practice theory seriously, Vaara and Wittington (Vaara and Whittington 2012, p. 287) have identified five directions of research: to go further in analyzing how agency is constituted in a web of social practices; to increase attention to broader societal practices, rather than just organizational ones; to analyze strategic emergence alongside deliberate planning; to further explore the role of material artifacts, technology, and the body in strategy-making; and, finally, to encourage critical analyses within SAP. Applications of Posthumanist Practice Epistemologies in Management and Organization Studies There are both similarities and differences between humanist and posthumanist practice epistemologies. In highlighting the core concepts of entwinement and experience, a line of continuity should be drawn, through which the divide of subject and object, culture and nature, is already questioned. While humanist practice theories have been influenced by Heidegger and Dewey’s late-1920s philosophies, the debates in philosophy itself have moved on to support more relational epistemologies. Although in a sense indebted to the past debates, the concept of entanglement should be positioned in contemporary philosophy and contemporary practice theories, which contribute to reevaluating everyday life and the mundane. Here are some examples of empirical research in which subject/object, human/ nonhuman, material/social, material/semiotic, and other dichotomous pairings have been considered entangled and not separated. The aim is to illustrate how a practice can be seen as an agencement that processually achieves agency through relations of connections and disconnections, and through their capacity to affect and be affected. A classic example is the study by Orlikowski (2007) on the introduction of BlackBerry. This study shows how communication changes that happened at Plymouth emerged from the performativity of technology when it became involved in members’ everyday practices. It was not that the material features of the BlackBerry (technology itself) had a social impact, or that the material affordances of mobile communication allowed more efficient communication. Rather, the performativity of this technology was sociomaterial, and sociomateriality emerged when it entered situated practices. As Orlikowski (2007, p. 1444) concludes: the “push email” capability inscribed into the software running on the servers has become entangled with people’s choices and activities to keep devices turned on, to carry them at all times, to glance at them repeatedly, and to respond to email regularly.

Another study by Janssens and Steyaert (2019), regarding managing diversity, can be compared with O’Leary and Sandberg (2017)‘s approach, to highlight the different methodological choices following different practice epistemologies. Starting from the assumption that behind all the apparently durable features of

6

A Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice

115

organizations (like horizontal and vertical segregation) there is some type of productive and reproductive work, the authors of both studies develop a practice-based theory of diversity in which the particular social order of an organization is constantly accomplished through the enactment of practices and their connections in space and time. However, they offer two different examples of why this is the case. The former focuses on mentoring practices and raises the crucial question of how one should understand why inequality in a diverse organization may persist despite the implementation of a formal, traditional diversity management program. The latter starts from the social order of a diverse organization that can be meaningfully understood as an order of equality and then proceeds to investigate how equality is accomplished through situated practice. By way of example, we can better understand how Janssens and Steyaert’s study was conducted by emphasizing its three steps: i) observing career mentoring in situ to identify how it is accomplished in embodied, material, and discursive ways; ii) tracing connections between the here-and-now of the situated practicing and the elsewhere-and-then of other practices; and iii) theorizing the reproduction of inequality. Thus, the authors conclude that: taken together, this study explains how, in this organization, the enduring unequal position of black women and men is the result of a particular kind of accomplishment of career mentoring, connected to decision making and leadership practices that together co-constitute a site of a hierarchical, masculine, and racialized realm. (Janssens and Steyaert 2019, p. 527)

Another example of posthumanist practice epistemology may be found in the reinterpretation of sensemaking by Hultin and Mähring (2017, p. 566), who propose an alternative to the traditional view of sensemaking as episodic, cognitivediscursive practice enacted within and between separate human actors. In these authors’ interpretation of sensemaking as performative, what makes sense is understood as a material-discursive practice and related subject positions, which owing to their specific positioning in the circulating flow of agency emerge as sensible. Consequently, every actor is not just making sense, but is also already being made sense of; positioning and being positioned in the flow of agency.

This empirical research employs ethnographic methods to study the flow of agency through the emergency ward at a Nordic university hospital. The authors illustrate, through the concept of entanglement, how agency is interpreted as a temporal flow, always inheriting from previous practices and imparting to subsequent practices. Their analysis focuses on the specific ways in which agency flows through materialdiscursive practices, on the enactment of consequential differences within this flow, and on how the researchers’ epistemic practices are entangled in this flow, thus playing a part in enacting the differences. This contribution is relevant for understanding managing within an agencement, since it points to agency as the circulation of a force connecting elements and activities. What the authors call “flow of agency” may be reinterpreted as the flow of affect, as the capacity of affecting and being

116

S. Gherardi

affected that connects humans, nonhumans, discourses, and knowledges within a practice. We also find examples of MOS empirical research focusing on the circulation of affect. One such study is Katila et al. (2019), which is conducted in the context of institutional work in entrepreneurial identity and is of interest for its methodology for researching the identity construction of “the manager” in situated managerial practices. The authors examined how the identity of the start-up entrepreneur is constructed within the continuous sociomaterial entangling that creates meanings and affective sensations as well as identifications with these meanings and sensations. The capability of sociomaterial entanglements to generate identification with the institution of start-up entrepreneurship is intensified through three characteristics: (i) multisensority (affectual sensations that stimulate attachment of the individual to the issues at hand), (ii) temporal multidimensionality (sociomaterial entanglements drawing from the past while simultaneously reaching toward the future), and (iii) the dynamics of equality and exceptionality building that create uniqueness and differentiation from others. In sum, under the umbrella term of practice-based studies, several epistemologies live side by side, and their core concepts – entwinement, experience, and entanglement – share a line of continuity but also imply methodological differences, as I illustrated in the previous two sections. Conclusion: The Challenge of Future Research This chapter has illustrated the epistemology of practice-based studies by discussing managerial work as “managing” within situated practices. It has discussed how different practice epistemologies cohabit under the umbrella term of practice-based studies, and how their core concepts (entwinement for scholars influenced by phenomenology, experience for those influenced by pragmatism, and entanglement for those influenced by posthumanism) articulate the relation between subject and object. The human subject may be positioned at center stage and external to the practice under study or internal to the practice at hand and in a symmetrical positioning with materiality, discursivity, and the researchers’ epistemic concepts and research apparatus. Therefore, in this chapter, two interpretations are given to the notion of epistemology of practice: a humanistic one, centered on “humans and their practices,” and a posthumanistic one, in which humans, nonhumans, and discourses are not independent realities with well-defined properties but are constitutive entanglements enacted in practice. When a practice is conceived as an agencement of entangled entities, this agencement unfolds through the entities’ capacity to affect and be affected. In assuming practice as the unit of analysis at the place of humans and their intentional actions, practice theories may contribute to a wider critique of humanist anthropocentrism (as a paradigmatic frame of separation) and of world domination by the Man of Reason. In last century’s philosophy, an initial critique of humanistic categories was undertaken through phenomenology, pragmatism, and the rediscovery of flesh and embodiment. In contemporary philosophies, posthumanism has become more radical, and several conversations (under the labels of relational

6

A Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice

117

epistemology, new materialisms, actor-network sensibilities, affect, and performativity) are taking place. Posthumanist practice theory is one of the voices in this conversation, and this chapter argues that it is a promising voice for future research. A posthumanist approach blurs the boundaries between theory and method, and in a posthumanist epistemology humans are neither center stage nor separated from nonhumans, the environment, the world, and the researchers’ epistemic apparatus. From this point onward, future research is becoming quite challenging because the concept of entanglement renders problematical certain categories of humanist qualitative research – such as “data,” “interview,” “voice,” and the “I” (Lather and St. Pierre 2013; Benozzo and Gherardi 2020). Postqualitative methodologies raise an interesting question: How do we individuate a “research problem” in the agencement of diverse elements that are constantly intra-acting, never stable, and never the same? A posthumanist practice epistemology is well positioned for answering this question in the context of the empirical study of practices. To illustrate this point, I mention only a couple of exemplary articles. First, Resch and Steyaert (2020) employ a practice-based approach to study alternative organizing, e.g., a social entrepreneurial network. They focus on everyday peer collaboration as a relational practice formed through a nexus of “weaving,” “sharing,” and “caring” activities. All practices are “tuned” and “enveloped” in a specific affective way and draw on the emerging strand of “affective ethics” (Thanem and Wallenberg 2015) to understand ethics as joyful encounters that augment our capacity to affect and be affected by others. Second, Katila et al. (2020) assume a slightly different concept of affect as sociomaterial agency. Elaborating on temporality and affect, they propose the concept of affecto-rhythmic order, which captures how rhythms and affects interrelate in the flow of organizational practices. A contextual affectorhythmic upbeat order circulates and enhances the practitioners’ individual and collective capacity to engage with the fast-paced development of business ideas and sales-pitching skills relevant in the entrepreneurial accelerator. This study theorizes and illustrates empirically the entangled nature of rhythms and affects in organizational practices and provides a novel insight into inter-corporeal learning and the regulative nature of practices. The transmission of affect beyond local enactment questions the boundaries of a practice and its embeddedness in other temporalities and other spatialities. The challenge for future studies that wish to deepen a posthumanist approach is to experiment with new methodologies following postqualitative research approaches.

Cross-References ▶ Feminist Ethics ▶ The Epistemology of Management: An Introduction ▶ The Performativity of Theories

118

S. Gherardi

Acknowledgments I wish to thank my colleagues from Mälardalen University (New Management Practices group), who have had the patience to read and comment on a first draft of this chapter: Christoffer Andersson, Michela Cozza, Lucia Crevani, Anette Hullin, Caroline Ingvarsson, Chris Ivory, Inti Lammi, Eva Lindell, and Anna Uhlin. A special thanks to Bente Elkjaer, Marie Manidis, and Antonio Strati, who have been very generous with me. It is understood that the responsibility for the final paper is mine alone.

References Barad K (2003) Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs 28(3):801–831 Barad K (2007) Meeting the university Halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press, Durham Bennett J (2010) Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Duke University Press, Durham Benozzo A, Gherardi S (2020) Working within the shadow: what do we do with ‘not-yet’ data? Qual Res Organ Manag 15(2):145–159 Braidotti R (2013) The Posthuman. Polity Press, Cambridge Brandi U, Elkjaer B (2016) Management education in a pragmatist perspective after Dewey’s experimentalism. In: Steyaert C, Beyes T, Martin P (eds) The Routledge companion to reinventing management education. Routledge, London, pp 193–205 Buch A, Schatzki TR (eds) (2018) Questions of practice in philosophy and social theory. Routledge, London Callon M et al (2013) Sociologie des agencements marchands. Presses des Mines, Paris Cecez-Kecmanovic D, Galliers RD, Henfridsson O, Newell S, Vidgen R (2014) The sociomateriality of information systems: current status, future directions. MIS Q 38(3):809–830 Cook SD, Brown JS (1999) Bridging epistemologies: the generative dance between organizational knowledge and organizational knowing. Organ Sci 10(4):381–400 Coole D and Frost S (eds) (2010) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press, Durham NC Deleuze G, Guattari F (1987) A thousand plateaus (trans: Massumi B). The University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Dewey J (1981 [1929]) Experience and nature. Boydston JA The later works, Vol. 1: 1925. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale/Edwardsville Erden Z, Schneider A, von Krogh G (2014) The multifaceted nature of social practices: a review of the perspectives on practice-based theory building about organizations. Eur Manag J 32(5):712– 722 Fenwick T, Edwards R, Sawchuk P (2015) Emerging approaches to educational research: tracing the socio-material. Routledge, London Fox N, Alldred P (2017) Sociology and the new materialism: theory, research, action. Sage, London Gherardi S (2000) Special issue on practice-based theorizing on learning and knowing in organizations. Organization 7(2):211–365 Gherardi S (2016) To start practice-theorizing anew: the contribution of the concepts of agencement and formativeness. Organization 23(5):680–698 Gherardi S (2017) One turn.......And now another one. Do the turn to practice and the turn to affect have something in common? Manag Learn 48(3):345–358 Gherardi S (2019) How to conduct a practice-based study: problems and methods, 2nd edn. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham Guzman G (2013) The grey textures of practice and knowledge: review and framework. Eur Bus Rev 25(5):429–452 Haraway D (1991) Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspectives. In: Simians HD (ed) Cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. Free Association Books, London, pp 183–202

6

A Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice

119

Haraway D (1988) Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Fem Stud 14(3):575–599 Hardie I, MacKenzie D (2007) Assembling an economic actor: the agencement of a hedge fund. Sociol Rev 55(1):57–80 Heidegger M (1996 [1927]) Being and time (trans: Stambaugh J). SCM Press, New York Hughes C, Lury C (2013) Re-turning feminist methodologies: from a social to an ecological epistemology. Gend Educ 25(6):786–799 Hultin L, Mähring M (2017) How practice makes sense in healthcare operations: studying sensemaking as performative, material-discursive practice. Hum Relat 70(5):566–593 Janssens M, Steyaert C (2019) A practice-based theory of diversity: respecifying (in)equality in organizations. Acad Manag Rev 44(3):518–537 Jarzabkowski P, Spee A (2009) Strategy-as-practice: a review and future directions for the field. Int J Manag Rev 11(1):69–95 Jones M (2014) A matter of life and death: exploring conceptualizations of sociomateriality in the context of critical care. MIS Q 38(3):895–925 Katila S, Laine PM, Parkkari P (2019) Sociomateriality and affect in institutional work: constructing the identity of start-up entrepreneurs. J Manag Inq 28(3):381–394 Katila S, Kuismin A, Valtonen A (2020) Becoming upbeat: learning the affecto-rhythmic order of organizational practices. Hum Relat 73(9):1308–1330 Korica M, Nicolini D, Johnson B (2017) In search of ‘managerial work’: past, present and future of an analytical category. Int J Manag Rev 19(2):151–174 Kuhn T, Ashcraft KL, Cooren F (2017) The work of communication: relational perspectives on working and organizing in contemporary capitalism. Routledge, London Lather P, St. Pierre EA (2013) Post-qualitative research. Int J Qual Stud Educ 26(6):629–633 Lave J, Gomes A (2019) Learning and everyday life: access, participation, and changing practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Law J (1992) Notes on the theory of the actor-network: ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity. Syst Practice 5(4):379–393 Leonardi PM (2013) Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality. Inf Organ 23(2):59– 76 Lorino P (2018) Pragmatism and organization studies. Oxford University Press, Oxford Massumi B (2017) The principle of unrest. Open Humanities Press, London Nicolini D (2012) Practice theory, work, and organization: an introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford O’Leary J, Sandberg J (2017) Managers’ practice of managing diversity revealed: a practicetheoretical account. J Organ Behav 38(4):512–536 Orlikowski WJ (2007) Sociomaterial practices: exploring technology at work. Organ Stud 28(9): 1435–1448 Orlikowski WJ (2010) The sociomateriality of organizational life: considering technology in management research. Camb J Eco 34(1):125–141 Orlikowski WJ, Scott SV (2008) Sociomateriality: challenging the separation of technology, work and organization. Acad Manag Ann 2(1):433–474 Østerlund C, Carlile P (2005) Relations in practice: sorting through practice theories on knowledge sharing in complex organizations. Inf Soc 21(2):91–107 Pareyson L (1960) Estetica: Teoria della formatività. Edizioni di Filosofia, Torino. [Partial English trans: Pareyson, L. 2009, Existence, Interpretation, Freedom: Selected Writings, edited by P.D. Bubbio, The Davies Group, Aurora] Price O, Gherardi S, Manidis M (2020) Enacting responsible management: a practice-based perspective. In: Laasch O, Suddaby R, Freeman RE, Jamali D (eds) The research handbook of responsible management. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, pp 392–409 Reckwitz A (2017) Practices and their affects. In: Hui S, Shove E, Schatzki T (eds) The nexus of practices: connections, constellations, practitioners. Routledge, London, pp 114–125 Reich A, Hager P (2014) Problematising practice, learning and change: practice-theory perspectives on professional learning. J Work Learn 26(6/7):418–431

120

S. Gherardi

Resch B, Steyaert C (2020) Peer collaboration as a relational practice: theorizing affective oscillation in radical democratic organizing. J Bus Ethics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-01904395-2 Rescher N (2003) Epistemology: on the scope and limits of knowledge. State University of New York Press, Albany Rouse J (2007) Practice theory. In: Turner S Risjord M (eds) Philosophy of anthropology and sociology. North-Holland Publishing, Amsterdam, pp 639–681 Sandberg J, Tsoukas H (2011) Grasping the logic of practice: theorizing through practical rationality. Acad Manag Rev 36(2):338–360 Sandberg J, Tsoukas H (2015) Practice theory: what it is, its philosophical base, and what it offers organization studies. In: Mir R, Willmott H, Greenwood M (eds) The Routledge companion to philosophy in organization studies. Routledge, London, pp 184–198 Scott SV, Orlikowski WJ (2014) Entanglements in practice. MIS Q 38(3):873–894 Shove E, Pantzar M, Watson M (2012) The dynamics of social practice: everyday life and how it changes. Sage, London Simpson B (2009) Pragmatism, Mead and the practice turn. Organ Stud 30(12):1329–1347 Strati A (1999) Organization and aesthetics. Sage, London Suchman L (1987) Plans and situated action: the problem of human-machine communication. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. (2ndedn 2007) Suchman L (1994) Working relations of technology production and use. Computer-supported Cooperative Work 2(1–2):21–39 Thanem T, Wallenberg L (2015) What can bodies do? Reading Spinoza for an affective ethics of organizational life. Organization 22(2):235–250 Tuana N (2008) Viscous porosity: witnessing Katrina. In: Alaimo S, Hekman S Material Feminism. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, pp 188–213 Vaara E, Whittington R (2012) Strategy-as-practice: taking social practices seriously. Acad Manag Ann 6(1):285–336 Višňovský E (2018) Action, practice, and theory: toward a pragmatist practice philosophy. In: Buch A, Schatzki T (eds) Questions of practice in philosophy and social theory. Routledge, London, pp 31–48

7

Critical Inquiry Dan Ka¨rreman

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Denaturalization as Epistemology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Negative Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reflexivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Power and Language in Critical Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Unpacking Understandings of Power in CI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language and CI: The Naturalization and Denaturalization of Social Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Inquiry: How to Do It . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion and Caveats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

122 123 125 126 127 128 129 131 134 135 135

Abstract

This chapter outlines key characteristics of critical perspectives on inquiry in organization and management practice: critical inquiry. It is argued that critical inquiry can be understood as commitments to an epistemology of denaturalization, a negative ontology, and reflexivity. The chapter highlights how power and the linguistic turn are mobilized over these commitments. It also discusses methods commonly used in critical inquiry. The chapter concludes by pointing to two possible avenues of future development: stronger engagement with fixed and naturalized realities, along the lines suggested by critical realism, and/or stronger engagement with occasioned and situated alternative realities, as suggested by proponents of critical performativity.

D. Kärreman (*) Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_55

121

122

D. Ka¨rreman

Keywords

Critical management studies · Power · Language · Epistemology · Reflexivity

Introduction This chapter deals with critical inquiry and management and organization studies. The notion of critical inquiry may look like a tautology for some, as all research is critical in the sense that the researcher opposes weak and unconvincing arguments, bad methodology, erroneous conclusions, and so on. In this sense, critique is a key element of the research process and endemic in all knowledge creation. However, in this context, “critical” is related to a particular stance toward society, rather than the research process. At heart, critical inquiry assumes that we are not stuck with the particular social world at hand. The social world as we know it is understood as a constructed through social processes and thus could have developed differently (see ▶ Chap. 5, “Interpretive Inquiry,” by Blagoev and Costas in this volume). “Critical” in this context means to problematize the current state of affairs in society at large and in relation to particular cases: inequality, freedom opportunity, and, overall, social justice. Here, a critical understanding is understood as a reflection upon established ideas, ideologies, and institutions in order to encourage liberation or at least reduce repression. More specifically, a critical understanding highlights the effects of power, resistance, division of labor, struggle, and difference. Generally speaking, critical inquiry (CI) in management studies is aligned to the schools of thought in the social sciences that question the power relations implied in management and organizational arrangements. These include labor process theory (Braverman 1974; Burawoy 1979), feminist organization studies and gender studies (Ashcraft 2009), radical humanism ideas (Benson 1977; Burrell and Morgan 1979), postcolonialism (Alcadipani et al. 2012), and “critical” versions of postmodernism (Alvesson and Deetz 2000). Here, the idea of “management” is systematically questioned and treated with suspicion. The purpose is not to question the usefulness of management practices per se but rather to scrutinize the social costs of these practices. These various attempts to question management are often brought together under the banner of Critidies (CMS) (Alvesson and Willmott 1992). The edited volume Critical management studies (Alvesson and Willmott 1992) was one of the central books in which the CMS field was represented in one collection. This book contained contributions from various disciplines, such as accounting, operational analysis, marketing, communication studies, sociology, and organization studies. CMS is still very much a multidisciplinary field, although the strongest impact can be found in organization studies and in the interdisciplinary field of organizational communication studies. It also comprises a number of dedicated conferences and outlets. Furthermore, CMS is recognized as a research division within the large annual international academic conference Academy of Management. The Critical management studies (CMS) conference is organized bi-annually, and at least two

7

Critical Inquiry

123

peer-reviewed journals, Organization and Ephemera, have branded themselves as critical management and organization studies journals. An influential attempt to provide some systematic criteria for what a critical perspective is in management studies can be found in Benson (1977). Deploying a Marxian theoretical framework, he argues that an organization should be seen as a contradictory social process, driven by groups with different and sometimes opposing interests – thus making the case for a dialectical theory of organization. In this sense, critical perspectives take an active interest in the exploitative and manipulative sides of organizing while paying particular attention to the socially and historically embedded nature of organizations (Clegg and Dunkerley 1980). A common theme is that organizations are driven by contradictions, struggle, and clashing power relations. Critical perspectives seek to acknowledge and transform these relations of power in order to achieve emancipation, and have in this sense an explicit progressive agenda. According to Fournier and Grey (2000), a critical perspective on management studies can be said to rest upon three theoretical or methodological principles: “nonperformativity,” “de-naturalization,” and “reflexivity” (see also Grey and Willmott 2005). With the term nonperformativity, the authors draw on Lyotard (1984) and argue that critical perspectives should resist attempts to “develop and celebrate knowledge which contributes to the production of maximum output for minimum input; it involves inscribing knowledge within means–ends calculation” (Fournier and Grey 2000, 17). De-naturalization means that CMS involves “deconstructing the ‘reality’ of organizational life or ‘truthfulness’ of organizational knowledge by exposing its ‘un-naturalness’ or irrationality; CMS is about ‘denaturalization’” (p. 18). By reflexivity, they mean that CMS should be explicit about the assumptions and vocabularies it invokes and reflect upon its limits and shortcomings. Fournier and Grey provide a good shorthand description of what critical inquiry (CI) adds to management and organization studies: an understanding that highlights struggle and contradiction, emphasizes the constructed – and, hence, changeable – nature of society and organizations, and invites reflection and re-imagination. This chapter aims to provide an understanding of the core epistemological, but also ontological and methodological, commitments inherent in critical inquiry (CI). Drawing on and extending Fournier and Grey, I suggest that CI is propelled by commitments to an epistemology of denaturalization, a negative ontology, and reflexive methodology.

Denaturalization as Epistemology Scholars engaged in critical inquiry do not rely on a one-size-fits-all epistemology. If anything, CI is perhaps only united, in epistemological terms, in the rejection of positivist assumptions that knowledge is available through the communal communication of sensory data captured in a neutral language of observation. CI scholars

124

D. Ka¨rreman

surely would have problematized every word in the previous sentence. Still, that does not mean that there is a singular epistemological position in the CMS community. CI scholars frequently engage in diverse forms of interpretivism, where emphasis is put on understanding the world view of the people under study (Geertz 1971; Bernstein 1983; Alvesson and Sköldberg 2017). They may also draw on structuralism and structuration (Burrell and Morgan 1979), and, more recently, on poststructuralism, where language and discourse are placed in the foreground as the epistemic object to study par préférance (Deetz 1992; Alvesson and Kärreman 2000). However, there is more than antipositivism that operates as a common denominator for the epistemology of critical inquiry. As pointed out by Fournier and Grey (2000), CMS is also united in a commitment to denaturalization as a cornerstone for critical inquiry. Fournier and Grey render denaturalization primarily as an ontological and political move. I do not question the political nature of denaturalization but it is more clear and fruitful to understand the ontology of critical inquiry as essentially a negative commitment, which will be further developed below, and denaturalization as a way of gaining knowledge. As Fournier and Grey put it, denaturalization is primarily a matter of realizing that existing knowledge is not positionless or without perspective: It consists of what is written in (doxa, conventional wisdom), as well as of what is written out (muted, marginalized, and suppressed experience). In terms of what is written in, denaturalization as an epistemological outlook questions the privileged position of established truths. Established truths are true in a narrow sense: They are truths established by particular perspectives, vocabularies, and groups of people. In terms of what is written out – voices and experiences not covered by established epistemic practices – denaturalization opens up for uncovering and discovering truths about marginalized people and phenomena. It also opens up the possibility of generating knowledge about a radically different society, either by giving voice to the muted or the voiceless or by providing a space where as-if and what-if realities can be articulated. The latter space was for a long time cornered by various forms of socialist and communist utopias, all which suffered mortal blows after the end of the cold war, at least in the West; one of the peculiar things about modern management and organizations studies is that it has very little to say about the fact that the most dynamic economy of the last 30 years – China – is run along state socialist and capitalist principles, at least according to its ruling party. For the moment, the utopian space afforded by denaturalization is sparsely populated, although the climate emergency is likely to make sure that this void is filled soon enough. Thus, to avoid seeing the social world as self-evident and familiar is imperative in critical inquiry. In this sense, critical inquiry insists to face the world as strange and artificial, as a choice rather than a given, as in flux rather than frozen, and as prone to injustice rather than fairness. The epistemological commitment to denaturalization prompts the scholar to start their study from a point where the social world is exotic and arbitrary rather than rational and familiar. A key move is to engage in problematization. As pointed out by Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) as well as Sandberg and Alvesson (2011), most research in

7

Critical Inquiry

125

organization and management studies is motivated by identifying so-called “gaps” of knowledge in the literature. Such gap-spotting is inherently problematic, as it naturalizes ideas about what constitutes an interesting research question. It is essentially a hegemonic move to conserve what is already written in within a particular field of study. From a denaturalization point of view, problematization avoids this pitfall. This can be done in several ways. A familiar perspective can be replaced with something that makes a phenomenon less self-evident. Assumptions can be re-imagined. Theories and concepts can be reworked. In general terms, problematization compels the scholar to rethink assumptions, ideas, and conceptualization of a particular subject matter, and not simply engage in rote application. Problematization is primarily about a systematic questioning of aspects of conventional wisdom, dominant research perspectives, key theories, and the subject matter itself. In essence, it is about creating a space for alternative and constructive formulation of interesting research questions. Problematization is not in itself the same thing as critique or deconstruction, although these may be major elements in, and resources for, this process. Denaturalization may also be forced upon society. Arguably, the financial crisis of 2008 put an end to the hegemony of the so-called Washington consensus, or the neoliberal order, where globalization, deregulation, and privatization were viewed as unquestioned social goods. The climate emergency is interpellating modernity in its totality, foreshadowing radical and catastrophic change. The Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 upended society and understandings about government intervention in ways that were almost impossible to imagine and comprehend before the fact.

Negative Ontology CI scholars work from different sets of ontological assumptions – or, in other words, ideas about how social reality is put together. Although most subscribe to variants of social constructionism (see ▶ Chap. 5, “Interpretive Inquiry,” Blagoev and Costas in this volume), there are differences in how much weight is given to what is already constructed relative to the construction processes themselves. For example, scholars interested in power, privilege, and social justice tend to draw on ontological assumptions that allow for frozen social constructions – for example, prevailing class, gender, and ethnic hierarchies – and systemic oppression, while scholars drawing on discourse, language, hegemony, and marginalization tend to focus on the construction processes themselves. For actual studies (as well as participating in life as we know it), critical inquiry operates with ontological assumptions that make it possible for the world they study to inhabit objects, subject(s), relationships, institutions, perceptions, and meanings. In this sense, it would be a mistake to argue that critical inquiry is wedded to a particular ontology. Rather, critical scholars adapt different sets of ontological assumptions for studying different phenomena and deploying different conceptual toolboxes and perspectives. Having said that, critical inquiry shares by definition a particular ontological commitment, namely to negative ontology (Kelly 2014; Firth 2020). Briefly, negative ontology points to the key assumption in critical inquiry that

126

D. Ka¨rreman

society exists as a nexus of ideological practices, material conditions, and exercises of power, struggle, and negotiation. The common denominator of the present makeup of any particular society is that it can be different. Although late capitalism can feel suffocatingly and overwhelmingly material, inert, and inescapable, it is not, even in its current decadent stage, a given, unavoidable, and natural fact. It consists of social facts and social processes, all of which can be undone and amended in principle. Without a commitment to negative ontology, critical inquiry is aimless, pointless, and fruitless. Perhaps the most accessible way to engage with negative ontology is to think of it as a way of unmasking how the social reality at hand presents itself. As Firth (2020, 44) puts it: “negative ontology . . . is an approach that looks beyond just what something is in practice and considers how its failure to be something may . . . produce significant theoretical insight.” The point is not to think differently about social reality, it is to think that social reality can be different.

Reflexivity Critical inquiry also allows for a diverse set of methods, research designs, and methodologies. Interviews, case studies, ethnographies, surveys, and the use of historical data and secondary sources are well within canon for critical studies. However, as with regards to its ontology and epistemology, critical inquiry has a commitment, rather than a particular position, design, or tool, as a common denominator. CI studies are committed to reflexivity. Reflexivity and reflexive methodology (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2017; Alvesson and Deetz 2000; Alvesson and Kärreman 2011b) emerge from the combined assumptions of negative ontology and denaturalized epistemology, and thus, they consider that the idea of perspectives and theories explicitly or implicitly making claims of total and finite truth to be unhelpful and counterproductive in social research. Knowledge comes from perspectives and positions, reflecting a social reality that can be different (and also perhaps should be different). Rather than promoting unified frameworks and “grand” theory, it is more useful to face the idea that truth, or “the right” or “the best” interpretations, can be inherently problematic and emerges from unjust social realities and elite perspectives, rather than immaculate understandings. It is thus preferable and more fruitful – and, in itself, a social good – to let diverse vocabularies, interpretations, and voices come to the fore in research texts. However, this is a difficult task. It is, for example, important to understand that researchers primarily use theories which they have grasped very well and for which they display an emotional and sociological preference. It is an investment to master perspectives, theories, and concepts. This is not to say that the researcher always suffers a kind of ontological and epistemological locked-in syndrome. It is to say that the critical researcher has to make an active attempt to break away from naturalized reality and claustrophobic prior knowledge.

7

Critical Inquiry

127

One way of engaging in reflexive methodology is to try to conceptualize empirical material in different ways and look for the various logics at play, rather than aiming to nail down the “one” or the “key” logic. When engaging with “data” – such as interview accounts, write-ups from participant observations, texts from social media – the material can be viewed as not only possibly revealing the meanings of those studied (or “facts” about their organizations), but as revealing broader and perhaps more telling dynamics: political action, moral storytelling, identity work, script application, and so forth (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2011). Apart from assuming that accounts summarize how people in the field see things, we can also view accounts as coming from people being on message in their position as spokespersons for some more or less recognized social groups, or accounts as indicating prevailing discourses. Thus, accounts can be seen as providing insights about political action, the circulation of discourse, and/or the experiences, meanings, and beliefs of individuals. Providing multiple interpretations is an obvious way of making reflexivity visible in the study. However, this introduces several practical problems. First, scholars are rarely equally proficient in different perspectives. Secondly, some perspectives may provide a better “fit” for the study at hand, which may make them more compelling and useful (but not more “true” than alternative renderings, only more capable of being written in). Thirdly, even to provide one really good and insightful interpretation is demanding and time-consuming. The main point of using multiple interpretations is not to demonstrate reflexivity – it is to add understanding. For practical purposes, other approaches to demonstrating reflexivity than multiple interpretation are preferable. In a way, explicit commitments to negative ontology and denaturalization make it very difficult to escape reflexivity. If one questions social reality as we know it, and the way established knowledge is writing in and writing out experiences, social dynamics, and phenomena, one is compelled to argue why one thinks this is the case. Arguably, the scholar has to engage in reflexive critique of how society operates and how established knowledge makes certain knowing visible and invisible. This is the core element of reflexivity. Rather than starting in society as it is given, its very essence is questioned. Rather than standing on the shoulders of giants, the pathways and marching orders of the “giants” are scrutinized.

Power and Language in Critical Inquiry When engaging with the “substance” of reality, critical scholars typically mobilize the vocabulary of power. When engaging with the “representations” of reality, they mobilize the vocabulary of discourse and language. Put in simplistic terms, power makes it possible to understand how social reality is stabilized and frozen but also how it may change. Discourse and language, on the other hand, make it possible to understand how social reality is rendered with layers of meaning. Power is viewed as the main driver for the manufacturing of social reality and social facts while discourse and language provide the resources to make social reality and social facts intelligible.

128

D. Ka¨rreman

This distinction is complicated by the fact that discourse and language have power effects. There is power in rendering society in a particular way. Also, power can sometimes speak for itself; it does not need to be talked into reality to be intelligible. It is a key insight of CI is that reality (ontology) and knowledge (epistemology) interact. Foucault’s (1980) ideas of truth regimes and power/knowledge capture most clearly how this dynamic unfolds: Knowledge establishes truths – realities – that power can operate from, which makes new forms of knowledge possible, which in turn make different forms of power possible and operational. This does not mean that knowledge and power are one and the same: Strictly speaking, knowledge is never power. For CI, power fills the void of negative ontology, and language naturalizes and denaturalizes.

Unpacking Understandings of Power in CI Although power exists in many forms and shapes within CI it is typically understood from three dominant perspectives: a) power as brute force, b) power as social force, and c) power as productive force. In the first perspective – power as brute force – power is understood as something that makes people do things that other people want them to do, thus restricting them from doing things they otherwise would not have chosen to do. In its most elementary form, power is from this perspective at play when A makes B to do things B otherwise would not do. The power as social force perspective is less interested in direct and overt exertion of power than in the way ideologies and cultural traditions make people (indirectly) comply with an existing order without much need for the mobilization of brute power in dealing with visible conflict (Lukes 1974). This notion of social power makes it possible to understand how power operates when social reality is constructed in ways that avoid visible conflict. The third dominant perspective – power as productive force – regards power as decoupled from specific interests and viewed as a constructive rather than restrictive force. Of course, most perspectives understand power as a resource as well as a restriction, but this third view emphasizes the former aspect. From this perspective, power is an integral part of social reality, which enables social agents to act in particular ways. This conception of power is said to understand power as “power to,” rather than as “power over” (Chan 2000). The most important contributor to this perspective on power is Michel Foucault (1974, 1980; for applications in organization studies see Burrell 1988; Chan 2000; Covaleski et al. 1998; Knights and Willmott 1989). Foucault regards power as the visible arrangement of practices that are applied in a variety of forms and social fields. Power relations are best understood in terms of the forms and techniques in which they are expressed. Power is particularly involved in the production of the subject, through defining and fixing individuals’ sense of how they should be. Subjectivity tends to be reduced to an effect of power, which is decentralized from specific actors and their interests. It is the exercise of power that matters. Foucault takes a particular interest in how emergent social practices, such as surveillance systems (e.g., the panopticon) and the organization of industrial work,

7

Critical Inquiry

129

are connected to the therapeutic notion of “curing” (rather than punishing) criminals, thus transforming the prison into an institution bent on producing “corrected” deviants, that is, normalized and domesticated bodies that no longer engage in deviant and dangerous conduct (Foucault 1974). Consequently, according to Foucault, in modernity, behavioral changes are achieved through “a general recipe for the exercise of power over men: the ‘mind’ as a surface of inscription of power, with semiology as its tool; the submission of bodies through control of ideas” (Foucault 1974, 102). In any attempt to understand power, it is important to consider the potential for resistance. Although typically conceptualized as the flipside of the coin in relation to power, resistance is sometimes brought to the forefront of analysis (e.g., Carr and Bower 2000). Researchers using critical perspectives tend to be particularly interested in the anatomy of resistance – that is, the types and forms of resistance workers may exercise (Fleming and Spicer 2003; Prasad and Prasad 2000; Thomas and Davies 2005). The meaning of resistance differs, depending on the perspective taken on power. The power-as-brute-force perspective, for example, typically depicts resistance as more or less binary responses to the exercise of power. Such responses may include activities such as those showcased by Carr and Bower (2000): deliberately reduced effort (e.g., withdrawal, foot-dragging, and “soldiering”), exit, voice, sabotage, enacting alternative channels, and engaging stakeholders (which includes resistance strategies such as leaks and whistleblowing; see Ackroyd and Thompson 1999, for a review). The common denominator here is that resistance is understood as a response to attempts to exercise “power over” (Chan 2000) the resisting party. This is also the case for resistance to power-as-social-force, although here resistance is more covert than overt and consists, for example, in anticonformist behavior and subversion of norms and conventions. The power-as-productive-force perspective, on the other hand, understands resistance not as the opposite of power, but rather as inherent and an integral part in the exercise of power: It can assume many forms, but always exists within a network of power relations. Thomas and Davies (2005), for example, see resistance as “a constant process of adaptation, subversion and reinscription of dominant discourses” (p. 687) and Weedon (1987) similarly views the tensions and contradictions of social processes around alternative discourses and subject positions as producing resistance towards prescribed subject positions. Almost everything related to subjectivity and not fully in line with a prescribed response may then be labeled “resistance.” The key element is the articulation of meanings that are alternative to the dominant or prescribed, in particular with regard to the self.

Language and CI: The Naturalization and Denaturalization of Social Reality Put bluntly, CI does not accept that language merely represents social reality. Rather, language is part of social reality. Language and language use is, to a large extent,

130

D. Ka¨rreman

what CI develops knowledge about. In this sense, CI draws strongly on the “linguistic turn,” reflected, for example, in debates on postmodernism (Cooper and Burrell 1988; Parker 1992; Chia 1995) and in postobjectivist hermeneutical research strategies (cf. Alvesson and Sköldberg 2009; Czarniawska-Joerges 1992). Postmodernists and discourse analysts argue that the conventional understanding of the relation between language and social reality has a central weakness in its belief that language represents reality. The postmodern argument highlights certain theoretical problems with this view: for example, how can one know that the word A truthfully represents the thing T? Discourse analysts show that emphasis on the representational capacities of language conceals and obfuscates the more productive question of its creative and functional capacities: What does language use actually accomplish? The word A may or may not represent the thing T but why is the word A invoked in the first place, and what does it accomplish? What does the linguistic turn mean? On a general level, the term indicates the importance and ubiquity of language. The various positions held can, in the context of research methodology, be reduced to two predominant sets of approaches: a philosophical-speculative voice and a behavioral-observational voice. The philosophical-speculative voice draws on poststructuralist thinking, owing most to the work of Jacques Derrida, but also to Ferdinand de Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It attacks, on philosophical-theoretical grounds, the widely accepted idea that language is a system of reference to which the power of denoting objects “out there” (Cooper 1989) is attributed. From a poststructuralist point of view, such as Derrida’s, “language is a structure of material marks or sounds which are in themselves ‘undecidable’ and upon which meaning has to be imposed” (1989: 480, emphasis in original). Symbolic systems such as language do not contain meaning. On the contrary, meaning is assigned by users to distinguish between certain experiences from one another. The distinction between language and external realities is, from this point of view, a category mistake. Language is external and real. It foregoes any experience of what is external, since experience is shaped and made intelligible through language. The second voice draws less on philosophical thought (although Foucault and Wittgenstein often are conspicuous sources of inspiration) and more on empirical observation in social settings. Nevertheless, it shares with the more philosophically oriented authors a skeptical stance towards the idea that language mirrors the world. In this context, it is proper to call it a behavioral-observational version of the linguistic turn (although it is sometimes also called “discursive psychology” or “social constructionism”). Here, the perspective is illustrated by discourse analysis (DA) as developed by Potter and Wetherell (1987). Other versions of this behavioralobservational linguistic turn are ethnomethodology and conversational analysis (Silverman 1993). Discourse analysts emphasize that the question is not to distinguish between “accurate” or “literal” accounts and “misguided” or “rhetorical” accounts, since there are no foolproof means of distinguishing between “fact” and “fiction.” The point is to take an interest in the various ways people use language, not only in the accounts they describe but also in the realities that their accounts attempt to produce (or reproduce) and in the realities to which their accounts respond.

7

Critical Inquiry

131

Clearly, the linguistic turn has a general influence on CI – but it also has a more direct influence that goes to the heart of its epistemological commitment to denaturalization. This connection is illustrated by the case of “discursive closure” discussed below. Put shortly, discursive closures “exist whenever potential conflict is suppressed” (Deetz 1992, 187) – or, in Fournier and Grey’s (2000) vocabulary, when experience is written out. Discursive practices, Deetz (1992) observes, may, on one hand, lead to the potential suspension of preformed convictions and relatively unconstrained production of understanding and, on the other hand, to the suspension of dissent, difference, and discussion. Discursive closure plays, according to Deetz, a pivotal role in creating systematically distorted communication (Habermas 1984; Forester 1989): Discursive practices . . . can either lead to . . . [the] open formation [of the self] by further exploration of the subject matter or divert, distort, or block the open development of understanding. When discussion is thwarted, a particular view of reality is maintained at the expense of equally plausible ones, usually to someone’s advantage. (Deetz 1992: 189)

It is the latter type of discursive practices that propels discursive closure. The practices themselves consist of tactical moves rather than substantive claims, and they often appear inoffensive and unobtrusive. This is further underscored by the fact that such discursive practices are often seemingly evoked for the common good, to keep the order, to avoid rocking the boat, and, ironically, to let everybody have a say. Deetz (1992) discusses a range of such processes. This chapter engages with one of them, namely naturalization. This is evoked when something is written in at the expense of something else being written out (Fournier and Grey 2000). It is, in this sense, the flipside of denaturalization. It occurs when a particular view of a subject matter is held forward and accepted, as the way things are. In relation to social reality, naturalization often appears as a result of reification – the treatment of social relationships and subjective constructions as natural, fixed, and external objects. For example, in contemporary Western society, freedom is typically constructed as the possibility of choosing from preset menus. In this sense, we can choose what we want to consume but we cannot choose to not be consumers. Freedom is rendered as choice between (given) options rather than as liberty. Processes of naturalization deny alternative formulations of experience. Such discursive moves are often used to stop or block discussion at the moment where it becomes interesting. For example, a naturalizing move is typically made by declaring “this is the way it is” in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to ask the more interesting question “Yes, but how did it happen?” Naturalizing moves make such question seem irrelevant, since it is claimed that this is a natural state of affairs, implying that alternative formulations are against the natural order.

Critical Inquiry: How to Do It Commitments to an epistemology of denaturalization, together with reflexivity and negative ontology, have significant consequences for empirical research. Here, CI trends strongly – but not exclusively – towards qualitative methodology, case

132

D. Ka¨rreman

studies, ethnography and, quite dominantly in recent times, discourse analysis. Discourse analysis has obvious appeal because of its focus upon the politics of language and frames of meaning, which aligns well with CI. It highlights the communicative character of interaction, captures key aspects of organizational reality, provides new tools for empirical analysis, and allows for nonreified understandings of organizations (Alvesson and Kärreman 2011). As pointed out above, discourse analysis puts emphasis on how human beings interact through language. In this sense, discourse analysis promotes a view of social interaction that stays sensitive to the taken-for-granted nature of much routine interaction, and largely avoids the reification of discursive closure (Deetz 1992), such as naturalization, marginalization, and neutralization. It also makes it possible to focus on and highlight everyday and routine organizational activities such as conversations and other forms of propagating talk and text. This is particularly useful because it makes it possible to anchor the analysis in manifest phenomena (i.e., communication activities) and thus to minimize the need for speculating in people’s intentions, ideas, states of mind, and other nonobservable phenomena. In this sense, discourse analysis ideally allows for more rigorous and grounded interpretation, precisely because it draws on things that are available for empirical inquiry. Finally, at least in theory, it provides a processual view of organizations that understands organizations as emerging properties of continuous acts of organizing and thus conceptualizes organizations as “performative accomplishments,” that is, entities that arise and change as a result of human interaction and politics (cf. Butler 1988; Spicer et al. 2009). As a consequence, discourse analysis is sensitive to the reified nature of much mainstream theorizing on organizations, to power relations and the exercise of power in organizations – and thus facilitates the problematization of the status quo (cf. Leonardi 2008). There are several key contributions to the understanding of organizations and organizational life that draw upon – but also transcend – CI. For instance, Deetz (1992) emphasizes how the modern workplace has become rife with control regimes that draw upon explicit or subtle forms of disciplinary power. Alvesson and Willmott’s (2002) article on identity regulation has, for example, drawn attention to how management control has changed focus from disciplining behavior to identity formation in modern organizations. Fleming and Spicer (2003) show how cynical distance in organizations can be understood as compliance rather than resistance and how this makes it possible to mobilize blasé and jaded workers for organizational and managerial ends. On one hand, cynical distancing provides workers with the sense of “seeing through” organizational control regimes and, thus, with a sense of autonomy and self-determination. On the other hand, this does not change the fact that they still comply. On the contrary, by cynically distancing themselves from protocols at work, they do not end up undermining and resisting them, but passively supporting them. The very illusion of autonomy provides subjects with the space to overcome tensions and to be more integrated into the company. More recently, CI has, among other things, engaged with climate change (Wright et al. 2013; Wright and Nyberg 2017), corporate responsibility (Fleming et al. 2013), consumption (Gabriel et al. 2015), affect (Fotaki et al. 2017), the brand society

7

Critical Inquiry

133

(Willmott 2010; Mumby 2016; Endrissat et al. 2017; Müller 2017; Mehrpouya and Willmott 2018), Brexit and Trumpian populism (Robinson and Bristow 2020), creative work (Finkel et al. 2017), and decolonialization (Dar 2018). It has also recently engaged in a meta-theoretical critique that has questioned performativity, which is one of the cornerstones of the critidies project. This strand of critique has been labeled critical performativity (Spicer et al. 2009, 2016). Critical performativity is founded on the argument that the explicit nonperformativity of CI makes it impotent to promote social change. Instead, CI satisfies itself with asking questions about the “ends” of any social formation from a safe distance. This might stand in stark opposition to attempts to face the practical demands of facilitating emancipatory social change. As a consequence, CI tends to have a narrow conception of what emerging social problems it can deal with. It often focuses on strictly organizational issues and seldom explores broader societal issues. Even when engaging with such issues as animal rights, militarization and war, (neo) colonialism, antiglobalization movements, the recent financial crises or global warming, CI frame these as examples of corporatist and managerialist discourses and practices. In this way, CI can be seen as parasitical on management (or market liberalism, if “management” is not applicable). It is dependent on the very thing it critiques to provide its identity. The result is that the position from which CI operate is always already given and predefined by the object of critique. Due to its largely intellectualist character, CI may also introduce cynical distance (Fleming and Spicer 2003) in the understanding of organizations. While it promotes the enlightening of organizations by shedding the light of reason onto previously shadowy worlds of power relations, and this process has emancipatory potential, it often progresses through the activity of the mind rather than through socially visible action. The result may be a cynical world where we can see all too well the various relations of domination and where we intellectually engage with a particular phenomenon, but we remain practically trapped and almost entirely dependent on this phenomenon. Spicer et al. (2009, 2016) make the argument that CMS needs to find a way to promote activism, and advocate the idea of critical performativity: In the future, CMS needs to embrace performativity in socially responsible and progressive ways. They point to the works of John L. Austin and Judith Butler, rather than Lyotard, for a more rounded understanding of performativity. Austin (1962) and Butler (1988) demonstrate the futility of generalized nonperformativity and provide ideas on how a more helpful understanding of performativity can be incorporated into CI. Austin points out that certain classes of speech acts are performative per se. Committing to nonperformativity is excessive, since this rules out engagement with speech-bound activism (cf. Black Lives Matter, #MeToo). Butler, on the other hand, shows that inequality, marginalization, and social injustice are enacted through language in performative ways and that social change also has to be enacted and performed. Additionally, critical performativity includes circumspectly caring for the people under study; being pragmatic about progress (not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good); and looking for potential in the present, rather than in utopian futures. In this sense, critical performativity attempts to bring in reformist activism at the heart

134

D. Ka¨rreman

of CI and CMS. This argument has sparked quite a lot of debate, highlighting nuances in understandings of performativity (Gond et al. 2016), the potential performative contradiction of critical performativity and the need for complicity (Ashcraft 2018), the possibility to mobilize mainstream management research for CI purposes (Koss Hartmann 2014), and the importance of nonperformativity (as understood by Fournier and Grey 2000) for CI (Fleming and Banerjee 2016), to mention a few. We should expect these debates to continue, at least for the near future.

Conclusion and Caveats In this chapter, I have argued that critical inquiry, rather than having a fixed ontological, epistemological, and methodological position, is characterized by commitments to a negative ontology, an epistemology of denaturalization, and a reflexive methodology. Having said that, different versions of CI fit within this classificatory scheme in various degrees. For example, Thompson (2005) argues that Critical management studies – the dominant form of critical inquiry in organization studies – focus too strongly on epistemological and ontological issues, while ignoring the real politics of the workplace. Concerns about knowledge claims and the nature of reality are only distracting sideshows from the “real issues” that CI should focus on. These “real” issues largely correspond with the kinds of topics that could be identified by Marxist-inspired structuralist analysis and critical realism (see ▶ Chap. 4, “Realist Inquiry,” by Reihlen et al. in this volume). They include, for example, the restructuring of the state, employment markets, the globalization of capital, and the degradation of the environment by multinationals. In order to capture these concerns, Thompson (2005) follows other critical realists and recommends a position that accepts an emancipatory or critical politics, as well as a reflexive epistemology, but argues that critique should base itself on a naturalized ontology. Critique would recognize that our knowledge of the social world is always fallible and open to continued revision but the social world itself has a real basis which is not just constructed through perception or discourse. The task of critidies would then be to reveal the real structures of oppression, calling these structures into question, while at the same time remaining reflexive about the knowledge claims they make. In a similar vein, proponents of critical performativity critique the intellectualist position that can be found in much of critical inquiry. They claim that it is not enough to point out injustices: One also needs to develop ideas on how to mobilize to counteract them. Denaturalization and reflexivity are necessary but not sufficient: Consideration needs to be given to how to act in progressive and emancipatory ways. Critical realists and proponents of critical performativity point to two possible development paths for CI: one based on an a priori naturalized ontology and the other on local and emergent occasions for social change. However, there is no need to stop at two possible directions. CI is an open-ended project with open-ended avenues for further development. Arguably, the core point of CI is to question the obvious and the unjust, and we are unlikely to run out of either.

7

Critical Inquiry

135

Cross-References ▶ Interpretive Inquiry ▶ Realist Inquiry

References Ackroyd S, Thompson P (1999) Organizational misbehaviour. Sage, London Alcadipani R, Khan FR, Gantman E, Nkomo S (2012) Southern voices in management and organization knowledge. Organization 19(1):131–143 Alvesson M, Deetz S (2000) Doing critical management research. Sage, London Alvesson M, Kärreman D (2000) Varieties of discourse: on the study of organizations through discourse analysis. Hum Relat 53(9):1125–1149 Alvesson M, Kärreman D (2011) Qualitative research and theory development: mystery as method. Sage, London Alvesson M, Sandberg J (2011) Generating research questions through problematization. Acad Manag Rev 36(2):247–271 Alvesson M, Sköldberg K (2017) Reflexive methodology: new vistas for qualitative research. Sage, London Alvesson M, Willmott H (eds) (1992) Critical management studies. Sage, London Alvesson M, Willmott H (2002) Identity regulation as organizational control: producing the appropriate individual. J Manag Stud 39(5):619–644 Ashcraft KL (2009) Gender and diversity: other ways to make a difference. In: Alvesson M, Bridgman T, Willmott H (eds) Oxford handbook of critidies. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 304–327 Ashcraft KL (2018) Critical complicity: the feel of difference at work in home and field. Manag Learn 49(5):613–623 Austin JL (1962) How to do things with words. Oxford University Press, Oxford Benson JK (1977) Organizations; A dialectical view. Admin Sci Quart 22(1):1–21 Braverman H (1974) Labour and monopoly capital. Monthly Review Press, New York Burawoy M (1979) Manufacturing consent. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Burrell G (1988) Modernism, postmodernism and organizational analysis 2: the contribution of Michel Foucault. Organ Stud 9(2):221–235 Burrell G, Morgan G (1979) Sociological paradigms and organizational analysis. Gower, Aldershot Butler J (1988) Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre J 40(4):519–531 Carr JB, Bower RS (2000) Principled opportunism: evidence from the organizational middle. Public Admin Quart 24(1):109–138 Chan A (2000) Redirecting critique in postmodern organization studies: the perspective of Foucault. Organ Stud 21(6):1059–1075 Chia R (1995) From modern to postmodern organizational analysis. Organ Stud 16(4):579–604 Clegg S (1989) Frameworks of power. Sage, London Clegg S, Dunkerley D (1980) Organization, class and control. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Collinson DL (2003) Identities and insecurites: selves at work. Organization 10(3):527–547 Cooper R (1989) Modernism, post-modernism and organizational analysis 3: the contribution of Jacques Derrida. Organ Stud 10(4):479–502 Cooper R, Burrell G (1988) Modernism, postmodernism, and organizational analysis: an introduction. Organ Stud 9(1):91–112 Czarniawska-Joerges B (1992) Exploring complex organizations: a cultural perspective. Sage, Newbury Park Dar S (2018) De-colonizing the boundary-object. Organ Stud 39(4):565–584

136

D. Ka¨rreman

Deetz S (1992) Democracy in the age of corporate colonization: developments in communication and the politics of everyday life. State University of New York Press, Albany Endrissat N, Kärreman D, Noppeney C (2017) Incorporating the creative subject: Branding outside–in through identity incentives. Hum Relat 70(4):488–515 Finkel R, Jones D, Sang K, Stoyanova Russell D (2017) Diversifying the creative: creative work, creative industries, creative identities. Organization 24(3):281–288 Firth J (2020) Deux ex Machina: towards a negative ontology of software, Doctoral dissertation, University of Auckland Fleming P, Banerjee SB (2016) When performativity fails: implications for critidies. Hum Relat 69(2):257–276 Fleming P, Spicer A (2003) Working at a cynical distance: implications for power, subjectivity and resistance. Organization 10(2):157–179 Fleming P, Roberts J, Garsten C (2013) In search of corporate social responsibility: introduction to special issue. Organization 20(3):337–348 Forester J (1989) Planning in the face of power. California University Press, Berkeley Fotaki M, Kenny K, Vachhani SJ (2017) Thinking critically about affect in organization studies: why it matters. Organization 24(1):3–17 Foucault M (1974) Discipline and punish. Penguin, Harmondsworth Foucault M (1980) Power/knowledge. Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977, ed. Gordon C. Pantheon, New York Fournier V, Grey C (2000) At the critical moment: conditions and prospects for critidies. Hum Relat 53(1):7–32 Gabriel Y, Korczynski M, Rieder K (2015) Organizations and their consumers: bridging work and consumption. Organization 22(5):629–643 Gond JP, Cabantous L, Harding N, Learmonth M (2016) What do we mean by performativity in organizational and management theory? The uses and abuses of performativity. Int J Manag Rev 18(4):440–463 Grey C (1999) We are all managers now: we always were. On the development and demise of management. J Manag Stud 36(5):561–585 Grey C, Willmott H (eds) (2005) Critidies. Oxford University Press, Oxford Habermas J (1984) The theory of communicative action. Beacon Press, Boston Hardy C (1994) Powerand politics in organisations. In: Hardy C (ed) Managing strategic action: mobilizing change. Sage, London Hoskin K, Macve R (1986) Accounting and the examination: a genealogy of disciplinary power. Account Organ Soc 11(2):105–136 Kelly S (2014) Towards a negative ontology of leadership. Hum Relat 67(8):905–922 Knights D, Willmott H (1989) Power and subjectivity at work: from degradation to subjugation in social relation. Sociology 23(4):535–558 Koss Hartmann R (2014) Subversive functionalism: for a less canonical critique in critidies. Hum Relat 67(5):611–632 Leonardi PM (2008) Indeterminacy and the discourse of inevitability in international technology management. Acad Manag Rev 33(4):975–984 Lukes S (1974) Power: a radical view. Macmillan, New York Lyotard JF (1984) The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Macintyre A (1984) After virtue: a study in moral theory, 2nd edn. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame Maguire S, Hardy C (2006) The emergence of new global institutions: a discursive perspective. Organ Stud 27(1):7–29 Mangham IL (1995) MacIntyre and the manager. Organization 2(2):181–204 Mehrpouya A, Willmott H (2018) Making a Niche: the marketization of management research and the rise of ‘knowledge branding’. J Manag Stud 55(4):728–734

7

Critical Inquiry

137

Meyer JW (1986) Myths of socialization and of personality. In: Heller TC, Sosna M, Wellbery DE (eds) Reconstructing individualism: autonomy, individuality, and the self in Western thought. Stanford University Press, Stanford, pp 208–221 Müller M (2017) ‘Brand-centred control’: a study of internal branding and normative control. Organ Stud 38(7):895–915 Mumby DK (2016) Organizing beyond organization: branding, discourse, and communicative capitalism. Organization 23(6):884–907 Parker M (1992) Post-modern organizations or postmodern organization theory? Organ Stud 13(1): 1–17 Pfeffer J (1992) Understanding power in organizations. Calif Manag Rev 34(1):29–50 Potter J (1997) Discourse analysis as a way of analysing naturally occurring talk. In: Silverman D (ed) Qualitative research: theory, method and practice. Sage, London, pp 200–222 Potter J, Wetherell M (1987) Discourse and pyschology: beyond attitudes and behaviour. Sage, London Prasad P, Prasad A (2000) Stretching the iron cage: the constitution and implications of routine workplace resistance. Organ Sci 11(4):387–403 Robinson S, Bristow A (2020) Riding populist storms: Brexit, Trumpism and beyond. Organization 27(3):359–369 Sandberg J, Alvesson M (2011) Ways of constructing research questions: gap-spotting or problematization? Organization 18(1):23–44 Spicer A, Alvesson M, Kärreman D (2009) Critical performativity: the unfinished business of critidies. Hum Relat 62(4):537–560 Spicer A, Alvesson M, Kärreman D (2016) Extending critical performativity. Hum Relat 69(2): 225–249 Thomas R, Davies A (2005) Theorizing the micro-politics of resistance: new public management and managerial identities in the UK public services. Organ Stud 26(5):683–706 Thompson P (2005) Brands, boundaries and bandwagons: a critical reflection on critidies. In: Grey C, Willmott H (eds) Critidies: a reader. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 363–382 Weedon C (1987) Feminist practice & poststructuralist theory. Basil Blackwell, Oxford Willmott H (2010) Creating ‘value’ beyond the point of production: branding, financialization and market capitalization. Organization 17(5):517–542 Wright C, Nyberg D (2017) An inconvenient truth: how organizations translate climate change into business as usual. Acad Manag J 60(5):1633–1661 Wright C, Nyberg D, De Cock C, Whiteman G (2013) Future imaginings: organizing in response to climate change. Organization 20(3):433–453

8

Fictional Inquiry Dennis Schoeneborn and Joep Cornelissen

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Philosophical Foundations of the Epistemology of Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Purpose 1: Juxtaposing Fictional and Counterfactual Statements Against Empirical Reality to Generate Novel Insights and Enhance Our Understanding of That Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . Purpose 2: Juxtaposing Fictional/Counterfactual Statements Against Other Scientific Statements to Probe and Refine These Statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Purpose 3: Studying Fictional Realities as Objects of Inquiry in Their Own Right and Examining Their Impact on Actual Empirical Realities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion: Toward an Epistemology of Fiction in Management Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

140 142 143 146 152 154 155 155

Abstract

This chapter augments established epistemologies of representation and epistemologies of emancipation by adding a third orientation, which can be termed epistemology of fiction. An epistemology of fiction deliberately generates scientific statements that deviate from actual empirical reality. The chapter is structured according to three main purposes of fictional inquiry: (1) juxtaposing fictional and counterfactual statements with empirical reality to reveal new insights and enhance our understanding of that reality (e.g., through ideal-type thinking or D. Schoeneborn (*) Department of Management, Society and Communication (MSC), Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark School of Management and Technology, Institute of Management and Organization, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] J. Cornelissen Rotterdam School of Management, Department of Business-Society Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_54

139

140

D. Schoeneborn and J. Cornelissen

figurative imagination); (2) juxtaposing fictional/counterfactual statements against other scientific statements to test and refine the latter statements (e.g., via counterfactual reasoning, thought experiments, or simulation); and (3) drawing on fictional realities as objects of inquiry in their own right, typically in order to understand the impact of these fictional realities on current or future (nonfictional) empirical realities. The chapter concludes with some considerations regarding the fit of an epistemology of fiction to management studies as an academic field. Keywords

Counterfactuals · Fiction · Ideal types · Management studies · Simulation · Thought experiments

Introduction In the philosophy of science, one can distinguish two main epistemological orientations that differ in how scientific statements relate to empirical reality. In an epistemology of representation, scholars strive to develop scientific statements that should match empirical reality as closely as possible. The main method employed for accomplishing such a match is to refine scientific statements by means of verification or falsification (e.g., Popper 1934; Shareff 2007). In an epistemology of emancipation, by contrast, scholars develop critical or normative statements with the ultimate aim of transforming empirical reality in such a way that it better matches these statements (e.g., Ezzamel and Willmott 2014; Scherer and Palazzo 2007). However, this basic distinction ignores a third possible way in which scientific statements and empirical reality can be interrelated. In this third epistemological orientation, which can be termed an epistemology of fiction, scholars develop fictional or counterfactual images or models without intending to represent nor to change existing empirical reality but with the aim of contrasting empirical reality with these statements. Generally speaking, this chapter distinguishes the following three main purposes of an epistemology of fiction (see Fig. 1): (1) using fictional and counterfactual scientific statements to contrast them with actual empirical reality as a means of revealing new insights and enhancing our understanding of that reality; (2) juxtaposing fictional and counterfactual theorizing with other representational or interpretative scientific statements as a way of probing and potentially enhancing the robustness of such statements; and (3) examining fictional realities (e.g., fictionalized art or narrative fantasies) as objects of inquiry in their own right, typically in order to understand the impact of these fictional realities on actual (nonfictional) empirical realities. While the first of these two purposes tend to relate primarily to the formative, front-end stage of the research process (such as theory development), the third purpose tends to be related mainly to the back-end stage, that is, to the execution of the research, treating fictional realities as empirical data. Beyond these three purposes of fictional inquiry, there is yet another fourth purpose that is characterized by a primarily practical orientation, as when scholars

8

Fictional Inquiry

Fictional/ counterfactual theories

Revealing novel insights about empirical reality • Ideal types • Figurative imagination

141 Probing & refining theories • Counterfactual statements • Thought experiments • Simulation

Representational theories

2

1

Fictional realities

3

Understanding fictional realities & their impact • Fictionalized data • Fiction as object of inquiry

Actual empirical realities

Fig. 1 Three purposes of fictional inquiry

use fictional scenarios, creativity, and design thinking to create novel (social) realities. While this is an important stream of research in its own right (see, for example, Jelinek et al. 2008) and can be linked to epistemological considerations, such as the theory of creative action developed by Joas (1996), this approach will not be covered in depth here since the orientation in these works tends to be more practical than epistemological. This focus on practicality is evident, for instance, in the following statement by Jelinek et al. (2008, p. 317–318): “Science raises the question ‘is this proposition valid or true?’,” while design asks “will it work better?” This chapter sketches out the contours of an epistemology of fiction with special reference to its application in management studies. For this purpose, this chapter compiles a diverse range of works that can be seen as different variants of fictional inquiry, including ideal-type thinking, figurative imagination, thought experiments, counterfactual reasoning, simulation, and the empirical study of fictionalized data, discussing these inquiries in relation to the three broad purposes defined above. A key contribution of this chapter is thus to demonstrate that these diverse approaches can be considered as part of a larger family of fictional inquiry in management studies, thereby providing a general epistemology of ways of seeing reality and a set of methodological tools (such as thought experiments and counterfactual reasoning) to give shape to this inquiry. As argued at the very end of this chapter, this epistemological orientation exhibits a particularly appropriate fit with management studies as a field.

142

D. Schoeneborn and J. Cornelissen

Philosophical Foundations of the Epistemology of Fiction Before elucidating the epistemology of fiction in relation to certain methodologies in more detail, it is helpful to contextualize its positioning and to define the overall concept of fiction mobilized in this chapter. Within the philosophy of science and linguistic philosophy, there are a range of writers and writings that are often collectively labelled as forming a “philosophy of fiction” (Savage et al. 2018, p. 975). These include Vaihinger’s (1924) foundational work on the philosophy of “as if,” Goodman’s (1978) work on counterfactuals and “worldmaking,” Searle’s (1975) work on speech acts and fiction, Walton’s (1990) work on fiction and pretense, Iser’s (1993) notion of fictionalizing acts, and Ricoeur’s (1979) philosophy of fiction and imagination. Drawing on this body of work, the concept of fiction can be most easily defined by focusing on the process of imagination by which fiction is generated. In short, this process involves an intentional act of pretending that certain realities apply, and as such is an essential exercise in almost any form of research, e.g., in terms of abstracting or projecting certain stylized images or defining hypothetical “constructs” (Podsakoff et al. 2016). This process follows an “as if” modality by which a set of imaginings are entertained as if they were real and were potentially descriptive and explanatory of the phenomenon or scenario studied. Because of this modality, fictions carry with them a somewhat ambivalent epistemological position, involving a kind of knowledge that may be consciously false but which nevertheless serves a practical purpose (Vaihinger 1924). Fictions are in many instances best understood as being not directly verifiable but as “auxiliary constructs” (Vaihinger 1924, p. 88) that are pragmatically useful in situations, e.g. in instances where we cannot directly rely on our sense impressions to fathom a subject but rather must approach it indirectly through our imagination. For example, when individuals personify an organization through speech (Taylor and Cooren 1997), such a personification is fictive insofar as the image that it projects is based on premises we merely pretend to be applicable for the purpose and in the service of our sensemaking (Phillips 1995). An organization is, simply put, not factually and literally a human actor of flesh and blood (Halgin et al. 2018). However, the fictional invocation provides a helpful heuristic for structuring and directing people’s thinking and thus affords a way of expressing and sharing an understanding of what would otherwise remain an overly abstract and intractable concept (cf. Searle 2010). Conceiving an organization in this way thus inevitably involves an intentional act of imagination “because the creation of a reality that exists only because we think it exists requires a certain level of imagination” (Searle 2010, p. 40). Such imagination, in turn, involves intentional acts of pretense (Searle 1975), since “we have to treat something as something that it is not intrinsically” (Searle 2010, p. 121). The intentional acts of pretense or imagination that constitute fictions are what enable individuals – including individual researchers – to make sense of and accordingly enact their understandings of organizations. This focus on the intentionality of imagination, rather than on the fidelity or resonance of what is imagined, stems from scholarship on fiction within the fields of representational philosophy

8

Fictional Inquiry

143

and symbolic anthropology (Goodman 1978; Iser 1993). It is this focus that distinguishes the approach to fiction adopted here from other dramaturgical and symbolic approaches based on narrative fiction (see, for example, Gabriel 2000; Phillips 1995). Although imagination and pretense can also connote subjective and playful fantasizing (March 1995), the meaning of fiction put forward here is in accordance with that developed by Goodman (1978), which is closer to the Latin roots of the term fictio and which designates serious and instrumental ways of pretending, postulating, and hypothesizing. In this perspective, while fictions may be literally false, at least initially, such falsehoods are not merely fanciful but rather serve direct practical purposes. Taking up the earlier example of the fiction of corporate personhood, this fiction not only enables corporate governance and corporate law but also facilitates the transaction of goods and resources in the real world (Fama and Jensen 1985). Instantiated in corporate imagery, corporate personification may even amplify the consumption of products and services, turning such consumption into rich symbolic experiences (Aaker 1997; Marchand 1998). Similarly, the use of fiction in academic research helps us to grasp abstract phenomena, enabling us to form novel and potentially useful ideas. The following sections focus on how this happens, referring to a number of specific methodological tools by which fictional imagination can be incorporated into the research process.

Purpose 1: Juxtaposing Fictional and Counterfactual Statements Against Empirical Reality to Generate Novel Insights and Enhance Our Understanding of That Reality The epistemology of fiction set out in this section applies especially to the initial stage of the scientific process, that is, to the genesis of new theoretical ideas. In critical rationalist epistemology, also known as “falsificationism” (e.g., Popper 1934), which arguably remains the predominant epistemological orientation in the natural and social sciences today, the process by which new theoretical ideas come into being is considered as “pre-scientific” and thus as being located outside of the scientific process as such. As argued in this chapter, however, this “pre-stage” is of great importance for the advancement of scientific knowledge, comprising as it does the systematic ways in which novel theoretical ideas are generated in the first place (see also the notion of “disciplined imagination” by Weick 1989). The imagination of fictional and counterfactual realities that can expand and illuminate the horizon of potentialities constitutes an important mechanism for developing new theory (Cornelissen and Durand 2014) – beyond attempts of representing or “mapping” empirical reality by means of (law-like) scientific statements. Such forms of imagination may be critical or normative in nature, serving as an antidote to current reality and/or as an image of how things could or should be. The focus here is on the general epistemology, regardless of the ends to which such forms of imagination are made to serve. This section present a range of approaches in which counterfactual and fictional thinking is employed, particularly in the phase of theory development and discovery,

144

D. Schoeneborn and J. Cornelissen

that is, at the front-end of the research process. More specifically, the section introduces and elucidates (1) ideal-type thinking and (2) figurative imagination as two main forms of fictional inquiry.

Ideal Types One classical form of fictional inquiry is the development of ideal types (Doty and Glick 1994). Dating back to the works of the sociologist Max Weber (1904/1969), ideal types are abstractions from social reality that are logically possible but are usually not found as such in empirical reality. The development of ideal types is systematic in that it takes its starting point in empirical reality but involves extending instances and features of that reality to their logical limit and probing them as part of conceptualized images or scenarios: An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged [. . .] into a unified analytical construct. In its conceptual purity this mental construct cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality. (Weber 1969, p. 90)

For Weber, ideal types are logically coherent, rational, and at least empirically possible. At the same time, however, ideal types are not designed to describe empirical reality as such. According to Popper’s (1934) “border of demarcation” criterion, therefore, such ideal types would be part of metaphysics and not of the social sciences because they are not falsifiable. Nevertheless, working with ideal types can be useful in that they allow for comparing and contrasting analytically “pure” concepts with actual empirical reality. Accordingly, ideal-type theorizing has also found its way into the field of management and organization studies (e.g., Doty and Glick 1994; Meyer et al. 1993; Scherer and Palazzo 2007). For instance, Voegtlin and his colleagues (2012) have drawn on Habermasian theories of deliberative democracy to develop their ideal type notion of “responsible leadership.” This idealized notion imposes significant pressure on leaders and managers to consider stakeholder demands and sensitivities in each and every step of their day-to-day decision-making. While this ideal in its “pure” form may never be found in actual managerial reality, the ideal type can nevertheless be analytically valuable as a conceptual category for capturing the extent to which certain real-life constellations more or less approximate to this ideal. In the same context, it is important to note that ideal types in Weber’s initial conceptualization are not necessarily “ideal” in the sense of being desirable but rather in the sense of being abstracted from social reality. As shown in the wellknown example of the “homo economicus” (Thaler 1996), however, ideal types often do end up being misunderstood as descriptive statements about empirical reality or even as normative statements about how empirical reality should be like. As such, ideal types may become embedded as base assumptions about empirical reality rather than continuing to serve their original purpose as useful theoretical abstractions to which empirical reality can be compared.

8

Fictional Inquiry

145

Figurative Imagination A further important source of counterfactual and fictional thinking in theory development is the figurative imagination of organization and management through the use of metaphors, analogies, and other rhetorical figures (Morgan 1986; Tsoukas 1993). The work of Gareth Morgan (1986) has provided us with a rich overview of how figurative imaginations of organization, including imagining an organization as a machine, organism, or brain, have gained a foothold in the field of organization and management studies and provided the basis for different theorizations of organization. Indeed, comprehending organizations via metaphors and analogies is among the most common and prominent ways of developing theories of organization (cf. Cornelissen and Durand 2014; Shepherd and Sutcliffe 2015). For the context of this inquiry, it is further important to note that, in contrast to theories that aim to provide as-precise-as-possible representations of phenomena (as in the case of Popperian epistemology), rhetorical figures such as metaphors and analogies derive their heuristic value precisely from the distance and dissimilarity between the epistemic domains they connect with one another. Anthropomorphic metaphors such as organizational knowledge, memory, and learning, for example, all benefit from the fact that the metaphor’s target domain (i.e., the organization) is in many respects not identical with the metaphor’s source domain (i.e., the human mind) (Schoeneborn et al. 2013). Such metaphors serve in this way to open up avenues for developing new insights through analogical comparison. In other words, it is the dissimilarity rather than the similarity between the metaphor and the phenomenon under investigation that becomes the key driving force of novel insights. As Cornelissen (2006, p. 1590) puts it: [. . .] for a metaphor to be apt and effective, the conjoined target and source concepts need to come from distant domains in our semantic memory; [this requires] the search for ‘betweendomains distance’, which must be fairly large for the metaphor to be effective because close distances provide little interaction or surprise.

In this sense, therefore, the effective use of metaphors and other rhetorical figures entails a certain balance or trade-off between their degree of aptness, which requires a certain “fit” and similarity, and their heuristic value, which is typically increased by distance and dissimilarity (see Cornelissen 2004, 2005). A relevant example of the power of dissimilarity can be found in the metaphor of “organizational sleep and insomnia” (Schoeneborn et al. 2013). While obviously counterfactual in the sense that organizations do not sleep, at least not in the same sense as humans, this metaphor can help generate novel readings and insights by tapping into the source domain of the human mind, including recent research from the neurosciences, to shed new light on the importance of processual rhythms in organizational settings (akin to circadian wake-sleep cycles). By virtue of analogical reasoning, as Schoeneborn et al. (2013) argue, the sleep metaphor is thus useful in spite of the dissimilarities between these epistemic domains, serving in this case to highlight the analogous and problematic tendencies of “social acceleration” (see also Rosa 2013) that apply both to organizational entities and to individual beings. Again

146

D. Schoeneborn and J. Cornelissen

it should be reiterated that metaphors such as the image of organizational sleep are not intended to “map” the empirical reality of organizations in the sense of providing an exact correspondence, since otherwise they would merely serve to make the similar more salient (Cornelissen 2005); rather the intention is to generate partly counterfactual insights that stem precisely from the distance between the figurative image and empirical reality. Finally, it is important to note that the need for dissimilarity between domains in such fictional inquiry should not be taken to imply that the greater the distance between these domains the better. In line with Weick’s (1989) considerations on disciplined imagination and thought trials, the onus here is on researchers to report openly on the selection criteria applied for their figurative imaginations and the heuristics by which they seek to connect (innovative) blends of domains (see also the selection criteria outlined by Cornelissen 2006 or the model of the “responsible actionability” of metaphors proposed by Schoeneborn et al. 2022). As Cornelissen (2006, p. 1583) has argued, it is in the same spirit that “researchers need to creatively search for new, possibly foreign concepts to compare metaphorically with the target concept of organization in order to probe and possibly advance organization theory further.” An important additional consideration in this respect is that figurative imaginations usually differ from ideal-type thinking in the sense elaborated by Weber, above all in the way that these theorizations relate to empirical reality. More specifically, figurative imaginations do not serve as nonempirical concepts by design but instead are employed to build bridges between different epistemic and empirical domains, in this way facilitating the transferability of insights across these domains, including even mutual and bidirectional transferability (see also Schoeneborn et al. 2016). As such, the remnants of metaphors may make their way into the very fabric of a theory and theoretical assumptions about reality, as in the case of seeing an organization as a “nexus of contracts” or as an “open system” of sorts. While initially being used in a heuristic manner, the implications and new inferences generated by a metaphor may thus be extended into constructs, basic explanations, and default assumptions, that is, into the underlying structure of theoretical argumentation (Ketokivi et al. 2017).

Purpose 2: Juxtaposing Fictional/Counterfactual Statements Against Other Scientific Statements to Probe and Refine These Statements This section turns the focus of attention to a second main purpose of an epistemology of fiction, that is, juxtaposing fictional or counterfactual statements against other (representational or interpretative) statements in order to probe and refine these statements. Three such forms of fictional inquiry are presented here in particular: (a) counterfactual reasoning, (b) thought experiments, and (c) simulation.

Counterfactual Reasoning At its core, a counterfactual is a statement in which a false or contrary-to-fact premise is followed by some assertion about what would happen if the premise

8

Fictional Inquiry

147

were to be true. Counterfactual reasoning is not only common in our everyday reasoning (see Paulsen 2014) but also has a rich history within the philosophy of science. Counterfactual reasoning has been linked to questions of causation and causal inference (Lewis 1973) as well as to possibilistic thinking that queries existing beliefs and offers the basis for new ideas and candidate inferences (Goodman 1978). In the context of causation, David Hume already hinted long ago at the importance of counterfactuals for causal inferences. The philosopher David Lewis (1973, 1986) has since elaborated Hume’s original ideas into a separate methodological approach that recognizes how “we think of a cause as something that makes a difference, and the difference it makes must be a difference from what would have happened without it” (Lewis 1986, p. 160). The core idea in Lewis’ (1973, 1986) counterfactual analysis is that of postulating “possible worlds” that function as disjuncture to the actual world in which we have observed the presence of antecedent A and effect B. The idea here is that there is an “actual world” which we observe and assume to be true while at the same time we can imagine alternative possible worlds, that is, states of affairs that might have been and where things might have worked out differently in terms of causation. Some of these imagined worlds are, of course, “closer” (in a metaphorical sense) than others, and Lewis has suggested that using more closely imagined alternatives (i.e., more similar worlds) best serves to foster our ability of establishing the dependency of B on A. By contrast, more remote alternatives are prone to obscure the comparison of causal relationships. The idea here is that if we systematically alter a possible antecedent A in an alternative possible world while keeping everything else constant, we will be better able to decipher A’s effect on B in the real world. If we do so while still depicting a plausible alternative scenario or scenarios (in the absence of A), we can zoom in on factors that really matter, using contrastive reasoning to filter out causal from noncausal dependencies in the real world (Cornelissen and Durand 2014). In Lewis’ approach to counterfactual reasoning, the reasoning undertaken by the researcher in working out whether a premise about A affecting B is likely to be true is largely conceptual in nature (Durand and Vaara 2009). Another stream of counterfactual analysis is focused on testing and probing the stability and contours of a presumed causal relationship (Collins et al. 2004; Woodward 2005). The latter approach, known as “causal modeling” (Pearl 2000, 2018; Spirtes et al. 2000), includes a range of techniques based on specifying a set of causal graphs or models and then running counterfactual tests on them to establish the nature of the causal relationship involved. Once researchers have formulated a model or graph based on a presumed “primitive” causal mechanism, they can use counterfactual interventions to test whether the presumed causal relationships hold, while also accounting for any spurious effects in the coefficients estimated previously. Here the counterfactual intervention would take the form of asking what would have happened to the causal model if A had been absent. As an example, such an inquiry could include testing whether a firm’s performance would be abnormal if we intervened to make sure that the firm does not possess strategic resources and capabilities (Durand and Vaara 2009). The effect of the intervention can then be predicted by modifying the corresponding equations representing the causal model and computing new

148

D. Schoeneborn and J. Cornelissen

probability functions as the surface manifestation of the presumed causal mechanism (Beebee 2014). Such counterfactual reasoning geared towards causal inference has been described by Cornelissen and Durand (2014, p. 1006) as a “lab-rat form of counterfactual reasoning” that “consists of a researcher contrasting a given actual scenario with a reasonably different imagined scenario of causal patterns and associations” in order to “exploit the carefully controlled structure of similarities and differences between the actual and imagined situation to determine patterns of causality and the plausibility of rival explanations.” In this kind of counterfactual reasoning, similar to controlled manipulations in lab experiments (Turner 1996, 2001), the researcher first attempts to isolate important causal factors and then imagines a comparable analogue as the basis on which to construct plausible alternative theoretical scenarios and to “test” alternative causal conjectures. While there has been growing recognition of the role of counterfactual reasoning in causal inference (Pearl 2018), it is less widely acknowledged that such reasoning also plays an important role in querying existing conceptual assumptions, theoretical interpretations and explanations, aiming thereby to check the plausibility of certain assumptions and/or to generate new theoretical ideas and research questions (Cornelissen and Durand 2014). Although such reasoning may be connected with questions of causal inference (Cornelissen and Durand 2014), it is analytically distinct to the extent that it merits discussion in its own right. One prominent way in which such possibilistic thinking manifests, for example, is when researchers reflect on base assumptions and default explanations concerning a particular topic, interrogating and problematizing those assumptions and identifying possible alternatives (Alvesson and Sandberg 2011). Based on asking “what-if” questions in order to think about a phenomenon differently, researchers construct alternative imagined scenarios and possible worlds which may incorporate basic variables from a particular literature or default theory but do so in ways that reframe the subject and suggest fresh leads and questions for research. Inserting alternative assumptions and explanations comprises a form of analogical reasoning, albeit in this case with such reasoning oriented towards providing an antidote to existing theoretical thought. As thought experiments, the purpose of these kinds of “spotlight” counterfactuals (Cornelissen and Durand 2014) is to highlight the features of a given theory or literature in such a way as to prompt a rethinking of the theory’s underlying assumptions and default logics. The counterfactual mirror image derived as a result of this process typically comprises a basic structure that is easy to discern and which, once pointed out, leads us to recognize the possibility of a different set of assumptions. The main aim is thus to stimulate reflexivity and to identify potential leads for alternative lines of inquiry and theory (Reed 2011). When these leads are extended into a more comprehensive theoretical frame, counterfactual reasoning may take the form of what Cornelissen and Durand (2014) have termed “constitutive” counterfactual reasoning. In such cases, researchers reframe an entire topic in a comprehensively new manner, with a new organizing frame that structures thinking, seeds a new set of theoretical assumptions regarding the topic, and powers new inferences in the form of specific

8

Fictional Inquiry

149

interpretations and explanations. As Cornelissen and Durand (2014, p. 1006) have argued, such reasoning involves “a complex blending of a proposed and prior theoretical frame, whereby the combination of contrasts and similarities, together with additional assumptions, is simulated and elaborated into an emergent conceptual representation and inferences.” Constitutive counterfactual reasoning, as in this example, expands theory in a completely new direction. In a single stroke, it grounds a master frame with a new but logically related set of assumptions, constructs, and causal inferences. The concept of such reasoning is informed by philosopher Nelson Goodman’s work on “counterfactual conditionals” (1947). Goodman argued that rather than operating on a focused set of assumptions, as in the case of “spotlight counterfactuals,” entire new worlds of interpretation and explanation come about when researchers adopt a broader approach to reasoning and interject a completely new conceptual structure, including base assumptions regarding certain classes of subjects and the causal or processual contingencies typically involved in such cases. Although Goodman highlighted the contrast between spotlight and constitutive counterfactuals (see also Fauconnier and Turner 1998), in many instances of research, it may be hard to differentiate these two types. Indeed, a spotlight counterfactual may be expanded in the course of research in terms of its scope and machinery to the extent that it becomes a constitutive counterfactual (Cornelissen and Durand 2014).

Thought Experiments A further and related form of fictional inquiry with a long history in the sciences involves thought experiments. Within the social sciences, and in management research, in particular, there is a widespread recognition that thought experiments play a crucial role in theory development (see Folger and Turillo 1999). For example, Simon (1991) used a creative thought experiment involving “a mythical visitor from Mars” observing the Earth from above as a way of making the case that organizations rather than markets are the dominant institution of today’s time. While Simon’s thought experiment was largely educational or illustrative in purpose, other thought experiments have given shape to entirely new theories. For example, Coase (1937, p. 388) conducted a thought experiment that asked the main question, “why is there any organization” if production activities are mechanically driven by price movements in the market. He envisaged a world governed by markets but also one mediated by organizations. Coase’s thought experiment centered on the following two questions (1937, p. 388): (1) “Having regard to the fact that if production is regulated by price movements, production could be carried on without any organisation at all, well might we ask, why is there any organisation?” and (2) “Why are some production activities organized in firms rather than markets?” Questions of this kind laid the basis for transaction costs economics, which has since become one of the most well-established theories in management and economics. Thought experiments can thus generate new vantage points and newly imagined scenarios that, in turn, can form the basis for extended theorizing (Folger and Turillo 1999). When such experiments are done well, moreover, they can also generate new kinds of conceptual vocabularies that previously did not exist. The question thus arises as to

150

D. Schoeneborn and J. Cornelissen

how a researcher can design and conduct a thought experiment in ways that generate the potential for useful new theories. Karl Weick’s (1989) notion of “disciplined imagination” offers a specific methodology for conducting effective thought experiments. Weick likens theory construction to an evolutionary process by which researchers first imagine various representations of a target subject before running these images in their minds and then selecting the most viable image for further theorizing and research. Researchers commonly engage in a number of mental experiments or thought trials when they iterate between reviewed literature, preliminary analyses, background assumptions, and their own intuition, considering a rich cascade of images as representations of the subject or problem at hand (imagination) before selecting and deciding upon a single image that best serves as a starting point for further inquiry into the problem (discipline). Disciplined imagination is thus typically abductive and includes a combination of deductive reasoning based upon readings of the relevant literature and inductive reasoning through intuitive thinking rather than an exclusive focus on either (Weick 1989). In Weick’s (1989, p. 529) own words: “Theorists depend on pictures, maps, and metaphors to grasp the object of study, and have no choice [in this], but can be more deliberate in the formation of these images and more respectful of representations and efforts to improve them.” Once researchers have formed such images and mapped them out to some extent, the next step is to select the most plausible and promising image through the application of particular selection criteria. These selection criteria are essentially heuristics for gauging the potential of an image for theory and research, including questions such as whether or not the image is interesting, real, relevant, and connected to other ideas, observations, and images. With this process of “disciplined imagination,” Weick places emphasis on the process of theorizing itself rather than its outputs, as well as on how imagination can be fostered by this process. A recent paper on thought experiments by Kornberger and Mantere (2020) extends the creative aspect of thought experiments in Weick’s work with a focus on the critical functions of such experiments. In their view, thought experiments can be used to problematize existing theoretical understandings by highlighting limitations and unforeseen implications in order to reveal the problematic nature of any taken-for-granted assumptions underlying theories. This critical emphasis can be traced back to Popper (1959), who considered thought experiments as viable tools for exploring the full range of implications of a theory and its possible unintended or unforeseen consequences in depth. Kornberger and Mantere (2020) further highlight how analogy, metaphor, and fiction often comprise the key ingredients and building blocks of thought experiments. This is the case in creative as well as in critical thought experiments, since both types involve researchers alternating between possible theoretical worlds, imaginatively completing and elaborating a set of ideas or thoughts and mentally running through the full scenario in their minds (and/or on paper). Given the extent to which many thought experiments rely on these elements, indeed, it is sometimes hard to distinguish clearly between a thought experiment and a counterfactual analysis. As such, many counterfactuals of the

8

Fictional Inquiry

151

constitutive kind (see above) can be considered as thought experiments and vice versa. In addition to offering new imagery (Weick 1989), including new theoretical grounds and ways of thinking about a subject, thought experiments can also provide a direct basis for novel concepts that can channel research in new directions. This was largely the case with transaction cost economics, for example, where a new conception of organization (as a production vehicle mediating in markets) gave rise to a whole range of new questions and directions for research. Kornberger and Mantere (2020) single out this important role of thought experiments, highlighting how they can form the basis for new conceptual combinations and leaps that can be turned into generative concepts. One example they offer is a new image with which to highlight how the nature of managerial control and indeed the role of managers may be changing in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic when so many professionals are increasingly working at home. Specifically, the authors evoke the image of a manager as a “rent collector” as a way of capturing this altered role as a result of the changes to coordination and control entailed in this newly distributed setting. Kornberger and Mantere (2020, p. 10) derive this image from a systematically developed and elaborated thought experiment which: [. . .] focuses on the aspect of control in organizing work in a distributed organization. [. . .] The transactional relationship between labour contract parties is elevated and the social, cultural and political aspects of organization become ornamental at best. Digitally charged Fordist managers that reverse-colonialize the home are rewarded for measuring, incentivizing and extracting outputs from individuals working from home. It is easy, following this line of reasoning, to extrapolate to a panoptic setting where the job of the manager will be handled more ‘effectively’, and ‘impartially’ by an AI, perhaps even a digital character such as the agents in the movie The Matrix.

Simulation Another key means of testing and refining existing theoretical assumptions is via formal modeling and computer-based simulations. Formal models and simulations have a long-standing tradition in the field of management studies (Hannah et al. 2021; Harrison et al. 2007), including James March’s (1991) classical model of exploration and exploitation in organizational learning and Cohen et al.’s (1972) “garbage-can model of organizational choice.” Two basic types of simulation models can be distinguished. One type generates probabilistic values derived from observed empirical data (e.g., Pentland et al. 2010), as in the classic example of weather forecasting based on past data about weather dynamics. Another type of model makes use of “synthetic data,” that is, data generated deductively and not derived directly from real-life settings. Scholars tend to draw on this data type either because certain data are nonexistent or inaccessible or because such data would be very costly to collect (Louie and Carley 2008). Such synthetic data enables the exploration of basic (causal) mechanisms between variables. Both types of simulation models (i.e., based either on observed or synthetic data) can be used to extrapolate and explore nonempirical and counterfactual “what-if” scenarios.

152

D. Schoeneborn and J. Cornelissen

Formal modeling and simulation is not an empirical approach as such, but rather is located in a space in between theory and empirics. Typically, simulation models are employed as a tool for theory development and theory testing (see Hannah et al. 2021; Harrison et al. 2007). Since formal models inevitably require abstraction from empirical reality, they rely on the parsimony principle, also known as “Ockham’s razor” or the “law of briefness” (e.g., Meier and O’Toole 2008), i.e., the aim of combining model simplicity (and elegance) with explanatory and predictive power. While the relatively high degree of abstraction of simulation models may initially seem like a disadvantage, such abstraction allows models to be used for testing theories in research areas that are difficult, complex, or costly to investigate through other empirical means (Hannah et al. 2021). For instance, Haack et al. (2021) have employed a Markov model to study the interplay between the field-level and organizational-level dynamics of CSR practice adoption in a combined way, enabling them to explore dynamics that would otherwise require large-scale and multisite ethnographic research.

Purpose 3: Studying Fictional Realities as Objects of Inquiry in Their Own Right and Examining Their Impact on Actual Empirical Realities This section outlines a set of approaches in which counterfactual or fictional thinking plays a role in the middle or back-end of the research process, that is, as objects of inquiry in their own right. One way in which fiction can enter the research process in this way is when fictionalized content from novels, movies, TV shows, or other forms of performative art is treated as the main data source of a research study (Rhodes and Parker 2008). In studying management and organizations, for example, some scholars have drawn on fictionalized content such as TV shows, ranging from The Simpsons (Ellis 2008) to The Wire (Zundel et al. 2013). Fictional data is counterfactual in the sense that it draws on staged and fabricated content that often exaggerates or dramatizes real-life settings. Scholars have argued that such fictionalized content can serve as a valuable source of data in its own right, not necessarily in the sense of providing a glimpse through the peephole into real-life settings but rather as affording a way to study cultural manifestations and imaginations of management and organization (e.g., Griffin et al. 2017; Rhodes and Parker 2008). Moreover, some fictionalized content is grounded in quasi-ethnographic work (e.g., the TV series The Wire was based on the diligent work of journalist David Simon, who studied the homicide division of the Baltimore police for more than a year), and thus can provide researchers with in-depth insights into certain societal milieus that would otherwise be inaccessible or hard to capture and collect (Zundel et al. 2013). A key task for the researcher, in this case, is to distinguish (e.g., by means of triangulation with other sources) which aspects of fictionalized data are derived directly from ethnographic insights and which ones are mere exaggerations or extrapolations. As Paulsen (2014) points out, moreover, counterfactual and fictional thinking is part of our day-to-day social life. With the term “everyday counterfactuals,” Paulsen

8

Fictional Inquiry

153

refers to our recurrent imaginations of alternative realities in the sense of “what could be” or “what could have been.” With reference to the works of Sartre, Bloch, and Marcuse, he argues that “the human being is first and foremost a creature that projects itself into potentiality” (Paulsen 2014, p. 162). Accordingly, Paulsen calls for researchers to investigate the ways in which counterfactual thinking shapes our social life, potentially by means of other epistemologies. In the context of management and organization studies, meanwhile, Durand and Vaara (2009) have pointed to the importance of counterfactual thinking and what-if scenarios for strategy-making. Savage et al. (2018) have linked the importance of counterfactual thinking to a fundamental reconsideration of the notion of organization. In their article on fiction in organization studies, they unfold a fictional ontology of organization, arguing that counterfactual games of make-believe in which actors act on behalf of “the organization” as a fictional entity (see also Ortmann 2004) are ultimately what constitute organizations in the first place: Fiction is in this sense not simply a heuristic for understanding organizations but it is the core, or constitutive, process through which organizations are imagined and made sense of, and that shapes in a very real sense how people act around them. (Savage et al. 2018, p. 978)

This view invites us to study the micro-processes of “fictional games of makebelieve” through which organizations are recurrently “made up.” Other scholars have emphasized the importance of fictional accounts and fantasies of the future in fostering intraorganizational and cross-organizational change. For example, in the context of geoengineering, defined as “radical, deliberate, planetary-scale technological interventions into the earth’s atmospheric, oceanic, or terrestrial systems,” Augustine et al. (2019, p. 1930) have demonstrated that “societal-level imaginaries” of geoengineering “increasingly [have] been treated as an ‘as-if’ reality.” The authors develop a process model to explain how imagined/ hypothetical distant futures of geoengineering have attained such a degree of concreteness and credibility that they have come to be taken for “as-if” realities, even to the extent that actors can orient their behavior toward these imaginaries. Their study vividly illustrates how counterfactual and fictional imaginations of the distant future can yield strong formative effects in the here and now (see also Beckert 2016). Such studies further help us to theorize how fictions become “future-making practices” (see Wenzel et al. 2020). Similarly, Christensen et al. (2013) argue that “aspirational talk” in the form of a company’s fictional account of its prospective future achievements in the areas of CSR and sustainability should not be condemned as mere “greenwashing.” Rather it is precisely because of the discrepancy between such talk about future states of affairs and current business practices that fictional and aspirational talk can serve as an important resource for organizational and social change, as indeed has also been shown both through empirical studies (e.g., Haack et al. 2012; Penttilä 2020) and simulation-based studies (Haack et al. 2021). In sum, questions about the ways in which counterfactual and fictional thinking can influence organizational realities as this kind of thinking becomes manifest in communications constitute an exciting

154

D. Schoeneborn and J. Cornelissen

avenue of research. Such questions place the locus of inquiry on practices of meaning-making about organizations rather than using such data as windows into the supposedly underlying objective reality of organizations implied by representationalist epistemologies.

Conclusion: Toward an Epistemology of Fiction in Management Studies This chapter has laid out the contours of an epistemological orientation in organization and management studies that relies on counterfactual and fictional thinking. The main contribution of this chapter is twofold. First, it has systematically illuminated the horizon of possibilities in which counterfactual and fictional thinking can enter the research process. At the same time, the systematization of these various and heterogeneous approaches is by no means exhaustive but rather selective, being based primarily on approaches which have already gained significant attention in management and organization studies. Second, the chapter has added to existing representational and emancipatory epistemological orientations in management and organization studies by foregrounding the role of a third epistemology, i.e., that of fictional orientation. An epistemology of fiction is not principally concerned with representational mappings of a presumed objective reality but strives instead to diversify the range of lenses through which social, managerial, and organizational realities can be perceived and understood. Accordingly, one of the paramount tasks of such epistemological orientation is the development of new theoretical vocabularies and imageries (through ideal-type thinking, figurative imaginations, counterfactual thinking, and thought experiments, as outlined above) that could constitute a basis for downstream theorizing, such as forming conjectures and hypotheses, developing theoretical models, and (re)defining base assumptions. Furthermore, an epistemology of fiction can be said to exhibit a particular fit with management as a science and practice. This is because such an orientation is focused on providing new ways of seeing (cf. Shaw et al. 2017) and thus can help widen the range of options for organizational and managerial actions. Indeed, one might go so far as to ask whether an epistemology of fiction could provide the science of management with an epistemology sui generis. The answer to this is almost certainly negative, of course, since counterfactual and fictional thinking is also prominently represented in other forms of science and philosophy more generally (see Rescher 2001). Nevertheless, it can be argued that interest in fictional and counterfactual thinking, in the sense of broadening the option range for organizational and managerial action, is especially pronounced in management studies, not least as a way of affording researchers the flexibility to handle the large-scale and complex societal challenges of today’s times. Moreover, counterfactual thinking can be found across the various epistemological orientations in management science, including in the form of testing counterfactual hypotheses in (descriptive-explanatory) multivariate causal models and in the form of ideal-typical modeling of utopian or dystopian

8

Fictional Inquiry

155

worlds in (normative) critical management studies. In this sense, attending to fiction also enables us to identify certain frequently overlooked similarities among different epistemological orientations in management studies. In the same context, however, it is important to note that an epistemology of fiction should not be misunderstood as an invitation for an “anything goes” approach (Feyerabend 1976). On the contrary, and in the spirit of Weick’s (1989) notion of “disciplined imagination,” an epistemology of fiction calls for researchers to substitute (missing empirical) validity with considerations of plausibility (Weick 1989, p. 524) and to lay bare the systematic and disciplined character of their inquiry in an intersubjectively comprehensible manner (see also Cornelissen 2006). As furthermore shown in this chapter, an epistemology of fiction exhibits a strong proximity to abductive (rather than deductive or inductive) forms of theorizing (cf. Mantere and Ketokivi 2013; Weick 1989). At the same time, the selection of certain idealizations for use in as-if scenarios, thought experiments, and other ways of generating synthetic data, etc., should not be guided solely by the aim of developing new ways of seeing but also by ethical considerations of what the researcher deems to be “right.” This requires researchers to be modest about their abilities to control the meaning of their own theorizations and idealizations and thus to consider the often unintended effects of these forms of theorizing. (In this regard, see also the somewhat caricaturesque history of the ideal type of the “homo economicus” and the significant performative effects it has created; Morgan 2006). Notwithstanding these potential risks, if these forms of imagination are undertaken in the right manner and with due care and consideration, they can be immensely useful as heuristic devices to “feed” theory development and to expand our ways of thinking about, understanding and explaining complex subjects such as organizations, institutions, and grand societal challenges.

Cross-References ▶ Critical Inquiry ▶ Evidence-Based Management ▶ How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business ▶ Realist Inquiry

References Aaker J (1997) Dimensions of brand personality. J Mark Res 34:347–357 Alvesson M, Sandberg J (2011) Generating research questions through problematization. Acad Manag Rev 36:247–271 Augustine G, Soderstrom S, Milner D, Weber K (2019) Constructing a distant future: imaginaries in geoengineering. Acad Manag J 62:1930–1960 Beckert J (2016) Imagined futures: fictional expectations and capitalist dynamics. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

156

D. Schoeneborn and J. Cornelissen

Beebee H (2014) Causation. In: Dainton B, Robinson H (eds) The Bloomsbury companion to analytic philosophy. Bloomsbury, London Christensen LT, Morsing M, Thyssen O (2013) CSR as aspirational talk. Organization 20:372–393 Coase RH (1937) The nature of the firm. Economica 4:386–405 Cohen MD, March JG, Olsen JP (1972) A garbage can model of organizational choice. Adm Sci Q 17:1–25 Collins JD, Hall EJ, Paul LA, Hall N (2004) Causation and counterfactuals. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Cornelissen JP (2004) What are we playing at? Theatre, organization, and the use of metaphor. Organ Stud 25:705–726 Cornelissen JP (2005) Beyond compare: metaphor in organization theory. Acad Manag Rev 30: 751–764 Cornelissen JP (2006) Making sense of theory construction: metaphor and disciplined imagination. Organ Stud 27:1579–1597 Cornelissen JP, Durand R (2014) Moving forward: developing theoretical contributions in management studies. J Manag Stud 51:995–1022 Doty DH, Glick WH (1994) Typologies as a unique form of theory building: toward improved understanding and modeling. Acad Manag Rev 19:230–251 Durand R, Vaara E (2009) Causation, counterfactuals, and competitive advantage. Strateg Manag J 30:1245–1264 Ellis N (2008) “What the hell is that?”: the representation of professional service markets in the Simpsons. Organization 15:705–723 Ezzamel M, Willmott H (2014) Registering ‘the ethical’ in organization theory formation: towards the disclosure of an ‘invisible force’. Organ Stud 35:1013–1039 Fama EF, Jensen MC (1985) Organizational forms and investment decisions. J Financ Econ 14: 101–119 Fauconnier G, Turner M (1998) Conceptual integration networks. Cogn Sci 22:133–187 Feyerabend PK (1976) Wider den Methodenzwang. Skizze einer Anarchistischen Erkenntnistheorie. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main Folger R, Turillo CJ (1999) Theorizing as the thickness of thin abstraction. Acad Manag Rev 24: 742–758 Gabriel Y (2000) Storytelling in organizations: facts, fictions and fantasies. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK Goodman N (1978) Ways of worldmaking. Hackett, Indianapolis Griffin M, Harding N, Learmonth M (2017) Whistle while you work? Disney animation, organizational readiness and gendered subjugation. Organ Stud 38:869–894 Haack P, Schoeneborn D, Wickert C (2012) Talking the talk, moral entrapment, creeping commitment? Exploring narrative dynamics in corporate responsibility standardization. Organ Stud 33: 815–845 Haack P, Martignoni D, Schoeneborn D (2021) A bait-and-switch model of corporate social responsibility. Acad Manag Rev 46:440–464 Halgin DS, Glynn MA, Rockwell D (2018) Organizational actorhood and the management of paradox: a visual analysis. Organ Stud 39:645–664 Hannah DP, Tidhar R, Eisenhardt KM (2021) Analytic models in strategy, organizations, and management research: a guide for consumers. Strateg Manag J 42:329–360 Harrison JR, Lin Z, Carroll GR, Carley KM (2007) Simulation modeling in organizational and management research. Acad Manag Rev 32:1229–1245 Iser W (1993) The fictive and the imaginary: charting literary anthropology. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore Jelinek M, Romme AGL, Boland RJ (2008) Organization studies as a science for design: creating collaborative artefacts and research. Organ Stud 29:317–329 Joas H (1996) The creativity of action. Chicago University Press, Chicago

8

Fictional Inquiry

157

Ketokivi M, Mantere S, Cornelissen JP (2017) Reasoning by analogy and the progress of theory. Acad Manag Rev 42:637–658 Kornberger M, Mantere S (2020) Thought Experiments and Philosophy in Organizational Research. Organization Theory. https://doi.org/10.1177/2631787720942524 Lewis D (1973) Counterfactuals. Blackwell, Oxford, UK Lewis D (1986) The plurality of worlds. Blackwell, Oxford, UK Louie MA, Carley KM (2008) Balancing the criticisms: validating multi-agent models of social systems. Simul Model Pract Theory 16:242–256 Mantere S, Ketokivi M (2013) Reasoning in organization science. Acad Manag Rev 38:70–89 March JG (1991) Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning. Organ Sci 2:71–87 March JG (1995) The future, disposable organizations and the rigidities of imagination. Organization 2:427–440 Marchand R (1998) Creating the corporate soul: the rise of public relations and corporate imagery in American big business. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA Meier KJ, O’Toole LJ Jr (2008) Management theory and Occam’s razor: how public organizations buffer the environment. Adm Soc 39:931–958 Meyer AD, Tsui AS, Hinings CR (1993) Configurational approaches to organizational analysis. Acad Manag J 36:1175–1195 Morgan G (1986) Images of organization. Sage, Thousand Oaks Morgan MS (2006) Economic man as model man: ideal types, idealization and caricatures. J Hist Econ Thought 28:1–27 Ortmann G (2004) Als ob: Fiktionen und Organisationen. Springer VS, Wiesbaden Paulsen R (2014) The counterfactual imagination. In: Swedberg R (ed) Theorizing in social science. Stanford University Press, Stanford, pp 158–176 Pearl J (2000) Causality: models, reasoning and inference. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Pearl J (2018) The book of why: the new science of cause and effect. Basic Books, New York Pentland BT, Hærem T, Hillison D (2010) Comparing organizational routines as recurrent patterns of action. Organ Stud 31:917–940 Penttilä V (2020) Aspirational talk in strategy texts: a longitudinal case study of strategic episodes in corporate social responsibility communication. Bus Soc 59:67–97 Phillips N (1995) Telling organizational tales: on the role of narrative fiction in the study of organizations. Organ Stud 16:625–649 Podsakoff PM, MacKenzie SB, Podsakoff NP (2016) Recommendations for creating better concept definitions in the organizational, behavioral, and social sciences. Organ Res Methods 19:159–203 Popper KR (1934) The logic of scientific discovery. Hutchinson, London Reed I (2011) Interpretation and social knowledge: on the use of theory in the human sciences. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Rescher N (2001) Philosophical reasoning: a study in the methodology of philosophizing. Blackwell, Malden Rhodes C, Parker M (2008) Images of organizing in popular culture. Organization 15:627–637 Ricoeur P (1979) The function of fiction in shaping reality. Man World 12:123–141 Rosa H (2013) Social acceleration: a new theory of modernity. Columbia University Press, New York Savage P, Cornelissen JP, Franck H (2018) Fiction and organization studies. Organ Stud 39: 975–994 Scherer AG, Palazzo G (2007) Toward a political conception of corporate responsibility: business and society seen from a Habermasian perspective. Acad Manag Rev 32:1096–1120 Schoeneborn D, Blaschke S, Kaufmann IM (2013) Recontextualizing anthropomorphic metaphors in organization studies: the pathology of organizational insomnia. J Manag Inq 22:435–450 Schoeneborn D, Vasquez C, Cornelissen JP (2016) Imagining organization through metaphor and metonymy: unpacking the process-entity paradox. Hum Relat 69:915–944

158

D. Schoeneborn and J. Cornelissen

Schoeneborn D, Vasquez C, Cornelissen JP (2022) Theorizing the role of metaphors in co-orienting collective action towards grand challenges: The example of the Covid-19 pan-demic. Research in the Sociology of Organizations 79:69–91 Searle JR (1975) The logical status of fictional discourse. New Lit Hist 6:319–332 Searle JR (2010) Making the social world: the structure of human civilization. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK Shareff R (2007) Want better business theories? Maybe Karl Popper has the answer. Acad Manag Learn Edu 6:272–280 Shaw JD, Bansal P, Gruber M (2017) New ways of seeing: elaboration on a theme. Acad Manag J 60:397–401 Shepherd DA, Sutcliffe KM (2015) The use of anthropomorphizing as a tool for generating organizational theories. Acad Manag Ann 9:97–142 Simon HA (1991) Organizations and markets. J Econ Perspect 5:25–44 Spirtes P, Glymour CN, Scheines R, Heckerman D (2000) Causation, prediction, and search. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Taylor JR, Cooren F (1997) What makes communication ‘organizational’? How the many voices of a collectivity become the one voice of an organization. J Pragmat 27:409–438 Thaler RH (1996) Doing economics without homo economicus. In: Medema S, Samuels W (eds) Foundations of research in economics. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, pp 227–237 Tsoukas H (1993) Analogical reasoning and knowledge generation in organization theory. Organ Stud 14:323–346 Turner M (1996) Conceptual blending and counterfactual argument in the social and behavioral sciences. In: Tetlock P, Belkin A (eds) Counterfactual thought experiments in world politics. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp 291–295 Turner M (2001) Cognitive dimensions of social science: the way we think about politics, economics, law, and society. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK Vaihinger H (1924) The philosophy of ‘as if’. Kegan Paul, London Walton K (1990) Mimesis as make-believe: on the foundations of the representational arts. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Weber M (1904/1969) The methodology of the social sciences. Free Press, New York Weick KE (1989) Theory construction as disciplined imagination. Acad Manag Rev 14:516–531 Wenzel M, Krämer H, Koch J, Reckwitz A (2020) Future and organization studies: on the rediscovery of a problematic temporal category in organizations. Organ Stud 41:1441–1455 Woodward J (2005) Making things happen: a theory of causal explanation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK Zundel M, Holt R, Cornelissen J (2013) Institutional work in the wire: an ethological investigation of flexibility in organizational adaptation. J Manag Inq 22:102–120

9

The Performativity of Theories Jean-Pascal Gond and Guillaume Carton

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Conceptual Roots of Performativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Performativity of Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Distinguishing Two Extremes of a Continuum: Performativity as a Mindset and Performativity as a Social Mechanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Core Common Assumptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Distinct Commitments and Analytical Foci . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Producing Knowledge “Through” vs. “About” Performativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Performative Frictions and in/commensurability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moving Forward: Combining Performativity as a Mindset and Performativity as a Social Mechanism? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion and Outlook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

160 161 162 165 167 168 170 171 175 176 177 177

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to explain how organization and management studies have built on and helped advance various streams of research dedicated to the performativity of theory – that is, how theory shapes the patterns of social interactions that constitute social reality. For that purpose, two ideal-type positions that form the poles of a continuum of scholarship about theory

J.-P. Gond (*) Bayes Business School, City University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] G. Carton Emlyon Business School, Écully, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_56

159

160

J.-P. Gond and G. Carton

performativity are distinguished. These poles consist of approaching either performativity as a mindset – an onto-epistemic lens helpful to reconsider the nature or organizational phenomena and management concepts – or of analyzing performativity as a social mechanism involved in the production and transformation of social reality for actors. By relying on illustrations from recent research, the common core assumptions underlying both perspectives on performativity can be specified as well as these perspectives’ distinctive commitments to these assumptions, analytical foci, and contribution to organizational knowledge of performativity. Finally, the chapter discusses how the insights generated at each pole of this continuum complement each other and can advance organizational and management studies of theory performativity.

Keywords

Performativity · John Austin · Performativity as a mindset · Performativity as a social mechanism

Introduction The question of how management and organization theories come to matter to managers and organizations generate recurrent concerns that have been discussed under the umbrella of the “rigour-relevance debate” (Carton and Mouricou 2017; Kieser et al. 2015; Grossmann-Hensel and Seidl 2021) or the “academic-practitioner gap” or “divide” (Bartunek and Rynes 2014; Carton and Ungureanu 2018). One fruitful epistemological angle to make sense of such a question consists of approaching the activity of organizational scholars not as “representing neutrally” an external reality, but rather as “intervening actively” within this reality (Hacking 1983; Pickering 1995). Research dedicated to the performativity of theory is predicated on this insight and analyses scientific statements as (co-)constitutive of empirical (social) reality. This chapter explains how organization and management studies can build on the streams of research dedicated to the performativity of theory so as to move beyond a representational stance while building on the rich conceptual roots of the performativity concept. After having positioned organizational studies of performativity in the broader history of performativity studies in social sciences, two positions about the performativity of theory can be distinguished: performativity as a mindset from performativity as a social mechanism. These two positions form a continuum that accounts for the various styles of scholarship investigating the performativity of theory. The chapter finally discusses how these distinct modes of theorizing about performativity can support new research perspectives on the performativity of theories.

9

The Performativity of Theories

161

The Conceptual Roots of Performativity John Austin defined in his book How to Do Things with Words a performative utterance as one “in which to say something is to do something; or in which by saying or in saying something we are doing something” (Austin 1962, p. 12; italics in original). For scholars interested in the performativity of theory, it is not without irony that by doing so, he contributed to bring into being the field of studies dedicated to the pragmatic uses of language – i.e., how do ordinary people use language to make things happen in social contexts. Austin illustrated this insight with the case of utterances pronounced during a wedding ceremony (e.g., “I do take this woman [man] to be my lawful wedded wife [husband]”), as “it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it” (Austin 1962, p. 5). John Searle, himself a student of Austin, further elaborated on this insight to develop the notion of speech act and develop a typology of speech acts, whether they are meaningful utterances (locutionary acts), whether they express an attitude (illocutionary acts), or whether they are brought about by saying something (perlocutionary acts) (Searle 1969). This triggered a long-lasting controversy with Derrida (1979), according to whom speech acts are not so much the product of their conditions of utterance (e.g., serious intention of the future married uttering their vows, presence of a priest during the ceremony) than citations that reiterate prior situations for the audience (e.g., knowledge by all the participants that they are attending a wedding ceremony). These debates have improved scholars’ understanding of speech utterances and how language can transform the social world. Moving away from these early philosophical and linguistics debates, the notion of performativity then started a long journey across multiple academic fields, from philosophy to literature studies and the social sciences (Denis 2006; Loxley 2007). The performativity concept has been used and redefined for purposes as diverse as understanding how readers coproduce fiction works in the field of literary critique (Fish 1982), how gender is constituted in feminist scholarship (Butler 1990, 1997), in philosophy to document how knowledge production became focused on a continuous search for efficiency in postmodern societies (Lyotard 1984), or in sociology to explain how economic theory is involved in the constitution of markets (Callon 1998; MacKenzie 2006). The import of these various conceptualizations of performativity in organization and management studies produced a vivid but fragmented field of study characterized by competing understandings of performativity. On the one hand, the sustained interest of organizational scholars in the notion performativity is illustrated by the publication of special issues dedicated to this theme (e.g., Human Relations 2018 “virtual special issue”; Long Range Planning 2018; M@n@gement 2017; Organization Studies 2021). On the other hand, the fragmented nature of the field has been

162

J.-P. Gond and G. Carton

illustrated in a review of the field that identified no less than eight distinct takes on performativity in organizational studies (Gond et al. 2016) – five of them corresponding to straightforward borrowing from foundational perspectives on performativity and regard performativity as doing things with words (Austin); searching for efficiency (Lyotard); constituting the self (Butler, Derrida); bringing theory into being (Callon, MacKenzie); or socio-materiality mattering (Barad); three corresponding to organizational scholars’ creative re-appropriation of the concept of performativity, and approach performativity as constitutive communication (Taylor, Cooren), enacting routines (Feldman, D’Adderio), or making critical theory influential (Spicer, Alvesson, Kärreman). Table 1 provides an overview of these various perspectives that have nurtured the discussion of performativity in organization and management studies in recent years, and which have been frequently cross-fertilized to advance current understanding of the core phenomenon of one of these eight perspectives – the performativity of theory.

The Performativity of Theory Central to the organizational scholarship dedicated to performativity is a stream of research dedicated to the organizational life of theories, which analyses “performativity as bringing theory into being” (Gond et al. 2016, p. 447) and is concerned with how theories co-constitute organizational phenomena (see greyshaded line in Table 1). This specific take on performativity leverages insights from the sociology fields of Science, Technology and Society (STS) studies and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and in particular the works of Barry Barnes (1983), Michel Callon (1998), Bruno Latour (1996), and Donald MacKenzie (2007), to explore the ramifications and implications of the “performativity of economics” thesis, according to which economics, broadly defined, contributes to shaping and constituting economies rather than observing or representing economic activities (Callon 1998, p. 2; see also Muniesa 2014; Muniesa and Callon 2007). In recent years, students of organization and management studies have extended this line of research, either by analyzing how economic language and concepts, such as rational choice theory (Cabantous et al. 2010; Cabantous and Gond 2011), transforms organizational and management practices (Ferraro et al. 2005), or by focusing their attention on the performativity of organization and management studies itself (Bartunek 2020; Carton 2020). For instance, more attention has been focused on how popular and fashionable notions such as modularity (D’Adderio and Pollock 2014), Michael Porter’s “Creating Shared Value” (Ligonie 2018), or Kim and Mauborgne’s “Blue Ocean Strategy” (Carton 2020) acquired an organizational life of their own and ultimately reshaped organizations (Bartunek 2020). In addition, organizational scholars have debated avidly about whether and how critical rather than mainstream management theories are and/or could be performed (Cabantous et al. 2016; Fleming and Banerjee 2016; Huault et al. 2017; Spicer et al. 2009). Debates and discussions of theory performativity move away from relying on well-established philosophical traditions to explore organizational or managerial

9

The Performativity of Theories

163

Table 1 Eight takes on performativity in organization and management studies

Borrowing of foundational perspectives

Organizational perspective on performativity

Conceptual roots

Key insights and themes in organizational analysis

Illustrative OMT paper

(1) Performativity as doing things with words

Austin, Searle

Key role of language and speech-act in the constitution of organizational phenomena such as strategy or organizational change

Ford and Ford (1995) and Kornberger and Clegg (2011)

(2) Performativity as searching for efficiency

Lyotard

Anti-performative stance: Critical management study’s (CMS) call to resist the search for efficiency-driving academic knowledge production in post-modern societies

Cooper and Burrell (1988) and Fournier and Grey (2000)

(3) Performativity as actors constituting the self

Butler, Derrida

Constitution and (re)production of gendered managerial roles and identities in the workplace

Harding (2004) and Tyler and Cohen (2010)

(4) Performativity as bringing theory into beinga

Barnes, Callon, MacKenzie

Role of academics, theories (in particular economics) and expert knowledge in the co-construction of organizational phenomena

Cabantous and Gond (2011) and Ferraro et al.(2005)

Analysis of the constitution of boundaries between social and material entities through practices and organizations

Nyberg (2009) and Orlikowski and Scott (2014)

Barad, (5) Performativity as socio-materiality Latour mattering

(continued)

164

J.-P. Gond and G. Carton

Table 1 (continued)

Creative reappropriations

(6) Performativity as constitutive communication (see Taylor and Van Every 1999)

Combination of (1) and insights from Latour

Analysis of how organizations and organizational phenomena are constituted and re/produced through communicative events and artefacts

Cooren (2004) and Schoeneborn and Scherer (2012)

(7) Performativity as the expression of routine (see Feldman and Pentland 2003)

Combination of (4) and insights from Latour

Distinction between the ostensive (defined as representations) and performative (expressed in practice) aspects of organizational routines

D’Adderio (2008)

(8) Performativity as making critical theory influential (see Spicer et al.2009)

Combination of insights from (1), (2), and (3)

Call to move beyond the anti-performative stance of CMS and make critical theory more influential through uses of language and engagement with practitioners

Wickert and Schaefer (2015)

Source: Simplified and adapted version of Gond et al.’s (2016) tables, pp. 444, 450 and 454. Please consult the original article for more details on each perspective a This Chapter, focuses on this specific stream of research, and the recent developments surrounding it, that are captured under the label of “theory performativity”

phenomena (Gond and Cabantous 2015). Rather, they point to a continuous enquiry into whether and how organizational and managerial theorizing transform the world, in ways that cut across ontological, phenomenological, epistemological, and methodological levels and assumptions. Accordingly, similar to their investigation of concepts such as culture (Smircich 1983), organizational scholars have produced distinct types of knowledge about theory performativity, depending on whether and how they use core assumptions inherent to the performativity turn (Muniesa 2014). For some, studying the performativity of theory consists of bringing back “theory” as a key ingredient (e.g., variables, artifacts, representations) of organizational life, and analyzing whether and how theories, together with their various producers (e.g., economists, management scholars, consultants) and supports (e.g., models,

9

The Performativity of Theories

165

equations, frameworks), influence organizational life. For others, studying the performativity of theory involves a more radical reconsideration of the representationalist assumptions that underlie most organization theory, and calls for reconstructing new understandings of key concepts such as leadership, entrepreneurship, or strategy as co-constituted by theory. These divergent styles of theorizing have generated distinct forms of knowledge about theory performativity, and nurtured debates and controversies about how to analyze theory performativity, and the value-added of adopting a distinct approach (see: Human Relations 69(2) in 2016; more recently in the Academy of Management Review: D’Adderio et al. 2019; Garud and Gehman 2019; Shadnam 2019 vs. Marti and Gond 2018, 2019). To clarify the state of affairs in this domain, one can distinguish between two ideal-type positions that form the poles of a continuum of scholarship about theory performativity: performativity as a mindset and performativity as a social mechanism. This distinction is first introduced, by specifying the core common underlying assumptions of both approaches but also their distinctive commitments to these assumptions and analytical foci, as well as the types of organizational knowledge of performativity they have produced, using illustrations from recent research. Then, the chapter presents how both positions can inform each other to advance organizational studies of theory performativity.

Distinguishing Two Extremes of a Continuum: Performativity as a Mindset and Performativity as a Social Mechanism Contemporary analyses of the performativity of organization and management studies are characterized by a set of common underlying assumptions to which various studies subscribe in distinct ways. One can usefully distinguish between two types of work. On one pole of a continuum, one type of work commits to the “spirit” of performativity at a deeper ontological and epistemological level, and regards it as a breakthrough way of rethinking organizational or managerial phenomena, committing to performativity as a mindset. Here, performativity is regarded less as a phenomenon relevant per se than an onto-epistemological lens – a researchers’ way of thinking, or mindset – useful to reconsider the very nature of any organization or management phenomena (e.g., Cabantous and Sergi 2018). On the opposite pole, other types of work leverage performativity analytical and methodological insights to further current understanding of performativity as being per se an organizational and managerial phenomenon. This research develops an analysis of performativity as a social mechanism that complements, reconsiders, or expands reflexively academic conceptualization of organizational theorizing and organizing (e.g., Marti and Gond 2018, 2019). Table 2 provides an overview of these ideal-type positions in the debates about the performativity of theory that is now presented by introducing first their common assumptions and their more specific features.

166

J.-P. Gond and G. Carton

Table 2 Contrasting the poles of the performativity as a mindset/performativity as a social mechanism continuum Characteristics Theoretical anchoring Common core assumptions

Distinctive assumptions

Analytical focus

Type of knowledge produced

Illustrative conceptual developments

Illustrative articles

Performativity as a mindset Performativity as a social mechanism Austin (1962); Actor-Network Theory; Pragmatism; Science Technology Society studies (STS); Socio-materiality Influence of the: • Linguistic turn – non-representational view on language • Process turn – ontology of becoming • Material turn – consideration of socio-materiality • Practice turn – focus on the actual doings of actors Performativity as an “epistemological Performativity as “mid-range breakthrough”: Stronger theorizing of social life”: Weaker commitment to core assumptions: commitment to core assumptions: • Generalized symmetry • Consideration of materiality and • Relational materiality objects in empirical analysis • Recognition of ontological • Relative ontological stability variability • Weak anti-representationalism • Strong anti-representationalism Performativity as an ontoPerformativity as an epistemological epistemological device to reconsider device to develop theory; an and develop new understandings of epistemo-methodological device to concepts and phenomena reconsider established methods Focus on the continuous Focus on the role academics and co-constitution of entities bodies of knowledge in empirical Co-constitution of agency and theory fields Recognition of theory agency (i.e., actant) Reconsideration of organizational Unpacking performativity phenomena through performativity mechanisms to theorize about Situated theorizing of how socioperformativity material assemblages are re/produced Transferable theorizing of phenomena in the form of Interest in open-ended trajectories generalizing frameworks leading to constitution of entities Interest in mechanisms accounting Internally consistent yet potentially for self-reinforcement, selfinsulated theorizing referentiality, and self-constitution Mid-range theorizing connected to established theories Reconsideration and Specification of social mechanism reconceptualization of and boundary conditions of entrepreneurship as a journey or performativity strategy performativity as a new Performativity work – institutional cultural condition work needed to perform theory Analysis of the production of Performative praxis mechanisms that assemblages and/or actor-networks explain how theories are brought into constituting new assumptions or being through actors’ practices theories (e.g., Bayesian thinking, blue Inscription of theory into artefacts to ocean strategy) change routines Cabantous and Sergi (2018), Dupret Beunza and Ferraro (2018), Ferraro (2019), Doganova and Eyquemet al. (2005), Ghoshal (2005), Renault (2009), Garud et al. (2018), Herrmann-Pillath (2016), and Marti and Muniesa (2018) and Gond (2018)

9

The Performativity of Theories

167

Core Common Assumptions The field of research dedicated to the performativity of theories is nurtured by multiple intellectual influences such as actor-network theory (ANT) (Callon 1998, 2016), social studies of sciences (Hacking 1983), pragmatism (Muniesa 2014), Science Technology Society (STS) (Law 2008), or socio-materiality studies (Barad 2007). Performativity studies in management builds on four core common assumptions that capitalize on the long journey and successive translations of this notion in social sciences since Austin’s (1962) publication (Gond et al. 2016). At the same time, performativity assumptions mirror four key turns in the social sciences: a nonrepresentational view on language (linguistic turn), an ontology of becoming (processual turn), an attention to socio-materiality (material turn), and an interest in the actual doings of actors (practice turn) (Kuhn et al. 2017). First, inherited from the linguistic turn in social science, performativity scholars envision discourses not merely as describing, but rather as constituting external realities (Austin 1962). Departing from representationalism that “takes it for granted that the defining characteristic of science is its production of representations of nature, facts and theories” (Pickering 1994, p. 413), performativity scholars emphasize the constitution of new worlds through their articulation, and thus consider language as being non-representational (Thrift 1999, 2008). For example, by demonstrating how methods of systematic literature review actually shape the fields of study they are supposed to “neutrally describe” by bringing into being new categories organizing the literature and calling for changes in the field’s research orientations, Gond et al. (2020) show how such non-representationalist assumptions can help revisit established academic procedures and methods used to review literature systematically. Second, performativity work is also inspired by the processual turn in management that puts the emphasis on evolving phenomena and therefore explicitly incorporates temporal progressions of activities as elements of explanation and understanding (Langley et al. 2013). Even if performativity scholars’ perspective on time has often remained implicit, performativity studies have approached reality as being “a form of becoming” and have explored how processes of becoming unfold over time. Cabantous and Sergi (2018) make this point explicit by referring to “the inherent processuality of performativity” (p. 1229). Focusing on the performativity of theories, Garud and Gehman (2019) similarly suggest metaphorically approaching theory performativity trajectories as “ongoing journeys” continuously instantiated and actualized rather than “destinations,” and accepting the idea of a world always in flux and transformation (see also Garud et al. 2018). Third, mirroring the material turn in social sciences and management (Boxenbaum et al. 2018), performativity scholars have conceptualized theories as relationally connected with assemblages of actors, artefacts, and practices (Law 2008), and have thus considered socio-materiality (Barad 2007). Accordingly, the social and the material interact to constitute the reality of everyday life (Orlikowski 2007). For instance, in studying how the strategy concept of Blue Ocean Strategy performed managerial reality, Carton (2020) shows how material devices such as

168

J.-P. Gond and G. Carton

books or practitioner-oriented journals and human beings such as consultants or faculty members played a key role in performing the concept. As Blue Ocean Strategy emerged, material devices such as books, articles, or teaching cases framed reality, and enrolled and consolidated other material devices and human beings to make the concept perform a broader scope of reality over time. Fourth, and finally influenced by the practice turn in social sciences (Schatzki et al. 2001), performativity scholars have emphasized the actual doing of actors. Such consideration of reality is at the root of the actor-network theory, the prior intellectual project of Michel Callon (1998), whose seminal study focused on the practices developed by marine biologists, researchers, and other actors to halt the decline of the population of scallops in Saint Brieuc Bay (Callon 1986). Cabantous et al.’s (2010) study of decision analysts illustrates in theory performativity how actors can develop specific tools (decision trees) that structurally embed the axioms of a theory (rational choice theory) in their consultancy practice. Overall, these four turns – linguistic, processual, material, and practice turn – constitute the core common assumptions that management and organization researchers make about theory performativity. Together, these assumptions represent an overarching conceptual apparatus that can help shift organization and management studies away from representational assumptions and positivism, investigate the co-constitution of theories and organizations, and approach theory as being actively intervening in the production of organizational phenomena rather than representing them neutrally.

Distinct Commitments and Analytical Foci However, despite this common core, performativity works diverge with regard to the breadth and depth of their commitment to these four core common assumptions. By delineating differences in these forms of commitments, two ideal-type positions can be identified in current performativity studies (cf. Table 1). Scholarly work approaching performativity as a mindset is characterized by a strong commitment of researchers to a performative way of thinking that involves embracing most of performativity’s core common assumptions. It regards performativity as an actual “epistemological breakthrough” by acknowledging that a performative take on knowledge leads to a radical reconsideration of the distinction between ontology and epistemology, in line with Barad’s (2007) view that: We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming. The separation of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between human and nonhuman, subject and object, mind and body, matter and discourse. (Barad 2007, p. 185)

Accordingly, performativity is regarded here as an “onto-epistemological device” that can be used to reconsider how phenomena are actively constituted through

9

The Performativity of Theories

169

socio-material practices. Like Butler’s (1990) radical reconsideration of gender materiality through performative analysis, performativity produces new and unique understandings of organizational and managerial phenomena. For instance, in the discipline of management, this stance on theory performativity questions the culture of strategy to better understand the discipline (Muniesa 2018), it reminds strategists, entrepreneurs, and intrapreneurs that business models, opportunities, and markets are constitutive arrangements that are subject to change (Garud et al. 2018), and it questions the role played by emotions in linking bodies and work through organizational communication (Kuhn et al. 2017). As the examples above illustrate, central to such a position is the focus on the continuous constitution of organizational or managerial entities, through communication and practices such as keynotes in the case of Steve Job presenting Apple’s strategy (Garud et al. 2018), and through the recognition that agency co-constitutes theory. This is evidenced by how Harvard Business School co-constituted the discipline of strategy through the case study method that involves students’ classroom role-playing, for instance (Muniesa 2018). In contrast, scholars interested in performativity as a social mechanism usually adopt either a narrower focus on only some of the four underlying core assumptions or combine them through a weaker commitment to their ultimate ontoepistemological implications, as the focus is put on the social mechanisms that performativity unveils. For instance, such studies could integrate the role of materiality and objects or focus on theory as a key entity in their analysis (Cabantous et al. 2010; e.g., Ghoshal 2005) while postulating the relative ontological stability of the entities under study. Rather than radically reconsidering their phenomenon of interest, such analyses correspond to a more traditional “middle-range” theorizing of social life (Merton 1949), aimed at providing heuristic ways of producing knowledge, somewhere between mundane empirical phenomena and grand onto-epistemological assumptions. Research on performativity as a social mechanism nevertheless remains distinct from mainstream studies of organizational and managerial phenomenon in that it reflexively problematizes the role of knowledge production in its own scholarly production. For instance, as they offer a performative endeavor to literature review and critically assess prior reviews in the corporate social responsibility field, Gond et al. (2020) question assumptions inherent to current methods of aggregating knowledge about academic fields and show how reviewing actually co-constitutes academic fields. In an empirical study on how philosophers have helped blue-collar staff from a recuperated workers cooperative expel their owner and takeover to survive during the Argentinian financial crisis, Esper et al. (2017) shed light on how academics can reflexively support the emergence and growth of alternative organizational forms (see also Leca and Barin-Cruz 2021). Such a position usually uses performativity insights either as a powerful epistemo-methodological device to identify limitations of a non-performative take on organizational and managerial phenomena, or as an epistemological device to produce knowledge that extends or consolidates theory by specifying phenomenological blind spots (e.g., Marti and Gond 2018).

170

J.-P. Gond and G. Carton

Producing Knowledge “Through” vs. “About” Performativity Arguably, these two differentiated positions are likely to result in the production of distinct types of knowledge about the role of theories in organizations and managerial practice, that each presents unique opportunities for contributions and specific challenges (cf. Table 1). First, analyses of performativity as a mindset are more concerned with producing knowledge through performativity, using the concept of performativity to offer a fresh and unique perspective on contemporary business practices, or revisiting the constitution of a body of practical and managerial knowledge. For instance, Dupret’s (2019) analysis of what is performed by silence within organizations exemplifies the value of adopting a performative mindset to reconsider a neglected phenomenon and recast it as actively producing organizational reality. By specifying the roles played by various forms of performance in the construction of strategy knowledge and by connecting ideals of strategic management and business education, Muniesa (2018) clarifies how strategy as a body of enacted knowledge instantiates a broader performative cultural condition. Other studies in this stream of research seek to reconstruct the slow constitutions of “actor-network” or “assemblages” connecting multiple human and non-human entities in ways that co-produce and give an academic, organizational, and/or managerial life to theory. Cabantous and Gond (2015), for instance, retrace over a long period of time decision theory scholars’ efforts at assembling concepts, symbolic resources, and practical tools to embed a Bayesian understanding of probabilities as “subjective” and “forward-looking” entities – rather than “objective” synthesis of prior occurrences – in management studies has resulted in the production of a research field dedicated to decision analysis. By contrast, studies of performativity as a social mechanism focus on producing knowledge about performativity. The focus is placed on the mechanisms through which theories come into being, as different sociological studies have attempted to do (MacKenzie 2006; e.g., MacKenzie and Millo 2003). This line of theorizing is inspired by the Barnesian notion of self-referentiality (Barnes 1983) that aims to explain how social knowledge is “made valid by virtue of being acted upon by the carriers of the knowledge” so that “coming to believe such knowledge creates the referents that make it valid knowledge; for it refers to itself as believed and not to anything independent of itself” (Barnes’ interview in Hwang et al. 2010, p. 607). Scholars of mechanism-focused performativity theory are thus interested in how knowledge constitutes reality by becoming self-referential. For instance, in an empirical study of a local climate adaptation to sea level rise in Australia, Bowden et al. (2021) show how climate change science is translated into a self-referential theory focused on property prices through two mechanisms of “enablement” and “theorization,” which together undermined the local authorities’ capacity to actually address climate change. Adopting an encompassing approach to social mechanism that interprets this notion in a constructivist rather than positivist manner after Barnes (1983), studies

9

The Performativity of Theories

171

that focus on knowledge about performativity aim at clarifying the nature of the performativity of economic mechanisms (Ferraro et al. 2005; Herrmann-Pillath 2016), or at specifying the multiple boundary conditions that shape performativity by enabling experimentation with theories (Marti and Gond 2018). Other studies have combined the notion of performativity with concepts from other organizational theories (e.g., institutional work, strategy-as-practice) to analyze the activities involved in bringing into being theories, within and through organizations, by inscribing them within artifacts or routines (D’Adderio and Pollock 2014), and/or connecting them to various institutions. This line of research has offered new concepts hybridizing these theories, such as “performativity work” (Beunza and Ferraro 2019) – that is, the activities involved in making performativity happen, or “performative praxis” (Cabantous and Gond 2011), which refers to the practices that contribute to turning a theory into social reality for actors. Organizational scholars have paid special attention to the mechanisms by which actors become cognitively embedded within specific theories – referred to as “conventionalizing” (Cabantous and Gond 2011, p. 579) – through educational institutions such as business schools, in ways that shape their language and mindsets (Ferraro et al. 2005), business practices (Ghoshal 2005), and subsequent decisionmaking (Jung and Shin 2019). Both approaches to performativity present specific potential and limitations. Analyses of performativity as a mindset, through their commitment to core performativity assumptions have attracted scholars’ attention to the necessarily timely and spatially open-ended nature of performativity studies and theorizing. But even though the mindset stream of studies has developed unique situated understandings and knowledge of how actor-networks or socio-material assemblage are constituted (Doganova and Eyquem-Renault 2009; Garud et al. 2018), it risks insulating studies of performativity from the rest of organizational scholarship, as the insights produced could be a hard buy for scholars who do not share such assumptions. By contrast, the middle-range theory-building of works focused on social mechanisms of performativity makes their findings and conceptualizations more easily transferable across distinct conceptual domains. The frameworks produced by Cabantous and Gond (2011), Beunza and Ferraro (2019), or Marti and Gond (2018) can enter into conversation with more established bodies of knowledge on organization and management studies (e.g., institutional theory, strategy-as-practice), but may sometimes risk scarifying part of the transformative potential inherent to the performativity concept.

Performative Frictions and in/commensurability Unsurprisingly, these two distinct scholarly positions on the performativity of theories, as a mindset or as a social mechanism, have generated tensions and

172

J.-P. Gond and G. Carton

debates, even though they have not been necessarily made as explicit as in this chapter. Some scholars could interpret these positions as irreconcilable, separated by a definitive “epistemological break” (Balibar 1978; e.g., Garud and Gehman 2019), whereas others regard both approaches as not necessarily incompatible (e.g., Marti and Gond 2019). Empirical studies on the performativity of theory published in recent years offer a variety of positions in relation to these ideal-types. Table 3 provides an overview of some of these studies and specifies their position vis-à-vis core assumptions and the concept of social mechanism. The epistemological tension between both positions is best illustrated by the controversy raised in the Academy of Management Review in response to Marti and Gond (2018) (D’Adderio et al. 2019; Garud and Gehman 2019). In their article, Marti and Gond (2018) envision theory performativity as a distinct social mechanism for which theoretical propositions can be formulated. Analyzing the article, Garud and Gehman (2019) recast the approach in terms of social mechanisms as related to Merton’s functionalist legacy, and question Marti and Gond’s (2018) commitment to three of the four core common assumptions of performativity by arguing that the article relies on a too representational view on language, does not assume an ontology of becoming and fails to take into account a distributed onto-epistemology. For their part, D’Adderio et al. (2019) question the commitment to two of the assumptions: the consideration of socio-materiality by conceptualizing a theory as an objectified, stand-alone entity, and the ontology of becoming by characterizing the effects of a theory in terms of linear, sequential process. In their response, Marti and Gond (2019) argue they do not see their model as a closed linear representation of Barnesian performativity, but rather as a processual one (see also Cloutier and Langley 2020). In line with Barnes (1983), they reclaim a constructivist interpretation of Merton’s mechanism of selffulfilling prophecies and argue that the social mechanism underlying the theory of self-fulfillment is necessarily part of ongoing journeys, as it operates through cycles triggered by anomalies, in ways that can relate to new, and potentially, folk theories. An analysis of publications on the performativity of theories; however, suggests that most scholarship in the domain can be positioned as a continuum between the two ideal ways of engaging with performativity; as Table 3 illustrates, some studies can be regarded as hybrid, assuming implicitly the commensurability of both analytical takes. Indeed, while Glaser (2017) applies a performativity mindset to focus on the process by which organizational actors associated with a theory work with practitioners to influence-specific organizational practices, the article also develops social mechanisms through which socio-material assemblages are performed. Likewise, while Carton (2020) uses performativity as a mindset to take a performativity perspective on strategy concepts, he also details the mechanisms through which the theory produces the assemblages. Finally, Palo et al. (2020) rely on the performativity concept to show how the magic world of Santa is being constructed, but also conceptualize the mechanisms through which the

9

The Performativity of Theories

173

Table 3 Empirical illustrations along the mindset-social mechanism continuum Articles

Positioning and contribution to theory performativity

Core argument or findings about performativity

Consistency with the core assumptions of performativity

Overall take on performativity

Ideal-type position: Performativity as a social mechanism Demonstration of Jung and business education as a facilitating Shin mechanism of (2019) performativity

Marti and Scherer (2016)

Beunza and Ferraro (2019)

Ligonie (2018)

Glaser (2017)

Carton (2020)

The rise of financial economics and agency-theoretic logic in business education changed students’ views about diversification

Normative Theories have a framework outlining performative effect the impact of theories on public policies on social welfare

Consideration of Social materiality and mechanism objects; relative ontological stability; weak antirepresentationalism

Consideration of materiality and objects; relative ontological stability; strong antirepresentationalism

Suggestion of the concept of performative work, i.e., the institutional work to enable theory translation and its adoption through material devices

Complementarity between performativity and institutional work

Conceptualization of forced performativity wherein a concept (Creating Shared Value) performs in a highly infelicitous context

Use of a performativity lens to explore how a theory shaped the strategy of an organization

Development of the process by which organizational actors associated with a theory work with practitioners to influence specific organizational practices

Organizational actors use design performances to intentionally change routines

Consideration of materiality and objects; relative ontological stability; strong antirepresentationalism

Hybrid: “mechanisms creating socio-material assemblages”

Importance of the assemblagein the performativity process of strategy theory developed by gurus (Blue Ocean Strategy)

Theories change the assemblages that change reality and thus enlarge its scope

Generalized symmetry, relational materiality; relative ontological stability; weak antirepresentationalism

Hybrid: “mechanisms producing assemblages”

(continued)

174

J.-P. Gond and G. Carton

Table 3 (continued) Introduction of “translocution”–a new category of speech act, a compendium of imagining, discussing, proposing, Palo et negotiating and al.(2020) contracting that transforms myths into an “imaginary-real world”

Pälli (2018)

Reliance on the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) approach to unpack the performativity of strategy

Activation and Bourgoin passivation as key et al. movements in the (2020) performativity of authority

Dupret (2019)

Performativity struggles between distinct types of psychiatric knowledge about the role of silence in therapy. Performance of silence through socio-material arrangements

Analysis of how actors calculate and organize the sociomaterial networks of the market, and manage the considerable uncertainty inherent in its operation

Generalized symmetry, relational materiality; recognition of ontological variability; strong antirepresentationalism

Development of a language-based approach to viewing the agency and materiality of strategy

Generalized symmetry, relational materiality; recognition of ontological variability; strong antirepresentationalism

Analysis of the socio-material dimension of authority/relational analysis of authority

Hybrid: “mechanisms of performativity through speech act”

Mindset

Performative approach to silence in the change process of organization

Necessity to Performativity Garud et cultivate a apprehended as al. (2018) performative mindset ongoing journeys Ideal-type position: Performativity as a mindset

myth is transformed into a model of an imaginary-real world. It is thus possible to view these contrasting ways of approaching the performativity of theory as a continuum by means of hybrid approaches that build on both stances on performativity.

9

The Performativity of Theories

175

Moving Forward: Combining Performativity as a Mindset and Performativity as a Social Mechanism? Arguably, both approaches to the performativity of theory can sensibly contribute to further organizational understanding of the life of theories within and across organizations. Moving beyond a dichotomic take on performativity mindset and mechanisms prompted by viewing them as inherently incommensurable and inspired by the notion of “metatriangulation” (Lewis and Grimes 1999, p. 677), according to which epistemologically distinct – and potentially distant – positions can be leveraged to theorize in different ways, it is now possible to discuss and illustrate possible fruitful interactions between both styles of research to develop future research about the performativity of theory. By promoting distinctive, yet potentially complementary takes on theory performativity, both perspectives can exercise a welcome influence on the other, allowing them to continuously learn from each other. Mindset studies can learn from social mechanism approaches to performativity about how to reconnect the reality/ knowledge they produce through the radical reconsideration of the relationship between phenomena and concepts such as strategy or entrepreneurship through to other notions or concepts upon which established scholarship has some grasp. Furthermore, the risk of performativity as a mindset becoming insulated from the rest of organizational scholarship can be mitigated by the discipline of specifying forms of connections between entities or constructs, that is imposed by the notion of social mechanism, which, even in its most minimalist form, refers to “bits of theory about entities at a different level (e.g., individuals) than the main entities being theorized about (e.g., groups), which serve to make the higher-level theory more supple, more accurate, or more general” (Stinchcombe 1991, p. 367). By contrast, mechanism-focused performativity scholarship can learn from mindset studies how to extend and deepen their approaches to specific phenomena and extend the generalizability and magnitude of the social mechanisms of performativity, notably by pointing toward unforeseen connections between various forms of performativity-based social mechanisms. For instance, distinct contributions have highlighted the self-referential nature of knowledge involved in Barnesian theory performativity (MacKenzie and Millo 2003), as well as the self-reinforcing nature of this mode of performativity in contrast to cases of counter-performativity in which a theory destroys its verisimilitude by being socially used (MacKenzie 2007), while other analyses insist on the role of experimentations in such a mechanism (Marti and Gond 2018, 2019; Muniesa and Callon 2007). Moving back to the underlying forms of sociomaterial interventions involved in all these mechanisms could help tie these narratives firmly into a more generic mechanism of performativity self-constitution. Here, the mindset spirit can avoid “closing-down” or “packaging” too quickly subtle and complex processual entities into a neat social mechanism, by helping to identify and theorize deeper relationships between social mechanisms (D’Adderio et al. 2019). By allowing such forms of “bridging” between multiple performativity mechanisms (Lewis and Grimes 1999), mindset approaches

176

J.-P. Gond and G. Carton

can help further generalize this approach, while constantly extending the range of phenomena that might be subjected to performativity analysis. Helping to keep the performativity ontology “flat” (Latour 2005) allows to “radiate out horizontally from the single instance in order to trace the network of connections that make it possible” (Seidl and Whittington 2014, p. 2). In so doing, mindset scholarship can improve the understanding of larger phenomena. For instance, Beunza and Ferraro (2019) had to rely on foundational ANT assumptions to account for the micro-political dimensions underlying the social mechanism that cause theories to come into being by developing the complementarity between performativity and institutional work. Accordingly, the mindset vs. social mechanism distinction sketches a potential division of labor between the theorization of empirically situated social mechanisms, potentially in relation to other established frameworks, and the mindset metatheorization that could connect different social mechanisms theories, expand their degree of generality, and/or reorient them back toward their core foundational assumptions. Both positions could be used in sequence through a research process or across distinct research projects. As a whole, they would play like a balancing tool, helping theory performativity scholars progress like tightrope walkers, while avoiding too conceptually esoteric analyses and too mechanistic empirical accounts.

Conclusion and Outlook Through their review of the field of performativity in organization theory, Gond et al. (2016) revealed “a lack of organizational conceptualization of performativity: discussions of how organizations are performed and performativity is organized remain embryonic” (p. 441). This chapter updated analysis of research dedicated to the performativity of theory suggests that this crucial gap in knowledge is being filled, as scholars investigate how economic theories, as well as more specifically managerial concepts (Carton 2020), alongside academic (Marti and Gond 2018) or folk theories (Bowden et al. 2021; Palo et al. 2020) are performed, while exploring how authority (Bourgoin et al. 2020), entrepreneurship (Garud et al. 2018), silence (Dupret 2019), or strategy (Muniesa 2018) are performatively organized (see Table 3). This chapter offers a distinction between performativity as a mindset and performativity as a social mechanism to make sense of two types of scholarship that rely more or less creatively and faithfully on four core assumptions constituting the performativity idiom in organization theory (see Table 1). The review of recent performativity scholarship suggests that much is yet to be done to empirically account for, conceptualize, and organize the myriads of self-constituting social mechanisms that pertain to theory performativity – from the Pygmalion effect (Eden 1984) to Barnes’ (1983) approach to “bootstrapped inferences” – that could all help clarify some facets of whether and how theory performativity “works” within, through, and for organizations. Studies approaching performativity as a mindset, on the other hand, have only started to tap into the radical possibilities

9

The Performativity of Theories

177

offered by the onto-epistemological reconsideration of potentially any organization and management concepts, theories, tools, and practices. Beyond the clarification of two styles of performativity scholarship, the underlying mindset vs. mechanism tension can be used as a heuristic device to combine productively both takes on performativity, and in a mindful manner, aim to reflexively engage with the analysis of conditions of academic knowledge production in organization and management studies. Future studies could propose new combinations of these approaches to further clarify the organizational life and conditions of theory production, and even use the mirror of performativity scholarship itself to clarify the selfmechanisms that constitute organizational scholarship on performativity – to perpetuate Austin’s provocative spirit.

Cross-References ▶ Problematizing the Relation Between Management Research and Practice

References Austin JL (1962) How to do things with words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Balibar E (1978) From Bachelard to Althusser: the concept of “epistemological break”. Econ Soc 7(3):207–237 Barad K (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press, Durham Barnes B (1983) Social life as bootstrapped induction. Sociology 17(4):524–545 Bartunek JM (2020) Accomplishing impact by performing our theories: it can be done, though not easily. J Appl Behav Sci 56(1):11–31 Bartunek JM, Rynes SL (2014) Academics and practitioners are alike and unlike: the paradoxes of academic-practitioner relationships. J Manag 40:1181–1201 Beunza D, Ferraro F (2019) Performative work: bridging performativity and institutional theory in the responsible investment field. Organ Stud 40(4):515–543 Bourgoin A, Bencherki N, Faraj S (2020) “And who are you?”: a performative perspective on authority in organizations. Acad Manag J 63(4):1134–1165 Bowden V, Gond J-P, Nyberg D, Wright C (2021) Turning back the rising sea: theory performativity in the shift from climate science to popular authority. Organ Stud 42(12):1909–1931 Boxenbaum E, Jones C, Meyer RE, Svejenova S (2018) Towards an articulation of the material and visual turn in organization studies. Organ Stud 39(5–6):597–616 Butler J (1990) Gender trouble. Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge, New York/London Butler J (1997) Excitable speech: a politics of the performative. Routledge, New York Cabantous L, Gond J-P (2011) Rational decision making as performative praxis: explaining rationality’s éternel retour. Organ Sci 22(3):573–586 Cabantous L, Gond J-P (2015) The resistible rise of Bayesian thinking in management: historical lessons from decision analysis. J Manag 41(2):441–470 Cabantous L, Sergi V (2018) Seeing the potentialities at the intersection: a reflection on performativity and processuality mindsets. M@n@gement 21(4):1229–1243

178

J.-P. Gond and G. Carton

Cabantous L, Gond J-P, Johnson-Cramer M (2010) Decision theory as practice: crafting rationality in organizations. Organ Stud 31(11):1531–1566 Cabantous L, Gond J-P, Harding N, Learmonth M (2016) Critical essay: reconsidering critical performativity. Hum Relat 69(2):197–213 Callon M (1986) Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay. In: Power, action, and belief: a new sociology of knowledge, vol 32. Routledge, London, pp 196–223 Callon M (1998) Laws of the markets. Blackwell, Oxford, UK Callon M (2016) Revisiting marketization: from interface-markets to market-agencements. Consum Mark Cult 19(1):17–37 Carton G (2020) How assemblages change when theories become performative: the case of the Blue Ocean Strategy. Organ Stud 41(10):1417–1439 Carton G, Mouricou P (2017) Is management research relevant? A systematic analysis of the rigorrelevance debate in top-tier journals (1994–2013). M@n@gement 20(2):166–203 Carton G, Ungureanu P (2018) Bridging the research-practice divide: a study of scholar-practitioners’ multiple role management strategies and knowledge spillovers across roles. J Manag Inq 27(4):436–453 Cloutier C, Langley A (2020) What makes a process theoretical contribution? Organ Theory. https:// doi.org/10.1177/2631787720902473 Cooper R, Burrell G (1988) Modernism, postmodernism and organizational analysis: an introduction. Organ Stud 9(1):91–112 Cooren F (2004) Textual agency: how texts do things in organizational settings. Organization 11(3): 373–393 D’Adderio L (2008) The performativity of routines: theorising the influence of artefacts and distributed agencies on routines dynamics. Res Policy 37(5):769–789 D’Adderio L, Pollock N (2014) Performing modularity: competing rules, performative struggles and the effect of organizational theories on the organization. Organ Stud 35(12):1813–1843 D’Adderio L, Glaser V, Pollock N (2019) Performing theories, transforming organizations: a reply to Marti and Gond. Acad Manag Rev 44(3):676–679 Denis J (2006) Préface: Les nouveaux visages de la performativité. Étud Commun Lang Inf Médiat 29:8–24 Derrida J (1979) Signature event context. Glyph 1:172–197 Doganova L, Eyquem-Renault M (2009) What do business models do?: innovation devices in technology entrepreneurship. Res Policy 38(10):1559–1570 Dupret K (2019) Performative silences: potentiality of organizational change. Organ Stud 40(5): 681–703 Eden D (1984) Self-fulfilling prophecy as a management tool: harnessing Pygmalion. Acad Manag Rev 9(1):64–73 Esper SC, Cabantous L, Barin-Cruz L, Gond J-P (2017) Supporting alternative organizations? Exploring scholars’ involvement in the performativity of worker-recuperated enterprises. Organization 24(5):671–699 Feldman MS, Pentland BT (2003) Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change. Adm Sci Q 48(1):94–118 Ferraro F, Pfeffer J, Sutton RI (2005) Economics language and assumptions: how theories can become self-fulfilling. Acad Manag Rev 30:8–24 Fish SE (1982) With the compliments of the author: reflections on Austin and Derrida. Crit Inq 8(4): 693–721 Fleming P, Banerjee SB (2016) When performativity fails: implications for critical management studies. Hum Relat 69(2):257–276 Ford JD, Ford LW (1995) The role of conversations in producing intentional change in organizations. Acad Manag Rev 20(3):541–570

9

The Performativity of Theories

179

Fournier V, Grey C (2000) At the critical moment: conditions and prospects for critical management studies. Hum Relat 53(1):7–32 Garud R, Gehman J (2019) Performativity: not a destination but an ongoing journey. Acad Manag Rev 44(3):679–684 Garud R, Gehman J, Tharchen T (2018) Performativity as ongoing journeys: implications for strategy, entrepreneurship, and innovation. Long Range Plan 51(3):500–509 Ghoshal S (2005) Bad management theories are destroying good management practices. Acad Manag Learn Educ 4:75–91 Glaser VL (2017) Design performances: how organizations inscribe artifacts to change routines. Acad Manag J 60(6):2126–2154 Gond J-P, Cabantous L (2015) Performativity: towards a performative turn in organisational studies. In: Mir R, Willmott H, Greenwood M (eds) The Routledge companion to philosophy in organization studies. Routledge, London, pp 508–516 Gond J-P, Cabantous L, Harding N, Learmonth M (2016) What do we mean by performativity in organizational and management theory? The uses and abuses of performativity. Int J Manag Rev 18(4):440–463 Gond J-P, Mena S, Mosonyi S (2020) The performativity of literature reviewing: constituting the corporate social responsibility literature through re-presentation and intervention. Organ Res Methods. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428120935494 Grossmann-Hensel B, Seidl D (2021) Problematizing the Relation Between Management Research and Practice. In: Neesham, C. (eds) Handbook of Philosophy of Management. Handbooks in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-483528_57-1 Hacking I (1983) Representing and intervening: introductory topics in the philosophy of natural science. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Harding N (2004) The social construction of management. Routledge, London Herrmann-Pillath C (2016) Performative mechanisms. In: Enacting dismal science. Springer, New York, pp 53–86 Huault I, Kärreman D, Perret V, Spicer A (2017) Introduction to the special issue: the evolving debate about critical performativity. M@n@gement 20(1):1–8 Hwang R-C, Li Z-F, Huang C-T, Chu R-X, Fan X (2010) Dropping the brand of Edinburgh school: an interview with Barry Barnes. East Asian Sci Technol Soc 4(4):601–617 Jung J, Shin T (2019) Learning not to diversify: the transformation of graduate business education and the decline of diversifying acquisitions. Adm Sci Q 64(2):337–369 Kieser A, Nicolai AT, Seidl D (2015) The practical relevance of management research: turning the debate on relevance into a rigorous scientific research program. Acad Manag Ann 9(1): 143–233 Kornberger M, Clegg S (2011) Strategy as performative practice: the case of Sydney 2030. Strateg Organ 9(2):136–162 Kuhn T, Ashcraft KL, Cooren F (2017) The work of communication: relational perspectives on working and organizing in contemporary capitalism. Taylor & Francis, New York Langley A, Smallman C, Tsoukas H, Van de Ven AH (2013) Process studies of change in organization and management: unveiling temporality, activity, and flow. Acad Manag J 56(1): 1–13 Latour B (1996) Que peuvent apporter l’histoire et la sociologie des sciences aux sciences de gestion ? In: Penan H (ed) XIII Journées Nationales des IAE. IAE Toulouse, Toulouse Latour B (2005) Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press, New York Law J (2008) On sociology and STS. Sociol Rev 56(4):623–649 Leca B, Barin-Cruz L (2021) Enabling critical performativity: the role of institutional context and critical performative work. Organization. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508421995759

180

J.-P. Gond and G. Carton

Lewis MW, Grimes AI (1999) Metatriangulation: building theory from multiple paradigms. Acad Manag Rev 24(4):672–690 Ligonie M (2018) The “forced performativity” of a strategy concept: exploring how shared value shaped a gambling company’s strategy. Long Range Plan 51(3):463–479 Loxley J (2007) Performativity – the new critical idiom. Taylor & Francis, London Lyotard J-F (1984) The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge. Manchester University Press, Manchester MacKenzie DA (2006) An engine, not a camera. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA MacKenzie DA (2007) Is economics performative? Option theory and the construction of derivates markets. In: MacKenzie DA, Muniesa F, Siu L (eds) Do economists make markets? On the performativity of economics. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp 54–86 MacKenzie DA, Millo Y (2003) Constructing a market, performing theory: the historical sociology of a financial derivatives exchange1. Am J Sociol 109(1):107–145 Marti E, Gond J-P (2018) When do theories become self-fulfilling? Exploring the boundary conditions of performativity. Acad Manag Rev 43(3):487–508 Marti E, Gond J-P (2019) How do theories become self-fulfilling? Clarifying the process of Barnesian performativity. Acad Manag Rev 44(3):686–694 Merton RK (1949) On sociological theories of the middle range. In: Social theory and social structure. Simon and Schuster, New York, pp 39–53 Muniesa F (2014) The provoked economy: economic reality and the performative turn. Routledge, New York Muniesa F (2018) Grappling with the performative condition. Long Range Plan 51(3):495–499 Muniesa F, Callon M (2007) Economic experiments and the construction of markets. In: MacKenzie DA, Muniesa F, Siu L (eds) Do economists make markets?: on the performativity of economics. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp 163–189 Nyberg D (2009) Computers, customer service operatives and cyborgs: intra-actions in call centres. Organ Stud 30(11):1181–1199 Orlikowski WJ (2007) Sociomaterial practices: exploring technology at work. Organ Stud 28(9): 1435–1448 Orlikowski WJ, Scott SV (2014) What happens when evaluation goes online? Exploring apparatuses of valuation in the travel sector. Organ Sci 25(3):868–891 Palo T, Mason K, Roscoe P (2020) Performing a myth to make a market: the construction of the “magical world” of Santa. Organ Stud 41(1):53–75 Pickering A (1994) After representation: science studies in the performative idiom. In: PSA: Proceedings of the biennial meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, vol 1994(2), pp 413–419 Pickering A (1995) The mangle of practice: time, agency, and science. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Schatzki TR, Knorr-Cetina K, von Savigny E (2001) The practice turn in contemporary theory. Routledge, London Schoeneborn D, Scherer AG (2012) Clandestine organizations, al Qaeda, and the paradox of (in) visibility: a response to Stohl and Stohl. Organ Stud 33(7):963–971 Searle JR (1969) Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Seidl D, Whittington R (2014) Enlarging the strategy-as-practice research agenda: towards taller and flatter ontologies. Organ Stud 35(10):1407–1421 Shadnam M (2019) A postpositivist commentary on self-fulfilling theories. Acad Manag Rev 44(3): 684–686 Smircich L (1983) Concepts of culture and organizational analysis. Adm Sci Q 28(3):339–358 Spicer A, Alvesson M, Kärreman D (2009) Critical performativity: the unfinished business of critical management studies. Hum Relat 62(4):537–560 Stinchcombe AL (1991) The conditions of fruitfulness of theorizing about mechanisms in social science. Philos Soc Sci 21(3):367–388

9

The Performativity of Theories

181

Taylor JR, Van Every EJ (1999) The emergent organization: communication as its site and surface. Routledge, London Thrift N (1999) Steps to an ecology of place. In: Massey D, Allen J, Sarre P (eds) Human geography today. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, pp 295–323 Thrift N (2008) Non-representational theory: space, politics, affect. Routledge, London Tyler M, Cohen L (2010) Spaces that matter: gender performativity and organizational space. Organ Stud 31(2):175–198 Wickert C, Schaefer SM (2015) Towards a progressive understanding of performativity in critical management studies. Hum Relat 68(1):107–130

Problematizing the Relation Between Management Research and Practice

10

Benjamin Grossmann-Hensel and David Seidl

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scientific Research as Self-Referential Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Impossibility of a Direct Transfer of Research Results to Management Practice . . . . . . . . The Impact of Research on Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

184 185 188 191 195 199 199

Abstract

The epistemological question of how management research can impact management practice is of central concern to management scholars. This question has been the subject of a long-standing discussion about the status of management studies as an applied science, the so-called relevance debate. In this chapter, we discuss the relation between management research and practice from the perspective of the “descriptive” stream of the practical relevance literature, analyzing the forms and conditions of practical relevance in epistemological terms. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s sociology of science, we start with a characterization of research as self-referential communication and discuss its most fundamental implication for the question of practical relevance: the impossibility of a linear transfer of research results to practice. Based on this, we discuss the ways in which management research can impact management practice and indicate a number of implications for the relation between research and practice.

B. Grossmann-Hensel (*) · D. Seidl University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_57

183

184

B. Grossmann-Hensel and D. Seidl

Keywords

Practical relevance · Management research · Sociology of science · Transferability · Resonance · Niklas Luhmann

Introduction The practical relevance of management research is of central concern to management scholars. It relates to the epistemological question of how scientific statements enter and potentially alter the knowledge of practitioners; that is, how management research intervenes in management practice. This question has been the subject of a long-standing discussion about the status of management studies as an “applied” science. Ever since the establishment of business schools, the impact of the body of knowledge developed in management research on management practice has been the subject of a fierce debate (Augier and March 2007, 2011). Academic engagement with the issue of practical relevance has given rise to a considerable body of literature (for a review, see Kieser et al. 2015). Most scholars contributing to this debate deplore a lack of practical relevance and call for measures to increase the scholarly impact of management studies (Nicolai and Seidl 2010). This is also reflected in the presidential addresses given at the Academy of Management annual conferences, whose most recent opening statement stressed that management scholars’ “thoughts were not relevant to the end users. The scholars’ paper airplanes crashed to the ground, and so the scholars’ work had very little impact” (Kulik 2020, p. 273). This vividly illustrates the importance of the question of practical impact, not just to scholars of the philosophy of management, but to management studies as a whole. Two groups of literature can be distinguished in the relevance debate (Kieser et al. 2015). On the one hand, a large body of programmatic texts has put forward (often somewhat naïvely) suggestions for increasing the practical relevance of management research. Interestingly, this literature has had hardly any practical impact on the practical relevance of management research (Nicolai and Seidl 2010). On the other hand, a small body of descriptive texts analyzes the forms and conditions of practical relevance in epistemological terms and from the perspective of the sociology of science. Researchers in this latter body of research have mobilized a wide variety of theories to conceptualize the relation between management research and practice. This includes the practice theory of Pierre Bourdieu (1990), who describes the spheres of research and management practice as different “social fields” (Splitter and Seidl 2011); Martin Heidegger’s (1996) existential philosophy, which has been mobilized to analyze the different onto-epistemological premises underpinning scientific and practical rationality (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2011); Aristotle’s concept of practical knowledge (1980), which has been drawn on to highlight the contextual and intuitive nature of practical as compared to scientific knowledge (Tsoukas and Cummings 1997; Jarzabkowski and Wilson 2006); Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1953) concept of “language games,” which has been used to describe the differences in the

10

Problematizing the Relation Between Management Research and Practice

185

internal dynamics of management research and management practice (Astley and Zammuto 1992; Seidl 2007); and Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems (1995), according to which management research and management practice are conceptualized as different self-referentially closed communication systems (Seidl 2009; Kieser and Leiner 2009). While all these approaches share an interest in the performative constitution of research and management as social practices (cf. ▶ Chap. 9, “The Performativity of Theories,” by Gond and Carton in this volume), Luhmann’s theory of social systems can be said to be the most “radical” (Moeller 2012) of these in its firm grounding in a constructivist epistemology (cf. ▶ Chap. 5, “Interpretive Inquiry,” by Blagoev and Costas in this volume). Given that Luhmann’s theory is also one of the most developed and widely discussed perspectives in the relevance debate, we focus primarily on his approach in this chapter. Yet, it should be noted that his approach is not free from criticism. Many scholars have accused Luhmann of being overly complex and thus challenging to access; others have criticized the approach for being difficult to use empirically (Hernes and Bakken 2003; Seidl and Mormann 2014). Indeed, there are very few studies that have applied Luhmann’s theory to empirical research on practical relevance (for exceptions, see Nicolai 2004; Nicolai and Seidl 2010), and the only empirical evidence Luhmann himself provides is of an anecdotal nature (e.g., Luhmann 1990, p. 642). In the descriptive body of literature on practical relevance, research and practice tend to be characterized as two distinct domains ruled by different logics. While the theoretical perspectives applied in this stream approach the debate with different foci, they all reject the notion of a direct transfer of academic knowledge to management practice in favor of much more complex problematizations of the relation between research and practice. In the following section, we will unpack the relation between management research and practice from the perspective of this descriptive literature. We start with a characterization of research as self-referential communication (section “Scientific Research as Self-Referential Communication”) and discuss its most fundamental implication for the question of practical relevance: the impossibility of a linear transfer of research results to practice (section “The Impossibility of a Direct Transfer of Research Results to Management Practice”). Based on this, we discuss the ways in which management research can impact management practice (section “The Impact of Research on Practice”) and indicate a number of implications for the relation between research and practice (section “Implications”).

Scientific Research as Self-Referential Communication In order to discuss how management research is related to management practice, it is first necessary to define what each of these terms entail. The relation between research and practice is conceptualized rather differently according to which foundational definition is used – which has led to manifold diagnoses and suggested solutions in the relevance literature. Most studies conceptualize scientific research in

186

B. Grossmann-Hensel and D. Seidl

terms of a particular group of people, typically the scientific community of university professors (Kuhn 1962). Accordingly, research is defined as what scientists do. Other studies define research in relation to specific institutions, like faculties, universities, or research networks (e.g., Krohn and Küppers 1990). In this case, research is defined as that which happens within these institutions. Various scholars have criticized such person- or institutions-based definitions of research. The main problem with such approaches is that they do not allow for a clear demarcation of what we might consider to be research. Clearly, many of the activities of scientists are not related to research, neither is a great share of what happens within academic institutions. More importantly, such conceptualizations of scientific research tend to obfuscate the research-practice interface. As Nicolai and Seidl wrote, [. . .] from the person-based or institution-based perspective, some central aspects of the relevance debate are obscured. In particular, it remains unclear why there should be a problem of relevance at all: many professors of business studies offer consulting services to companies; business schools offer executive education programmes that focus explicitly on practitioners; companies cooperate with business professors at various different levels; students with a particular interest in management practice earn degrees in business schools and afterwards join industry. (Nicolai and Seidl 2010, p. 1259)

In contrast to these rather simple conceptualizations, more sophisticated approaches treat research in academia as a particular form of communication. Scientific research is conceptualized as a network of communication, materializing primarily in the form of academic books and articles connected through cross-citations (Stichweh 1994). As such, scientific communication can easily be recognized by the number of references to other publications. This network of communication also defines the criteria for scientific communications and, thus, which communications are treated as part of the network (Stehr 1992). Claims set out in scientific communication are substantiated by reference to theories and methods presented in earlier publications. Methods and theories, thereby, define the “rules” of what constitutes an acceptable scientific communication. That is, they define how scientific communication can be related to other scientific communication and how empirical observations can be turned into scientific communication. These methods, theories, and results are then subsequently reapplied to generate new methods, additional theories, and novel results. Whether an instance of communication is considered as research or not thus depends on highly selective mechanisms intrinsic to the recursive conduct of scientific research – which has been described as the self-referential modus operandi of science (Luhmann 1990; Bailey 1997; Kieser and Leiner 2009; Weingart 2013, p. 86). Based on this understanding of science as communication, we can see that not everything scientists do is research. Many instances of communication by management scholars or business schools, for example, providing consultancy advice or arranging internships, would not be considered scientific in nature. Instead, only those instances of communication that engage in referencing earlier research publications would be considered scientific.

10

Problematizing the Relation Between Management Research and Practice

187

Taking this conceptualization to its extreme, Luhmann (1989, 1990) characterizes science as an operationally closed system of communication which reproduces itself on the basis of the code “true/untrue.” This means that in order to be considered part of a “scientific” discourse, every scientific communication must refer to earlier scientific communication as either true or untrue; in doing so, it too becomes an element of scientific discourse which can be referred to in further instances of communication in order to claim truth or falsehood for themselves. The criteria for whether an instance of scientific communication is classified as “true” or “untrue” are thus entirely the result of scientific discourse; “true” in this sense refers to instances of communication that have been accepted by other instances of scientific communication as “true,” for example, in the form of cross-references, which in turn serve to claim truth-value for themselves (Kieser 2002, p. 208; Nicolai 2004, p. 956). The flipside of this self-referentiality is that scientific communication cannot draw on nonscientific communication (e.g., legal decrees, newspaper articles, or political manifestos) in order to substantiate any scientific claims. In this sense, scientific research has been described as a “self-contained, closed system” (Astley and Zammuto 1992, p. 443) immersed in “an incestuous, closed loop” (Hambrick 1994, p. 13). In line with these descriptions, Luhmann speaks of a self-referential closure of science – which means that all information processed within the scientific system is processed in accordance with the structures of that scientific system: The self-referential closure of the system of science implies that the structure of this system cannot be determined through intervention from outside; or rather: that the distribution of the values “true” and “untrue” to sentences can only be decided in the system of science and that the conditionings necessary for this are consequently the exclusive domain of the system of science. (Luhmann 1990, p. 622f.; our translation)

Consequently, only those instances of communication that distinguish between true and untrue have an information value for further scientific communication. Other distinctions, by contrast, ultimately have no information value for the operation of scientific research – they make no difference; they are simply “noise.” To be taken up in scientific discourse, a phenomenon thus has to be structured differently from the way in which it would be structured in other discourses. This self-referential mode of operation in scientific research becomes most evident if we look at how research deals with the issues practitioners are concerned with. Scientific research constructs and frames those issues in a self-referential way, which has very little to do with the way the issues are seen by the practitioners. As Kieser and Nicolai write: [. . .] in discourses in which researchers try to establish the validity of theories on the basis of scientific criteria, science necessarily disconnects itself from discourses in which practitioners evaluate the usefulness of a concept. Again, the practice-oriented researcher finds himself or herself thrown back on that self-referential stream of communication that is typical for scientific discourses and is perceived as detached from the real world. (Kieser and Nicolai 2005, p. 277)

188

B. Grossmann-Hensel and D. Seidl

This holds true even if the very same individuals take part in both the scientific and practical discourses. For instance, in his study on the practical relevance of Michael Porter’s work on strategic management, Nicolai (2004) demonstrated that the “scientific” parts based on economics and the “applied” research aimed at practitioners’ work are two unconnected and autonomous bodies of knowledge. To highlight that the applied parts of Porter’s work are not really based on his scientific research, Nicolai refers to it as “Applied Science Fiction.” More concretely, Porter’s practice-oriented work “blurs the boundaries between scientific and practical communication and allows science to react to simplifying claims of application, without giving up its self-referential logic” (Nicolai 2004, p. 958), thus functioning as a way of “decoupling” (Meyer and Rowan 1977) scientific and practical communication. Luhmann’s conceptualization of science as a self-referential form of communication differentiated from other fields of society is widely shared among management scholars in the descriptive stream of the practical relevance literature. Even though some of these scholars consider Luhmann’s characterization of operative closure to be too extreme, they essentially concur that there is a fundamental difference between the logic of management research and the logic of management practice (Splitter and Seidl 2015). Based on various thinkers, they claim that management research constitutes a particular “field” (Bourdieu), relies on a specific “rationality” (Heidegger), forms a specialized “language game” (Wittgenstein), or operates according to its own “code” (Luhmann). This characterization of management research means that a direct transfer of scientific results from management research to management practice is impossible – even though this is often assumed by proponents of the programmatic approaches.

The Impossibility of a Direct Transfer of Research Results to Management Practice Most programmatic approaches in the relevance debate implicitly assume that the knowledge generated in management research can be transferred in a more or less linear way to management practice (Nicolai 2004). Nicolai and Seidl (2010, p. 1260) refer to these assumptions as the “input-output model” of practical relevance and, somewhat polemically, Nicolai (2004, p. 954) speaks of an “aqueduct model” of practical relevance. Analogously to the way in which aqueducts transport water over large distances by use of gradients and a sophisticated infrastructure of bridges and canals, this model presumes that academic knowledge can be transported across any lingering obstacles between academia and practice. Nicolai explains the analogy as follows: academic knowledge is like water. [. . .] From this point of view knowledge transfer does not generate any fundamental problems. Academic knowledge flows from top to bottom. [. . .] scientific knowledge is generally superior to practical knowledge [. . .]. The truth cannot be surpassed; alternative points of view can only be inferior. Academic knowledge moves by itself and spreads unidirectionally. The direction of the knowledge flow goes from science to

10

Problematizing the Relation Between Management Research and Practice

189

practice [. . .]. If the basic conditions are met, then knowledge flows by itself into practice. (Nicolai 2004, p. 954)

According to the aqueduct model, there can be only two reasons for the lack of practical relevance of management research. On the one hand, the “gradient” might be insufficient: the knowledge created in management research might not be rigorous enough and, thus, in hydraulic terms, of sufficient altitude to ensure that the epistemological descent to the practitioner level enables a smooth flow of knowledge (e.g., Camerer 1985). On the other hand, various barriers might hinder the flow of knowledge in spite of the ample gradient –for example, linguistic, temporal, or micropolitical barriers (Nicolai 2004, p. 953). Kieser et al. (2015) distinguish several prominent streams of literature in the programmatic relevance debate which are implicitly based on the aqueduct model. The first stream, which they term the “popularization view,” describes the relevance gap as the result of the use of scientific jargon in the academic “ivory tower” and the inaccessibility of research for practitioners (e.g., Choudhury 1986; Cohen 2007; Hambrick 1994). Accordingly, various forms of popularization are presented as solutions to the relevance problem. The arguments and results of management research are to be simplified and translated to practitioners by, for example, refraining from the use of jargon or by focusing on their implications for practitioners, and the transfer infrastructure needs to be strengthened, for example, in the form of bridging journals. The second stream, which they term the “institutional view,” sees the root of the relevance problem as located in the institutions of management research. “The business school” or “the business professor” are judged to be too detached from practice and narrowly specialized in their research, with few incentives for practical engagement (e.g., Bennis and O’Toole 2005; Oviatt and Miller 1989; Porter and McKibbin 1988). Accordingly, various countermeasures to the perceived “disconnect” (Buckley et al. 1998, p. 319) between business schools and management practice are suggested, such as the strengthening of the contact between researchers and practitioners by, for example, creating partnerships between academia and industry. The third stream is “action research,” which sees the main problem of the relevance gap as rooted in the tendency of management researchers to address academic problems rather than “real-world” problems, and to refrain from engaging directly with the practitioner world (e.g., Coghlan 2011; Levin and Greenwood 2001; Reason 2006). Accordingly, action researchers have called for a dissolution of the differentiation between research and practice – the goal is “a more direct process of researching what social stakeholders understand to be pressing problems” by addressing “real-life problems” through participation in problem-solving, and the identification of workable solutions to the “satisfaction of all involved” (Levin and Greenwood 2001, p. 105). The fourth stream is commonly referred to as “Mode 2 research” (e.g., Huff 2000; MacLean et al. 2002; Mohrman et al. 2008). According to the respective authors, the reason for the relevance gap is the traditional form of research, which they refer to as

190

B. Grossmann-Hensel and D. Seidl

“Mode 1” production of knowledge: a disciplinary, homogeneous, hierarchical, and form-conserving mode of research in which “problems are set and solved in a context governed by the, largely academic, interests of a specific community” (Gibbons et al. 1994, p. 3). They suggest that the relevance problem can be resolved by adopting a different research stance, which they label “Mode 2 research.” Using this approach, research is to be conducted in collaboration with the practitioner and in the context of its application (Nowotny et al. 2013; van de Ven 2011). The fifth stream of research, commonly referred to as “design science,” sees the main problem of the relevance gap as lying in the orientation of management research to the natural sciences, which focuses more on explanation than on developing instrumental knowledge (e.g., Pascal et al. 2013; Romme 2003; van Aken 2005). Accordingly, these scholars suggest turning management research into a design science, focused on designing new solutions to the problems of professionals through, for example, the creation and evaluation of artifacts in accordance with “tested and grounded technological rules” (van Aken 2004, p. 228). The sixth stream is “evidence-based management,” whose proponents claim that the relevance gap results from a mutual decoupling of management research and practice: While scholars are incentivized to diverge from elaborated knowledge, managers often rely on forms of weak evidence, such as their personal experience or business books (e.g., ▶ Chap. 3, “Evidence-Based Management,” Mensmann et al. in this volume; Rousseau 2006, 2012; Rousseau and McCarthy 2007). These researchers suggest that management research should focus on developing evidence-based knowledge for practice: following the example of evidence-based medicine, both management research and practice are to be grounded in the “best available scientific evidence,” constantly synthesizing and “translating principles based on best evidence into organizational practices” (Rousseau 2006, p. 256). While the different streams of the programmatic relevance debate differ in their diagnoses of the relevance gap and the solutions they suggest, they all share the assumption that scientific knowledge can (at least in principle) be transferred to the domain of practice. Yet, if we subscribe to conceptualizations of scientific research as a self-referential form of communication differentiated from other fields of society as outlined in the previous section, such an assumption is highly questionable. Seen through such a lens, the social world is made up of incommensurable discourses whose elements can neither be transferred nor translated into elements of another discourse (Scherer 1998). Due to its particular code guiding its selfreferential operation, scientific communication is irrevocably detached from the logic guiding management practice (Splitter and Seidl 2015). While this does not mean that scientific communication cannot refer to management practice, practical issues are re-constructed in the scientific management discourse by turning them into scientific issues. And if the scientific management discourse were to adopt the logic of management practice as suggested by some programmatic scholars, the scientific discourse would no longer be scientific and just become part of management practice (Seidl 2009; Kieser et al. 2015). This also means that even if it were

10

Problematizing the Relation Between Management Research and Practice

191

possible to transfer knowledge from management research to management practice, that knowledge would be reconstructed according to the logic of management practice such that it would become a different knowledge (Seidl 2007). As Kieser and Leiner (2012) point out, even if the very same human beings participate in the respective discourses, they cannot directly transfer meaning from one discourse to another. Instead, the meaning of a specific instance of communication is shaped by the conditions of the discourse in which it is subsequently reconstructed. Consequently, whenever “researchers try to establish the validity of theories on the basis of scientific criteria, science necessarily disconnects itself from discourses in which practitioners evaluate the usefulness of a concept” (Kieser and Nicolai 2005, p. 277). The perceived relevance of management research is hence not the result of a linear transfer of scientific knowledge but “the outcome of a nonlinear reproduction of knowledge by the system of practice itself” (Rasche and Behnam 2009, p. 244). In Luhmann’s words, scientific research “can, under these conditions, never fully serve specific application needs; it can never be fully instrumentalized” (Luhmann 1981, p. 326; our translation). If we accept these far-reaching implications for the relation between management research and practice, this begs the question of how the impact of management on practice can be conceptualized differently.

The Impact of Research on Practice In order to discuss the practical relevance of management research, it is necessary to define what we mean by relevance. As several authors have pointed out, the relevance debate suffers from a lack of a clear and accepted definition of relevance. As Nicolai and Seidl write, “[a]lthough many researchers talk about ‘relevance’ they hardly ever specify what they actually mean by that” (Nicolai and Seidl 2010, p. 1257). Similarly, Augier and March stress that the “definition of relevance is ambiguous, its measurement imprecise, and its meaning complex” (Augier and March 2007, p. 138). At the most basic level, one can speak of relevance whenever management research makes a difference to management practice. Focusing particularly on managerial decisions, some authors also speak of relevance in terms of an impact on managerial decision making (Cohen 2007; Kieser and Wellstein 2008; Luhmann 1981; Starkey and Madan 2001). As Davenport and Prusak (Davenport and Prusak 1998, p. 170) write, “if knowledge doesn’t improve decision making, then what’s the point?” Similarly, Luhmann writes that we should analyze the application of scientific results in practice not in terms of action but in terms of making decisions. It is not a question of whether something which from a scientific point of view has been acknowledged as correct action is reproduced correctly or not; rather the question is whether the decision situation is modified through the incorporation of a scientific result, which may (but doesn’t have to) affect the alternative ultimately selected. (Luhmann 1981, p. 330; our translation)

192

B. Grossmann-Hensel and D. Seidl

If the relation between management research and practice is approached from this angle, any kind of knowledge can potentially be considered practically relevant to the extent that it makes a difference to decision making whatever that difference may consist of. Building on the work of Rich (1977), Beyer and Trice (1982), Knorr-Cetina and Weiss (1977), and Pelz (1978), Nicolai and Seidl (2010) distinguish three basic forms of practical relevance of management research according to the phase of the decisionmaking process it affects. First, knowledge that influences the courses of action selected in particular decision situations can be said to possess instrumental relevance. Rich (1977), in this context, speaks of “knowledge for action.” Most contributions in the programmatic relevance debate (implicitly or explicitly) refer to this form of relevance (e.g., van Aken 2005; van de Ven 2000). Examining the so-called implications sections of articles published in the leading management journals, Nicolai and Seidl (2010) reveal that many authors claim that their research findings are of instrumental relevance; that is, the findings offer knowledge that would help in the selection of courses of action. This knowledge is presented either in the form of schemes, that is, as graphically presented flow charts, matrices, or checklists to order decision situations (e.g., Miles et al. 1978), as technological rules or recipes, that is, as algorithmic rules or heuristics to design an intervention for a desired outcome as practiced in medicine or engineering (e.g., van Aken 2004), or as forecasts, that is, trends or predictions of concrete events regarding a future development. In much of the literature emphasizing instrumental relevance, the perceived lack thereof appears as a “technical” problem (Whitley 1985) which can in principle be solved, for example, through appeals to the scientific community and changes in publication procedures. However, many of the solutions suggested in this stream of literature seem to contradict the model of scientific research as a self-referential system of communication outlined above. The pursuit of truth according to the norms and rules of scientific rigor defining which communications can be used as a point of reference for further scientific communications (Seidl 2007) can conflict with the pursuit of results oriented to practical application. According to Luhmann, one important consequence of the operative closure of the system of scientific research is that “its methodological apparatus is not sufficiently environment-specific” to derive instrumental guidelines for practical application (Luhmann 1981, p. 326; our translation). In line with that, various scholars have spoken of a trade-off between rigor and (instrumental) relevance (e.g., Carton and Mouricou 2017; Lampel and Shapira 1995; Kieser and Leiner 2009; Lampel and Shapira 1995; Mayer 1993; Nicolai 2004; Shrivastava 1987): the more management research seeks to develop technological rules, the more it will have to give up its claim to academic rigor (Whitley 1988). Even in areas with quasi-technical problems, scholars have therefore increasingly refrained from devising specific technological rules independent of a particular temporal, social, and local context (Zinkhan and Hirschheim 1992). Management research also faces the problem of incommensurability, that is, a pluralism of radically different and incompatible systems of orientation without any objective frame of reference to evaluate these competing perspectives

10

Problematizing the Relation Between Management Research and Practice

193

(Scherer 1998). As various scholars have highlighted, the discipline resembles a “fragmented adhocracy” (Whitley 1984), which undermines its ability to provide unequivocal instrumental guidelines. Nicolai and Seidl write: If different theories are associated with different instrumental claims, they might neutralize each other. Instrumental relevance is based on the reduction of complexity, i.e. on the exclusion of alternative decisions. [. . .] [Yet] theoretical pluralism re-establishes complexity with regard to the decision maker. Thus, with increasing pluralism, instrumental relevance is reduced. Since science itself does not offer any methods for choosing between instruments, this problem cannot be solved by scientific means. (Nicolai and Seidl 2010, p. 1273)

Second, knowledge which affects how a decision situation is perceived, constructed, framed, or understood can be said to be of conceptual relevance. Rich (1977), in this context, speaks of “knowledge for understanding.” The main characteristic of such forms of knowledge is that they broaden our understanding, as developed in Weick’s (1979) notion of “complicated understanding” as the ability to generate interpretations and understandings of organizational events from several rather than single perspectives (Bartunek et al. 1983). This form of relevance is also often found in the implications sections of research articles. This mostly takes the form of linguistic constructs, that is, new concepts or metaphors, or the uncovering of either new and alternative routes of action or of causal relationships and unknown side effects, all of which change the understanding of a decision situation. In the literature emphasizing conceptual relevance, it has been argued that scientific knowledge spreads through a process of “dissociation” (Jarzabkowski and Wilson 2006), “translation” (Latour 1987), or “productive misunderstanding” (Seidl 2007). When compared with the (allegedly) more linear transferability of the technological rules formulated in claims to instrumental relevance, often using engineering as a role model for an applied science (e.g., Thompson 1956), research striving for conceptual relevance presents much more “indirect and subtle” (Beyer and Trice 1982, p. 615) utilizations of social science. Conceptual relevance appears to be compatible both with academic rigor and an overall trend towards theoretical pluralism in management research (Astley and Zammuto 1992, p. 455), but its application puts some strain on practitioners: conceptual knowledge presupposes an active engagement with scientific forms of thinking and communication. In this context, Luhmann (1981, p. 332) argues that such knowledge cannot diffuse into practice without a scientification of practice – which can indeed already be observed (Whitley 1995). Third, knowledge used to legitimate or enforce a chosen course of action can be said to offer legitimative relevance. Building on the analysis of Knorr-Cetina and Weiss (1977) on the use of knowledge as a substitute for decisions, Pelz (1978, p. 352, 357), in this context, also speaks of a “symbolic use” of knowledge that uses research as political ammunition to accredit or discredit certain predetermined positions whose existence matters more than the actual content of the analysis. Given that these are latent forms of practical relevance whose explication would rule out their utilization, it is not surprising that they are rarely mentioned in the relevance literature. Forms of legitimative relevance include credentializing, for example, the control that scientific research exerts over curricula and thus the process

194

B. Grossmann-Hensel and D. Seidl

of certification in business schools (Whitley 1995), and the use of rhetoric devices, for example, the utilization of scientifically generated knowledge as a means to increase the perceived legitimacy of a choice already made to third parties (Astley and Zammuto 1992, p. 452). The literature on legitimative relevance rarely provides suggestions on how to increase the practical relevance of research. Whereas, at first glance, legitimative relevance could be expected to be compatible with scientific rigor (the more rigorous a knowledge claim, the more it is suited to serve as a credential or as a rhetoric device (Kieser 2002)), this relation is in fact ambivalent. Given the trend toward theoretical pluralism, it increasingly becomes possible to legitimate almost any form of management practice by making opportunistic use of specific elements of scientific communication (Beck and Bonss 1989). In the long run, the fragmentation of management research makes scientific justifications appear arbitrary and thus undermines legitimative relevance. Attempts to make non-opportunistic use of the results of management research could, paradoxically, even turn out to be counterproductive, in that credentializing and rhetorical devices become less persuasive if supplemented with a more comprehensive understanding of the wider theoretical context. In sum, theoretical pluralism not only reduces the legitimative relevance of management research, but some scholars have even observed a general erosion of scientific authority (e.g., Luhmann 1990, p. 629). Independently of the form of practical relevance, the transmission of knowledge from the scientific domain into managerial practice is associated with a substantial change of meaning. In Luhmann’s view, a process of “non-identical reproduction” occurs: [. . .] a change of meaning through re-contextualisation, through integration into a new neighbourhood, through triggering of different associations. Whether the infused element was true or false quickly loses its relevance. (Luhmann 1981, p. 330; our translation)

So-called applied knowledge is not in a strict sense a translation or transmission of an original meaning, but an entirely different meaning constructed in management practice according to its own logic: One discourse cannot but reconstruct the meaning of the other in its own terms and context and at the same time can make use of the meaning material of the other discourse as an external provocation to create internally something new. (Teubner 2000, p. 408)

From this perspective, the introduction of scientific knowledge into managerial practice causes an unspecific perturbation (Teubner 2000) which elicits reactions in the receiving system highly specific to that system. An example of this is the way in which new concepts of organizing tend to get incorporated in organizations – often resulting in nothing more than the introduction of a label, the meaning of which is then constructed according to the particular structures of the organization (Seidl 2007). The eventual application of new concepts is usually preceded by lengthy discussions about how the labels associated with

10

Problematizing the Relation Between Management Research and Practice

195

those concepts can be interpreted and related to existing practices (Zbaracki 1998). In all of these instances of nonidentical reproduction (Luhmann 1981), it is impossible to determine from the outset what meaning will ultimately be created in response to a perturbation generated by the scientific system. Whereas in principle any instance of scientific communication can be taken up in managerial contexts and thus become practically relevant, the system of science itself can reflect on the varying likelihoods of causing such resonance. In line with this, Luhmann (1981) suggests conceptualizing applied science as a form of science that contemplates and tries to increase its potential for causing perturbations in practice. Such an understanding significantly departs from ordinary conceptions of applied science as a science whose findings are simply transferred into practice. Instead, management research might increase its practical relevance by reflecting on its potential for stimulating alternative conceptualizations within managerial contexts, that is, by stimulating “productive misunderstandings” (Seidl 2009) in practice. Again, it is impossible to forecast the different practices these misunderstandings will eventually give rise to: There is of course, no built-in guarantee that such a misunderstanding will be productive. You cannot say in advance whether in the famous shell, the irritation of the [grain of sand] will at the end create the pearl. (Teubner 2000, p. 409)

Implications Conceptualizing scientific research as a self-referential network of communication has implications both for management research and management practice. For management research, the most immediate implication is that alleged claims of practical relevance should not form the starting point, but instead become the object of critical reflection of the status of management research as an applied science. In general, the lack of practical relevance does not need to be seen as a deficiency of the particular strand of research but can instead be regarded as a consequence of the inevitable incommensurability between the discourses of management research and practice. In a strict sense, we might even restrict the notion of relevance to questions regarding the relevance or irrelevance of research to further research – but not to practice as such. This problematization of the notion of relevance has two implications. On the one hand, it allows management research to acknowledge its self-referentiality as constitutive: management research – like all scientific research – is ultimately bound to itself in its operation as a system of communication (Kieser 2002; Kieser and Leiner 2009; Nicolai 2004). As a consequence, the “difference” or “gap” between management research and management practice should not be deplored but rather be appreciated as the condition sine qua non for the constitution of management research as an applied science. If, by contrast, management research was simply adjusted to the logic of management practice, it would lose its status as an applied

196

B. Grossmann-Hensel and D. Seidl

science and instead simply turn into another form of management practice (Kieser 2002; Luhmann 1990). On the other hand, management research could use this notion of relevance in order to systematically study its ability to create resonance in managerial practice in the form of perturbations (Astley and Zammuto 1992; Luhmann 1990; Teubner 2000). In an extension of this line of argument, management research could even try to deliberately increase its resonance in management practice. Seidl (2007, p. 214) distinguishes a content and a process side for future research in this direction. As for the content side, he identified the development of labels likely to have resonance in practical discourse as a promising way forward. Such labels would typically need to offer sufficient “interpretive viability” (Benders and Van Veen 2001), a scope for interpretation to “fit” the concrete organizational context. On the process side, he suggested ways in which the process of research could come into “contact” with management practice. In contrast to “Mode 2 research” (e.g., Gibbons et al. 1994), this would imply a parallel processing of scientific and practical communication as two simultaneous but separate discourses in which the “same” communications mean different things. However, attempting to increase the resonance of management research in practice would incur two dangers. First, given the different operating logics of research and practice, the former has no strict control over its effects on the latter. In a paradoxical way, scientific research can only try to draw the attention of managerial practice to the fact that it is ultimately this very practice which determines the resonance of the scientific perturbation. Put differently, scientific research in a strict sense can be neither praised nor blamed for any remote effect that its concepts might have in practice. This might be seen as a major limitation of Luhmann’s theorizing: given his “radical theoretical modesty” (Moeller 2012, p. 111), he merely describes the communicative operation of science as a social system incapable of controlling its effects on society as a whole and refrains from any concrete suggestions on how to increase the applicability of scientific knowledge. In his discussion of the effects of science on society, he simply “confirms and radicalizes the old insight that suggestions on how to apply knowledge have to take into consideration local institutions, norms, interests and sensitivities” as part of a general disclaimer that the constructivist epistemology underlying his sociology “does not allow for more specific statements” (Luhmann 1990, p. 650, 648; our translation) concerning the impact of scientific research on practice. Second, if management research focuses too much on its effect on practice, it might become disconnected from scientific communication and ultimately lose its status as an undisputed element of the scientific system. Luhmann even proclaims that it is “difficult to see why theory, as is often asserted, ought to make an effort to be understandable for practitioners. Why should it accept the concomitant restrictions?” (Luhmann 2018, 393). In other words, attempts to focus solely on covering the interface between scientific research and practice could lead to the respective branch of management research losing its access to some of the communication channels that are indispensable for an association with scientific research, such as cross-citations and reputation (Luhmann 1990; Kieser 2002). A promising way for

10

Problematizing the Relation Between Management Research and Practice

197

management research to deal with this tension might be to reflect on its own orientation with regard to internal (research) and external (practitioner) audiences and try to strike some sort of balance – without fully overcoming the trade-off implied. For management practice, taking seriously the notion of incommensurability would also have consequences. One would be to give up the guiding assumption of instrumental notions of relevance which assumes that research can instruct management practice in an even remotely linear way. Technological rules applicable in management practice can be neither directly derived from theories nor directly substantiated by theories, given that these tend to be too general for those purposes (Jarzabkowski and Wilson 2006). If management science is understood as a social science that deals with complex problems (Mintzberg 2004), then there is indeed a trade-off between instrumental relevance and scientific rigor, at least in that standardized solutions like technological rules are “doomed to failure” (Whitley 1988, p. 64). At the same time, managerial practice might nevertheless take ample notice of management research in meaningful ways. Conceptual forms of relevance, while not pretending to offer the “direct and obvious uses and consequences” (Beyer and Trice 1982, p. 615) promised by instrumental accounts, present a highly demanding challenge not just for researchers but also for practitioners (Seidl 2007). If managerial practice is conceived of not simply as the receiving and applying end of the transmission of research content but as playing an active role in the (mis-) understanding scientific knowledge, it becomes the key locus in which questions of relevance are decided in situ. If looked at this way, the adoption of scientific knowledge is a skillful accomplishment in which relevance is attributed independently of scientific criteria. Then, the ultimate question of applicability is if and how the referral to a particular theory can be mobilized to achieve certain aims and in doing so retrospectively attribute relevance to the outputs of research. Luhmann illustrates this with an example from psychology: With regard to the question of applicability it is irrelevant whether the Oedipus complex really exists; what counts is whether someone who is skilled in identifying it is able to combine situations and therapies in a successful way. (Luhmann 1981, p. 323; our translation)

Whereas Luhmann offers little advice on how to successfully combine management situations and scientific therapies, his theory of social systems might provide the basis for an empirical research program on the resonance of management research beyond notions of linear transferability. The applicability of the results of scientific inquiry depends on manifold factors which deserve the empirical scrutiny of management researchers. Speculative but promising research in this direction could take a closer look at some of the following aspects (cf. Nicolai 2004): What role do different dissemination media like transfer journals, conferences or practitioner platforms play in the dissemination of scientific knowledge? How can organizations like consulting firms, universities’ alumni associations, or interorganizational initiatives contribute to creating resonance between scientific

198

B. Grossmann-Hensel and D. Seidl

research and practice? And which forms of productive (mis-)understandings can individual management researchers instigate in their field research? Luhmann’s (2012) theory of modern society as being divided into separate function systems (i.e., economy, law, education, politics, mass media, medicine, etc.) directs our attention to the specific sensitivities of these function systems, making it possible to examine the specific requirements for managerial relevance within organizations in such diverse contexts (cf. Mohe and Seidl 2011, p. 18). There is no reason why it should not fall into the very realm of management research to systematically analyze how such forms of resonance can be enhanced. Table 1 Differences between the programmatic literature and perspectives based on the sociology of science (partly adapted from Kieser et al. 2015, p. 148 ff)

Main causes of the relevance problem identified in the literature

Relation between scientific knowledge and practical knowledge Conceptualization of the adoption of scientific knowledge in practice Primary form of practical relevance discussed Implications for increasing practical relevance

Mainstream programmatic views - Lack of channels for “transferring” scholarly research to practice (popularization view) - Business schools are detached from practice (institutional view) - Misfit between disciplinary structures and the structure of practical problems (Mode 2 / action research) - Lack of academic interest in developing prescriptions (design science) - Lack of systematic collection of evidence (evidence-based management) Superiority of scientific knowledge

Sociology of science views (particularly Luhmann) - Research and practice as different “social fields” (Bourdieu) - Scientific rationality as disconnected from the logic of practice (Heidegger) - Phronetic gap between scientific and practical knowledge (Aristotle) - Research and practice as different “language games” (Wittgenstein) - Research as a selfreferentially closed communication system (Luhmann) System-specific types of knowledge

Transfer of knowledge

Productive misunderstandings

Instrumental relevance

Conceptual relevance

- Strengthen transfer infrastructure (popularization view) - Intensify contact to practitioners (institutional view) - Address “real-life” problems (Mode 2 / action research) - Focus on technological rules / design propositions (design science) - Take evidence-based medicine as a model for management studies (evidence-based management)

Limited possibilities for increasing practical relevance For researchers: - Study the relationship to practice - Balance internal and external audiences For practitioners: - Increase resonance by fostering productive (mis-) understanding

10

Problematizing the Relation Between Management Research and Practice

199

A comparison between the programmatic literature on the theory–practice relation and Luhmann’s approach based on the sociology of science reveals the following key differences (see Table 1). Whereas the programmatic literature identifies the main causes for the relevance problem as either a lack of transfer infrastructure, a detachment of business schools from practice, a misfit between academic structures and interests and practical problems or a shortage of evidence, literature based on the sociology of science (Bourdieu, Heidegger, Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Luhmann) would argue that the differentiation between scientific research and practice simply cannot be bridged. While programmatic accounts presume the superiority of scientific knowledge, Luhmann conceptualizes system-specific types of knowledge which cannot be conceived of “in the old hierarchical sense with theory taking precedence over practice in rank or essentiality” (Luhmann 2018, p. 393). Accordingly, whereas the programmatic literature conceptualizes the adoption of scientific knowledge by practitioners as a transfer of knowledge primarily in the form of instrumental relevance, Luhmann’s theory of social systems highlights conceptual relevance in the form of productive misunderstandings (Seidl 2009). This leads to the following implications for increasing practical relevance: according to the programmatic literature, either the transfer infrastructure or contact with practitioners need to be strengthened, “real-life” problems are to be addressed, evidence collected, and design propositions developed. In comparison, the possibilities for increasing practical relevance from Luhmann’s perspective appear rather limited: researchers should examine their relationship to practice more reflexively and try to balance internal and external audiences of scientific research, and practitioners should try to explore ways of increasing resonance by actively seeking to (mis-)understand scientific knowledge.

Cross-References ▶ Evidence-Based Management ▶ Interpretive Inquiry ▶ The Performativity of Theories

References Aristotle (1980) Nicomachean ethics. Oxford University Press, Oxford Astley WG, Zammuto RF (1992) Organization science, managers, and language games. Organ Sci 3:443–460 Augier M, March JG (2007) The pursuit of relevance in management education. Calif Manag Rev 49:129–146 Augier M, March J (2011) The roots, rituals, and rhetorics of change: North American business schools after the Second World War. Stanford University Press, Stanford Bailey KD (1997) The Autopoiesis of social systems: assessing Luhmann’s theory of self-reference. Syst Res Behav Sci 14:83–100

200

B. Grossmann-Hensel and D. Seidl

Bartunek JM, Gordon JR, Weathersby RP (1983) Developing “complicated” understanding in administrators. Acad Manag Rev 8:273–284 Beck U, Bonß W (eds) (1989) Weder Sozialtechnologie noch Aufklärung? Analysen zur Verwendung sozialwissenschaftlichen Wissens. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt Benders J, Van Veen K (2001) What’s in a fashion? Interpretative viability and management fashions. Organization 8:33–53 Bennis WG, O’Toole J (2005) How business schools have lost their way. Harv Bus Rev 83:96–104 Beyer JM, Trice HM (1982) The utilization process: a conceptual framework and synthesis of empirical findings. Adm Sci Q 27:591–622 Bourdieu P (1990) The logic of practice. Stanford University Press, Stanford Buckley MR, Ferris GR, Bernardin HJ, Harvey MG (1998) The disconnect between the science and practice of management. Bus Horiz 41:31–39 Camerer C (1985) Redirecting research in business policy and strategy. Strateg Manag J 6:1–15 Carton G, Mouricou P (2017) Is management research relevant? A systematic analysis of the rigourrelevance debate in top-tier journals (1994–2013). M@n@gement 20:166–203 Choudhury N (1986) In search of relevance in management accounting research. Account Bus Res 17:21–32 Coghlan D (2011) Action research: exploring perspectives on a philosophy of practical knowing. Acad Manag Ann 5:53–87 Cohen DJ (2007) The very separate worlds of academic and practitioner publications in human resource management: reasons for the divide and concrete solutions for bridging the gap. Acad Manag J 50:1013–1019 Davenport TH, Prusak L (1998) Working knowledge: how organizations manage what they know. Harvard Business Press, Boston Gibbons M, Limoges C, Nowotny H et al (1994) The new production of knowledge: the dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies. SAGE, London Hambrick DC (1994) 1993 presidential address: what if the academy actually mattered? Acad Manag Rev 19:11 Heidegger M (1996) Being and time. State University of New York Press, Albany Hernes T, Bakken T (2003) Implications of self-reference: Niklas Luhmann’s autopoiesis and organization theory. Organ Stud 24:1511–1535 Huff AS (2000) 1999 presidential address: changes in organizational knowledge production. Acad Manag Rev 25:288–293 Jarzabkowski P, Wilson DC (2006) Actionable strategy knowledge. Eur Manag J 24:348–367 Kieser A (2002) On communication barriers between management science, consultancies and business companies. In: Clark T, Fincham R (eds) Critical consulting. Blackwell, Oxford, pp 206–227 Kieser A, Leiner L (2009) Why the rigour–relevance gap in management research is unbridgeable. J Manag Stud 46:516–533 Kieser A, Leiner L (2012) Collaborate with practitioners: but beware of collaborative research. J Manag Inq 21:14–28 Kieser A, Nicolai A (2005) Success factor research: overcoming the trade-off between rigor and relevance? J Manag Inq 14:275–279 Kieser A, Wellstein B (2008) Do activities of consultants and management scientists affect decision making by managers? In: Hodgkinson GP, Starbuck WH (eds) The Oxford handbook of organizational decision making, pp 493–516 Kieser A, Nicolai A, Seidl D (2015) The practical relevance of management research: turning the debate on relevance into a rigorous scientific research program. Acad Manag Ann 9: 143–233 Knorr-Cetina KD, Weiss CH (1977) Policymakers’ use of social science knowledge: symbolic or instrumental? In: Using social research in public policy making. Lexington Books, Lexington, pp 165–182

10

Problematizing the Relation Between Management Research and Practice

201

Krohn W, Küppers G (1990) Science as a self-organizing system outline of a theoretical model. In: Krohn W, Küppers G, Nowotny H (eds) Selforganization: portrait of a scientific revolution. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp 208–222 Kuhn TS (1962) The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Kulik CT (2020) 2019 presidential address – management scholars, end users, and the power of thinking small. Acad Manag Rev 45:273–279 Lampel J, Shapira Z (1995) Progress and its discontents: data scarcity and the limits of falsification in strategic management. Adv Strateg Manag:113–150 Latour B (1987) Science in action. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Levin M, Greenwood D (2001) Pragmatic action research and the struggle to transform universities into learning communities. In: Reason P, Bradbury H (eds) Handbook of action research. SAGE, London, pp 103–113 Luhmann N (1981) Theoretische und praktische Probleme der anwendungsbezogenen Sozialwissenschaften. In: Luhmann N (ed) Soziologische Aufklärung 3: Soziales System, Gesellschaft, Organisation. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden, pp 321–334 Luhmann N (1989) Ecological communication. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Luhmann N (1990) Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt Luhmann N (1995) Social systems. Stanford University Press, Stanford Luhmann N (2012) Theory of society. Stanford University Press, Stanford Luhmann N (2018) Organization and decision. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge MacLean D, MacIntosh R, Grant S (2002) Mode 2 management research. Br J Manag 13:189–207 Mayer T (1993) Truth versus precision in economics. Elgar, Aldershot Meyer JW, Rowan B (1977) Institutionalized organizations: formal structure as myth and ceremony. Am J Sociol 83:340–363 Miles RE, Snow CC, Meyer AD, Coleman HJ Jr (1978) Organizational strategy, structure, and process. Acad Manag Rev 3:546–562 Mintzberg H (2004) Managers not MBAs: a hard look at the soft practice of management development. FT Prentice Hall, Harlow Moeller H-G (2012) The radical Luhmann. Columbia University Press, New York Mohe M, Seidl D (2011) Theorizing the client – consultant relationship from the perspective of social-systems theory. Organization 18:3–22 Nicolai A (2004) The bridge to the ‘real world’: applied science or a ‘schizophrenic tour de force’? J Manag Stud 41:951–976 Nicolai A, Seidl D (2010) That’s relevant! Different forms of practical relevance in management science. Organ Stud 31:1257–1285 Nowotny H, Scott PB, Gibbons MT (2013) Re-thinking science: knowledge and the public in an age of uncertainty. John Wiley & Sons Oviatt BM, Miller WD (1989) Irrelevance, intransigence, and business professors. Acad Manag Perspect 3:304–312 Pascal A, Thomas C, Romme AGL (2013) Developing a human-centred and science-based approach to design: the knowledge management platform project. Br J Manag 24:264–280 Pelz DC (1978) Some expanded perspectives on use of social science in public policy. In: Yinger JM, Cutler SJ (eds) Major social issues: a multidisciplinary view. The Free Press, New York, pp 346–357 Porter LW, McKibbin LE (1988) Management education and development: drift or thrust into the 21st century? McGraw-Hill, New York Rasche A, Behnam M (2009) As if it were relevant: a systems theoretical perspective on the relation between science and practice. J Manag Inq 18:243–255 Reason P (2006) Choice and quality in action research practice. J Manag Inq 15:187–203 Rich RF (1977) Uses of social science information by federal bureaucrats: knowledge for action versus knowledge for understanding. In: Weiss CH (ed) Using social research in public policy making. Lexington Books, Lexington, p 199

202

B. Grossmann-Hensel and D. Seidl

Romme AGL (2003) Making a difference: organization as design. Organ Sci 14:558–573 Rousseau DM (2006) Is there such a thing as “evidence-based management”? Acad Manag Rev 31: 256–269 Rousseau DM (2012) Envisioning evidence-based management. In: The Oxford handbook of evidence-based management. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 3–23 Rousseau DM, McCarthy S (2007) Educating managers from an evidence-based perspective. Acad Manag Learn Edu 6:84–101 Sandberg J, Tsoukas H (2011) Grasping the logic of practice: theorizing through practical rationality. Acad Manag Rev 36:338–360 Scherer AG (1998) Pluralism and incommensurability in strategic management and organization theory: a problem in search of a solution. Organization 5:147–168 Seidl D (2007) General strategy concepts and the ecology of strategy discourses: a systemicdiscursive perspective. Organ Stud 28:197–218 Seidl D (2009) Productive misunderstandings between organisation science and organisation practice: the science-practice relation from the perspective of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of autopoietic systems. Adv Ser Manag:133–148 Seidl D, Mormann H (2014) Niklas Luhmann as organization theorist. In: Adler P, du Gay P, Morgan G, Reed M (eds) The Oxford handbook of sociology, social theory, and organization studies. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 125–157 Shrivastava P (1987) Rigor and practical usefulness of research in strategic management. Strateg Manag J 8:77–92 Splitter V, Seidl D (2011) Does practice-based research on strategy Lead to practically relevant knowledge? Implications of a Bourdieusian perspective. J Appl Behav Sci 47:98–120 Splitter V, Seidl D (2015) Practical relevance of practice-based research on strategy. In: Golsorkhi D, Rouleau L, Seidl D, Vaara E (eds) Cambridge handbook of strategy as practice, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 128–142 Starkey K, Madan P (2001) Bridging the relevance gap: aligning stakeholders in the future of management research. Br J Manag 12:3–26 Stehr N (1992) Practical knowledge: applying the social sciences. SAGE, London Stichweh R (1994) Wissenschaft, Universität, Professionen: soziologische Analysen, Erste Auflage. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt Teubner G (2000) Contracting worlds: the many autonomies of private law. Soc Leg Stud 9:399–417 Thompson JD (1956) On building an administrative science. Adm Sci Q:102–111 Tsoukas H, Cummings S (1997) Marginalization and recovery: the emergence of Aristotelian themes in organization studies. Organ Stud 18:655–683 Van Aken JE (2004) Management research based on the paradigm of the design sciences: the quest for field-tested and grounded technological rules. J Manag Stud 41:219–246 Van Aken JE (2005) Management research as a design science: articulating the research products of mode 2 knowledge production in management. Br J Manag 16:19–36 Van de Ven AH (2000) Professional science for a professional school: action science and normal science. In: Beer M, Nohria N (eds) Breaking the code of change. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, pp 393–413 Van de Ven AH (2011) Reflections on research for theory and practice: from an engaged scholarship perspective. In: Mohrman SA, Lawler EE (eds) Useful research: advancing theory and practice. Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, pp 387–406 Weick KE (1979) The social psychology of organizing. Addison-Wesley, Reading Weingart P (2013) Wissenschaftssoziologie, 3rd edn. transcript, Bielefeld Whitley R (1984) The fragmented state of management studies: reasons and consequences. J Manag Stud 21:331–348 Whitley R (1988) The management sciences and management skills. Organ Stud 9:47–68 Whitley R (1995) Academic knowledge and work jurisdiction in management. Organ Stud 16:81–105 Wittgenstein L (1953) Philosophical investigations. Blackwell, London Zbaracki MJ (1998) The rhetoric and reality of total quality management. Adm Sci Q:602–636 Zinkhan GM, Hirschheim R (1992) Truth in marketing theory and research: an alternative perspective. J Mark 56:80–88

Part II Philosophy of Science for Management Theory and Practice

Philosophy of Science for Management Theory, Practice, and Sci-fi Freaks: An Introduction

11

Alejandro Agafonow

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Nonsense of Theory-Less Management Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Large Samples and Correlations Are Not Silver Bullets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Limits of Induction Illustrated with the Inference of What a Planet Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Need for Retroduction Illustrated with the Inference of What a Planet Is . . . . . . . . . . . . The Need for Concepts with High Discriminating Power in Management Science . . . . . . . . . . . The Chapters of This Section . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

206 207 209 210 211 213 214 216 217 217

Abstract

It is beyond question that advanced engineering applications would be impossible without the insights of natural science theories. In the field of management, however, the profession is still debating the relevance of theory for management research and practice. To introduce this handbook section, this chapter builds on a paradigmatic case of theory development in astronomy that requires no previous knowledge, in the hope of convincing theory skeptics of what management scholarship is missing when banking on a theory-less discipline of management. The key lies in the capacity of theoretical concepts with high discriminating power to unravel hidden structures, without which interventions with surgical precision are not possible. Only theory-based practice has proved to be able to cope with the management needs of today’s complex organizations, and business schools will be no more than vocational schools unless we can turn the rising tide

A. Agafonow (*) ESSCA School of Management, Angers, France GRANEM, Université d’Angers, Angers, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_65

205

206

A. Agafonow

of theory-less management research. The chapter closes with a summary of the contributions that make up this handbook’s section on philosophy of science. Keywords

Astronomy · Basic science · Business school · Induction · Management science · Management practice · Theory

Introduction . . .it’s hard not to admire theorists when many experimentalists, as ingenious as their contraptions are, ‘simply’ validate things which the theorists have already said. Anderson might have discovered the positron, but Dirac invented it first. Eddington might have observed deflected starlight, but Einstein simply plucked it out of thin air based on what seemed like magical speculation. (Jogalekar 2013, p. online)

If you are a sci-fi freak like me, who finds yourself navigating the broad field of management and economics, this chapter and Handbook section are intended for you. We may sometimes find ourselves daydreaming about space travel at a time when setting foot on Mars looks feasible, space tourism is developing, and Elon Musk makes a publicity stunt by sending a Tesla Roadster car into space onboard a reusable rocket developed by his company Space X. As you are about to discover, such a taste for the unknown may not be a total waste of time, for it can be a powerful motivation to delve into the striking resemblance that astronomy and the social sciences share. That is, they both have limitations in the experimental manipulation of variables, yet that has not prevented astronomy from reaching the status of science, despite not being able to control celestial bodies at will (Nagel 1961). A popular joke among physicists recounts the story of a dairy farmer who was in a predicament over how to increase his cows’ production of milk. After turning to a local university for help, a theoretical physicist accepted the challenge of looking into the problem. Relying on the power of introspection, the physicist was finally ready to present his conclusions. Standing in a lecture room arranged for the occasion, the physicist starts by drawing a perfect circle on the blackboard: “Consider a weightless, spherical cow, floating in a vacuum. . ..” Theoretical physics is portrayed negatively in this joke, yet it has left a long-lasting impression in the general public’s imagination compared to experimental physics, as evidenced by the popularity of Albert Einstein compared to the unfamiliar name of Arthur Eddington, who corroborated Einstein’s theoretical prediction of the bending of starlight (Jogalekar 2013). As Jogalekar (2013) posits in this chapter’s opening quotation, this may have something to do with the perplexing power of theory to shed light on the complexities of the real world. Unlike physics, however, management is a social science laggard in the adoption of the theoretical standards of science. Quarrels over the role of theory in management practice and education remain prominent today (e.g., Bennis and O’Toole 2005; The Economist 2009; Thomas et al. 2014; Chia and Holt 2017), and academics and journal editors continue to challenge

11

Philosophy of Science for Management Theory, Practice, and Sci-fi Freaks:. . .

207

the role of theory-driven management research (e.g., Hambrick 2007; Schmenner et al. 2009; Shaw et al. 2017; Ployhart and Bartunek 2019). This chapter delves into what management academics are missing when they minimize the significance of theory, namely, the discriminating power of concepts without which hidden structures cannot be unraveled. In the spirit of this chapter, eye-opening cases in astronomy that require no previous knowledge from the reader are built upon to take aim at theory-less management research and practice. In doing so, the contributions to this handbook’s section on philosophy of science are highlighted. In a nutshell, I illustrate here how the progress of a scientific discipline crucially depends on a conceptual leap that consists in giving up commonsense distinctions employed in daily life when referring to the object of study. Instead, theoretical concepts with high discriminating power are used in science to unravel the hidden structures that slip through the gross meshwork of commonsense (Nagel 1961; Cohen and Nagel 1998). Such a conceptual leap is at the heart of scientists’ capability to spot the difference between, for instance, a wolf and a Tasmanian wolf that, despite appearances, are species belonging to two different families with a dissimilar genetic origin, the first a canid and the second a marsupial. Likewise, the periodic table of elements builds on the high-discriminating-power concepts of atomic structure to distinguish between elements that may seem different on the surface but share similar properties (Hempel 1970). Hydrogen, for instance, is a gas that conducts heat and electricity, just like metals do, thanks to similarities in their atomic structures. This chapter expounds on the need for a similar conceptual leap in management science.

The Nonsense of Theory-Less Management Practice Business schools owe their existence to the need to improve management practice. To focus on management practice aside from theory is, however, as self-defeating as to believe that advanced engineering applications can be developed on the margins of physical theory. Consider, for instance, the Global Positioning System (GPS) that helped you reach your destination on time last summer vacation. Such a handy technology would hardly be possible if it did not take into consideration the effect that the Earth has on the space-time fabric, which Albert Einstein worked out in his theory of relativity. Because such an effect resembles the dings and dips that heavy objects produce in a fabric (Levenson 2015), the bending force of gravity will differ depending on how close mass and energy are to a massive body like the Earth. Since the distance between your GPS monitor and the satellites on the Earth’s orbit is about 20,000 Km, relativistic effects – i.e., Doppler shifts, the Sagnac effect, and gravitational redshifts – must be corrected for (Ashby 2002) if it is to accurately guide you to your destination next summer. Theory-less works on management practice are, however, praised and in high demand. Consider, for instance, “The no asshole rule” advanced by Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Robert I. Sutton, which has produced a lot of buzz

208

A. Agafonow

in the media. Rich in colorful anecdotes, it touches a nerve and speaks to many. Yet, despite its scant theoretical foundations, it is the typical kind of writing piece that boosts a business school’s popularity and helps you remain “academically qualified.” Similar works in Financial Times ranked journals include “Dealing with workplace bullshit” and “Competent jerks.” That there are unpleasant persons in the workplace is undeniable. If reality is taken at face value, however, it would be easy to mistake, for instance, white Bengal tigers for a species different from the typical specimen with orange fur and black stripes. Relying on the obvious orange-and-black fur to define a species misses that a number of Bengal tigers will not display the distinctive fur because there are genetic mechanisms that make a recessive gene to produce white coloring. As Albert Einstein put it, “[i]ntuitive conclusions based on immediate observation are not always to be trusted for they sometimes lead to the wrong clues” (cited in Murray 1992, p. 594). Without the inferential roundabouts made possible by putative causes inferred with the help of extant theory, one runs the risk of mistaking appearance for reality, which produces false and negative positives, i.e., either confusing a symptom with a nonexistent cause or vouching for the absence of a cause that is actually present, a problem that today troubles, for instance, social enterprise and entrepreneurship scholarship (Agafonow 2018; Agafonow and Perez 2020). A fascinating chapter in the history of astronomy illustrates this problem. The so-called transits are opportunities to observe astronomical phenomena that otherwise would remain hidden. They are the moments when an object passes across the phase of another object, such as when the Moon orbits between the Earth and the Sun, producing a solar eclipse. On March 26, 1859, Edmond Modeste Lescarbault, a French physician and an amateur astronomer, had his telescope pointing at the Sun just at the moment of another transit that was about to send shockwaves around the globe. On this occasion, the background face was that of the Sun, and the object crossing its face – which Mr. Lescarbault spotted – was an apparent planet whose existence had been recently postulated by the most competent professional astronomer at that time: Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier. Le Verrier postulated the existence of Vulcan to explain an anomaly in the orbit of Mercury, which was left unexplained by Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation (Levenson 2015). In the decades that followed, planet seekers both confirmed and failed to do so the sighting of Vulcan, to the point where the popular science magazine Scientific American declined to publish more news about Vulcan and The New York Times attributed the news of disconfirmation to professional jealousy (Levenson 2015). In fact, Vulcan never existed, despite astronomers seeing at times in the vicinity of Mercury a round black spot transiting the phase of the Sun. This illustrates a cornerstone in the practice of science, that is, scientific discoveries “are interpretations in the light of theories” (Popper 2005, p. 90). Dispense with a theory as Mr. Lescarbault did, or rely on a faulty one as Prof. Le Verrier did, and you cannot even trust what your eyes see. Vulcan was not really there, it was a fiction, yet many claimed to have seen it. Or, as posited by Hanson (2010): “there is more to seeing than meets the eyeball” (p. 7).

11

Philosophy of Science for Management Theory, Practice, and Sci-fi Freaks:. . .

209

In the teeth of this century-old scientific wisdom, A-class management journals have become a platform to air calls to cut back on theory-laden research (e.g., Hambrick 2007; Schmenner et al. 2009); to relax one’s hold on theory to make naked-eye-like observations, as former editors of the Academy of Management Review have posited (i.e., Ployhart and Bartunek 2019); to engage in tabularasa approaches to scholarly production that begin anew, theory-wise, from a clean slate, as posited by former editors of the Academy of Management Journal (i.e., Shaw et al. 2017); or to make one’s contribution pass “the Mom Test,” so it is within the reach of laypersons, which was espoused by another former editor of the Academy of Management Review (i.e., Ragins 2012), to name but a few cases.

Large Samples and Correlations Are Not Silver Bullets The problem of doing away with theory cannot be fixed by surveying large samples either. The opposite has been, however, the century-old hope of probabilistic explanations (Nagel 1961; Hempel 1966; Cohen and Nagel 1998), which aim at identifying regularities in large datasets by searching for factual correlatives. The virtue of probabilistic explanations is that large samples reduce the probability that the relationship observed is the product of a sampling error, let us say no more than 5 errors in 100 times at the standard level of significance p < 0.05 (Babbie 2013). The problem is that, first, such a probability is limited to the sample examined, conveying no truth value about hypotheses per se or, as put by Altman and Krzywinski (2017): “A P value is a probability statement about the observed sample in the context of a hypothesis, not about the hypotheses being tested” (p. 213). Second, such a probability does not always vary proportionally to the size of the sample. In fact, the threshold of a significant probability can be crossed back and forth as more data is added to the sample (Muller 2016), which can only be avoided with an infinite number of observations, past, present, and future (Hempel 1966). As recently put by Deaton and Cartwright (2018): “Unbiasedness means being right on average, where the average is taken over an infinite number of repetitions using the same set of subjects in the trial” (p. 03). Infinite observations are – you have guessed it – impossible, which is missed by Lee et al. (2014) when vouching for larger samples to end disagreements about social enterprise theory. After all, Newton’s law of gravity was not discovered by sampling falling apples in many different locations around the world (Shapira 2011), despite the pull of gravity being indeed different depending on a location’s altitude. To explain the limits of probabilistic explanations and their inductivism, few examples are better than the ones offered by astronomy because they are a stimulant to our imagination, especially if you are a sci-fi freak. Next, I draw on the International Astronomic Association to build an accessible example requiring no previous astronomical knowledge, yet not fully devoid of expert content, to illustrate how the apparently simple notion of a planet cannot be grasped without theory. If you thought you knew what a planet is, what follows invites you to think again.

210

A. Agafonow

Table 1 Inductive vs. theoretical definitions illustrated with what a planet is Type of definition Inductive definitions

Theoretical definitions

Concept’s discriminating power Low (employs commonsensical distinctions)

Phenomenon’s features or attributes Size and light reflection

High (unravels hidden structures)

Orbit, density, and hydrostatic equilibrium

Phenomenon identified First eight planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune

Three additional planets: Ceres, Pluto, and Charon

What a planet is Before the twentieth century, it was only possible to differentiate between planets, viewed as large heavenly bodies, and smaller satellites and wandering rocks After the twentieth century, it was realized that planets can also be celestial objects smaller than the Moon or with odd orbital paths, formerly mistaken for satellites and wandering rocks

In a nutshell, you will realize that without theory one is condemned to rely on the low discriminating power of commonsensical distinctions, which hinge upon quotidian and ordinary attributes to attest to the presence of a phenomenon. For instance, and as summarized in Table 1, size and light reflection helped to first identify in the nineteenth century eight planets, i.e., Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. There were, however, three additional planets that were missed in the absence of high-discriminating power concepts that the maturing science of astronomy made possible later in the twentieth century. That is, thanks to the theoretical concepts of orbit, density, and hydrostatic equilibrium, it was possible to identify planets smaller than the Moon or with odd orbital paths, adding three more planets to our solar system, i.e., Ceres, Pluto, and Charon.

The Limits of Induction Illustrated with the Inference of What a Planet Is It is curious how we came to identify the first eight planets (i.e., Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) out of an array of objects comprising planets, asteroids, comets, rocks, gravel, dust, and ions. It is apparent that, to tell what a planet is, the Earth offered some clues. To look for analogs to the Earth in outer space, size was an obvious fact to guide our inductive search, say through the intensity of light reflected by celestial objects. Based on the premises of

11

Philosophy of Science for Management Theory, Practice, and Sci-fi Freaks:. . .

211

induction, however, eight instances of what a planet is constitute a tiny sample compared to the number of wandering objects in the entire universe. The sample is not representative enough to allow us to tell a planet apart from other celestial objects. For instance, one planet that did not make it into the initial list is Ceres, an object smaller than the Moon, located between Mars and Jupiter. If Ceres is smaller than the Moon and still a planet, size was an inappropriate criterion to infer from. What distinguishes Ceres from the Moon is what they orbit. While Ceres orbits the Sun, the Moon orbits the Earth, thus orbit is apparently a better criterion to look for planets that allows distinguishing planets from satellites. On that account, the following inductive syllogistic form proves to be wrong because it gratuitously assumes that an observed attribute associated with planet Earth, and found in few other instances, is enough to deem celestial objects not having this attribute not to be planets, i.e., the planet Earth is big and other planets have been found to be big as well. Thus, Ceres is not a planet because it is not big. What is at stake in this inductive inference is whether there is a lawful relationship between the observable attribute, i.e., size, and the inferential construct, i.e., a planet. That many planets have been found to be correlated with large size only tells us that attribute and construct are loosely related and, instead of claiming new knowledge, such a correlation invites us to move past induction, shedding light on what makes some celestial objects, despite their small size, a planet. As Popper (2000) puts it, “. . .no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white” (p. 50). Thus, the planet Ceres casts doubts on the suitability of size to induce the identification of further planets. The addition of Pluto to the list, however, complicates things a bit more. Just like Ceres, Pluto is smaller than the Moon but, unlike Ceres, Pluto’s orbit is not near the ecliptic plane (i.e., the imaginary plane where the Earth orbits the Sun). It has an eccentric tilted orbit that takes more than 200 years to complete. Pluto is not a satellite though, because, however odd its orbit is, it still orbits the Sun. Thus, when trying to discover what a planet is, we have replaced sheer size as a criterion to guide inferences with orbit, which allowed us to add two additional planets to the original list of eight (i.e., Ceres and Pluto). In moving from size to orbit in search of a criterion to guide inferences, however, we are already leaving the camp of induction. This is because orbit cannot simply be accounted for by a planet’s motion but requires the theoretical notion of gravity, which goes beyond simply falling apples.

The Need for Retroduction Illustrated with the Inference of What a Planet Is Because we cannot account for a planet’s motion based on commonsensical mutual contact that imparts matter forward motion (i.e., direct contact with matter such as upon impact does not propel planets), certain retroductive steps are involved in the postulation of the concept of an orbit, which required imagining something like

212

A. Agafonow

action at a distance, used centuries ago by Greek Epicurean philosophers (Ducheyne 2011). The latter was replaced by Isaac Newton with the idea of an elastic ether with inter-particular repulsive forces (Ducheyne 2011). Although Newton’s theory was superseded by Albert Einstein’s theory in the twentieth century, the take-home message is that, to use orbit as a criterion to guide inferences in search of planets, we must have already given up induction to build instead upon putative causes whose inception requires a retroductive instead of inductive inference.1 The discovery of yet another celestial object, Charon, is currently motivating a revision of orbit as a criterion for the definition of a planet. Charon has been deemed to be Pluto’s satellite, but it is not accurate to say that Charon orbits Pluto, because together with Pluto both form a so-called double planet whose center of gravity is not inside a primary planet, as is the case of the Moon relative to the Earth. The center of gravity is located in the empty space between Pluto and Charon, as happens with the Sun and its planets. Thus, Pluto and Charon orbit each other and the Sun at the same time, which is currently motivating calls to reclassify Charon as a planet. Just as a planet is neither a star like the Sun nor a satellite whose center of gravity is located inside a different primary object, i.e., a planet, the criterion of size went through a reconceptualization too. If a planet can be smaller than the Moon, like Ceres, Pluto, and Charon, which are, properly speaking, dwarf planets, what distinguishes a planet from a rubble pile beside its orbit? A rubble pile does not have sufficient self-gravity to keep its chunks tightly bound and to prevent it from re-arranging itself, but a planet does. A planet has achieved an equilibrium shape, which is basically spherical, made possible by a mass above 5
1020 Kg and a diameter above 800 Km. Thus, something as apparently simple as the definition of a planet requires far more than induction. A planet is a celestial object shaped by hydrostatic equilibrium that orbits a star and which is neither a star nor a satellite. The criterion used early to tell a planet apart from a different celestial object, i.e., size, had the advantage of being more or less self-evident. Yet to infer what a planet really is, such a criterion conveyed ill-suited premises. That is, it was unclear how large, dense, and what orbital path a celestial object must follow to be considered a planet, making it impossible to discriminate between a rubble pile, a satellite, and a planet. Note how far we are in the twenty-first century from what in the nineteenth century were believed to be humans’ capabilities to infer new knowledge. In the words of Hume (1748/2000): “From causes which appear similar we expect similar effects. This is the sum of all our experimental conclusions” (p. 39). If Hume’s inductivism characterized science today, Ceres, Pluto, and Charon would still be unknown to us despite being very real, orbiting in our planet’s backyard. The point is thus whether it would be possible to arrive at a planet’s definition as a blend of orbit, size, and density by purely inductive means. The answer is categorically negative because, beyond sheer size, to bring orbit and density into the

For an explanation of retroduction, refer to Agafonow and Perez, ▶ Chap. 14, “Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics,” also published in this handbook.

1

11

Philosophy of Science for Management Theory, Practice, and Sci-fi Freaks:. . .

213

definition, theoretical constructs must be posited that make the inferential enterprise rely on creative insights on the margins of particular facts or instances, i.e., retroduction. Thus, theories cannot be built on facts alone.

The Need for Concepts with High Discriminating Power in Management Science The commonsensical definition of a planet as a large heavenly body that shines and revolves around the sun has been thus replaced over the course of the development of astronomy by a celestial object shaped by hydrostatic equilibrium that orbits a star and which is neither a star nor a satellite. This conceptual evolution required moving away from vague commonsense distinctions employed in daily life, like size and light reflection, and towards the use of more discriminating theoretical concepts able to unravel hidden structures (see Table 1). It is this conceptual leap that half a century ago Nagel (1961) claimed was missing in the social sciences. Should the social sciences move in this direction, Nagel posited, they would be transformed beyond recognition. Half a century later, we are still asking management scholarship to pass the Mom Test (e.g., Ragins 2012) and quarreling over the role of theory in management practice and education (e.g., Bennis and O’Toole 2005; The Economist 2009; Thomas et al. 2014; Chia and Holt 2017). Although it is customary to attribute the Ford and Carnegie Foundations the championing in the mid-twentieth century of a business school curriculum that made room for scientific foundations, in reality, this trend dates back to the years around 1900, when the emergence of multidivisional corporations made bookkeeping and clerical skills obsolete in the light of the expertise required to manage the modern corporation (Chandler 1999). The critics of the scientific business school curriculum miss that this was a response to the very practical management needs of the new multidivisional corporations. This tension between practice and theory or basic science is not unique to the field of management. Similar concerns drive the fields of, for instance, biomedical sciences (Ioannidis 2006). Yet it is uncommon to see scientific and professional societies in these fields calling for basic science and its theoretical principles to be scaled down. Rogue practitioners who neglect standard procedures premised on scientific principles tend to be reprimanded, like the French physician Didier Raoult, who was sued for charlatanism by the French society of physicians after having promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of Covid-19 based on anecdotal success, bypassing standard scientific procedures to establish its effectiveness. Basic research in management can be, however, looked down upon in business schools and the associations that federate them. This tension has long since manifested in a schism between scientific societies and business school deans over the control of the business school curriculum (Bornemann 1957), which may have been initially driven by a legitimate concern with the application of knowledge to the needs of business administration. The sway that scientific societies had over substantive aspects of the curriculum happened in

214

A. Agafonow

the context of an organization of tertiary education institutions that gave academics substantial autonomy. Weak formal mechanisms of organizational control ensued from the realization that scientific knowledge does not lend itself easily to standardization. Let us remember that tertiary education institutions were known for being inverse pyramids where administrators had little leverage with the work of academics (Mintzberg 1979). Today, however, the allocation of authority in tertiary education institutions has substantially changed with the advent of a “bean-counting performance evaluation culture” (Tsui 2013), where what matters are A-journal hits and citation counts, tantamount to counting beans, instead of knowledge breakthroughs.2 This change in the allocation of authority has been lent support, for instance, by business school accreditations endorsing governance structures where corporate stakeholders and students, instead of academics, play a central role in decision-making, such as the case with the EQUIS accreditation (see accreditation standards in The European Foundation for Management Development 2019).

The Chapters of This Section Theory-less management practice would condemn business schools to be no more than vocational schools, unlikely to supply the management skills needed by today’s complex organizations. This Handbook’s section includes works offering insights that will hopefully motivate management researchers to give proper attention to theory, including the chapter by Arran Gare and Cristina Neesham, entitled ▶ Chap. 12, “Reviving Methods of Speculative Philosophy,” where they examine the use of analogies and metaphors, which are forms of reasoning that belong to a primordial stage in the process of building conjectures in science, yet not to be underestimated at all. For instance, billiard balls were a helpful analogy used by physicists to blaze a trail in the study of alpha particles that describe small angles when bouncing, just as billiard balls do (Hesse 1963). Thus, analogies and metaphors are fundamental to put into practice synopsis and synthesis and, as the authors exhort, management academics run the risk of neglecting a helpful tool for reasoning when overly emphasizing the use of statistical methods. In ▶ Chap. 13, “Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics,” Norman Blaikie and Jan Priest offer an account of the different types of inferences. Their chapter partially builds on previous works by Norman Blaikie, which have become a method toolkit for several generations of in-training management researchers. It must be noted, however, that Blaikie and Priest are among the few who endorse a distinction between retroduction and abduction, which are more generally treated in the literature as interchangeable concepts. Distinguishing 2

For the repercussions of research performance evaluation systems based on A-hits and citation counts, refer to Agafonow and Perez, ▶ Chap. 15, “No Organizations for Today’s Einsteins,” also published in this handbook.

11

Philosophy of Science for Management Theory, Practice, and Sci-fi Freaks:. . .

215

between retroduction and abduction, however, lays bare a problem – namely, that this form of inference has been deemed to be the product of intuition, imagination, or a hunch, which are aptitudes that Blaikie and Priest reserve for abduction only. If this were the case, how do scientists avoid confounding two common products of abduction, namely, promising hunches and wild hypotheses devoid of fertility? This is the question answered in ▶ Chap. 14, “Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics,” by authors Alejandro Agafonow and Marybel Perez. Unlike the already vast literature on retroduction/abduction, we take issue with the reduction of this kind of inference to an inherent ability or talent reserved for geniuses, shedding light instead on the inferential steps that fall within the scope of reason and which, therefore, almost anybody could in principle follow provided that a normal degree of intellectual ability is present. We do not normally think of management and economics as disciplines where discoveries are possible, on a par with the natural sciences. Yet, at the level of basic research, discoveries have a universal structure that cuts across disciplines, which our chapter illustrates with Oliver E. Williamson’s discovery of the forbearance governance regime of hierarchies. The mental process leading to discoveries can be emulated in one’s own work, provided that certain barriers, such as a bean-counting evaluation culture in academia, are absent (Tsui 2013). Such a culture is inimical to scientific discoveries, and it is the product of a trend towards research output standardization, which is at the heart of the transposition of organizational mechanisms suitable for a factory floor into universities and business schools. This is the subject addressed by Agafonow and Perez in ▶ Chap. 15, “No Organizations for Today’s Einsteins.” It is posited here that the adoption of certain organizational mechanisms in today’s academia bears witness to bad management practices that are likely to have far-reaching negative consequences on the production of academic knowledge. Humans make value judgments about organizations. Think, for instance, about the criticisms that multinational corporations attract. Likewise, humans make value judgments about uncustomary behaviors. Homosexuality is a case in point. Yet, just as not every behavior, however uncustomary, can be considered a disorder, not every organization merits approval or disapproval without a thorough understanding of its organizational mechanisms and their evolutionary origins. Unqualified value judgments are, however, how a large part of the management profession currently thinks about organizations, laying the discipline open to false positives. In ▶ Chap. 16, “The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder: Implications for the Social Sciences and Management Practice,” Jerome C. Wakefield and Jordan A. Conrad help us temper such value judgments by shedding light on how psychiatry deals with false positives, that is, apparent or symptomatic signs mistaken for deeper phenomena. They show how psychiatry has evolved to distinguish true psychological disorders from normal bereavement reactions, which is key to managing public interventions when, for instance, natural disasters, war, or mass-trauma events happen. Under these circumstances, distinguishing bereavement afflictions from true disorders can free resources for more on-target public interventions, improving the management of public health.

216

A. Agafonow

On a different note, Marta Bertolaso authors ▶ Chap. 17, “Complexity and Management: Epistemic Insights from the Life Sciences,” which explores the implications for management of the epistemological problem of combining different levels of analysis, as well as calling for research that pays attention to the influence of upstream factors, equivalent to lifestyles in life science, on the micro-structures that science has puzzled out so well. It is an open question, however, whether the upstream level of analysis and the downstream, mechanistic level of analysis are incompatible or complementary. Bertolaso endorses a contrarian interpretation of this relationship but, at least in genetics research (e.g., Egger et al. 2004), epigenetic mechanisms are complementary rather than contrarian to the micro-structures studied by mechanistic approaches. It remains to be seen why such a complementarity would not apply to management research as well.

Conclusion Notwithstanding the existence of management journals and societies dedicated to the development of theory, management continues to be today a social-science laggard in the adoption of the theoretical standards of science. While scientists stand in awe of the capacity of theory to anticipate observations that are corroborated time and time again (Jogalekar 2013), theory continues to elicit little esteem from both a part management academics and, in particular, practitioners. This failure to keep up with the theoretical progress of natural sciences has prevented management academics, with few exceptions, from developing and embracing concepts with high discriminating power. Without the latter, management is left at the mercy of the wrong clues suggested by commonsense and immediate observations, as Albert Einstein warned (cited in Murray 1992). This is further attested by the currency that mind-like entities or entelechies enjoy among many management academics today. Entelechies are teleological anthropomorphic interpretations that thrive during the early stages of scientific thought (Hempel 1966). A particularly influential entelechy is Ghoshal and Moran’s (1996) and Ghoshal’s (2005) moral sense of responsibility, which has not improved on Marshall’s (1920) century-old spirit of honesty and uprightness. It is not only a simplification if intended as a moral theory, but also unsound as a positive account of what makes organizations tick. Marshall wanted to explain why the newly created joint-stock companies at the start of the twentieth century, which were experimenting with ownership structures that replaced traditional owners who had tight control over the enterprise with employees without a substantial share of the ownership, were not maladministered. There have been, to be sure, more scientific explanations advanced in the twentieth century which, adding insult to injury, make the popularity of this entelechy a reminder of the hurdles faced by management scholarship in its way to becoming a mature social science. Although the contributions in this handbook section offer a few pointers to help management academics meet the theoretical standards of science, these

11

Philosophy of Science for Management Theory, Practice, and Sci-fi Freaks:. . .

217

contributions are also a testimony to the state of confusion that still characterizes management scholarship. In receiving the baton passed on by Nagel (1961), I would like to invite our readers to embrace these standards and transform management scholarship beyond recognition. I am, however, pessimistic, for the organizations that today host management academics are more than ever inimical to the production of scientific knowledge.3

Cross-References ▶ Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics ▶ Reviving Methods of Speculative Philosophy

References Agafonow A (2018) Setting the bar of social enterprise research high. Learning from medical science. Soc Sci Med 214:49–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.SOCSCIMED.2018.08.020 Agafonow A, Perez M (2020) Entrepreneurship and contextual definitions of mental disorders: why psychiatry abandoned the latter and entrepreneurship scholars may want to follow suit. Acad Manag Perspect 34:1–6. https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2019.0071 Altman N, Krzywinski M (2017) Interpreting P values. Nat Methods 14:213–214. https://doi.org/ 10.1038/nmeth.4210 Ashby N (2002) Relativity and the global positioning system. Phys Today 55:41–47. https://doi.org/ 10.1063/1.1485583 Babbie E (2013) The practice of social research, 13th edn. Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, Boston Bennis W, O’Toole J (2005) How business schools lost their way. Harv Bus Rev 85:96–104 Bornemann A (1957) The development of economics and administration in the school of business. J Bus 30:131–140 Chandler ADJ (1999) The visible hand. The managerial revolution in American business. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA/London Chia R, Holt R (2017) The nature of knowledge in business schools. Acad Manag Learn Educ 7: 471–486. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2008.35882188 Cohen MR, Nagel E (1998) An introduction to logic and scientific method. Allied Publishers, New Delhi Deaton A, Cartwright N (2018) Understanding and misunderstanding randomized controlled trials. Soc Sci Med 210:2–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.SOCSCIMED.2017.12.005 Ducheyne S (2011) Newton on action at a distance and the cause of gravity. Stud Hist Phil Sci 42: 154–159. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.SHPSA.2010.11.003 Egger G, Liang G, Aparicio A, Jones PA (2004) Epigenetics in human disease and prospects for epigenetic therapy. Nature 429:457–463. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02625 Ghoshal S (2005) Bad management theories are destroying good management practices. Acad Manag Learn Educ 4:75–91. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMLE.2005.16132558 Ghoshal S, Moran P (1996) Bad for practice: a critique of the transaction cost theory. Acad Manag Rev 21:13–47. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMR.1996.9602161563 Hambrick DC (2007) The field of management’s devotion to theory: too much of a good thing? Acad Manag J 50:1346–1352. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.28166119 3

Ibid.

218

A. Agafonow

Hanson NR (2010) Patterns of discovery. An inquiry into the conceptual foundations of science. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Hempel CG (1966) The philosophy of natural science. Prentice-Hall, New Jersey and Englewood Cliffs Hempel CG (1970) Fundamentals of taxonomy. In: Aspects of scientific explanation and other essays in the philosophy of science. The Free Press and Collier Macmillan Publisher, New York/London, pp 137–154 Hesse MB (1963) Models and analogies in science. Sheed and Ward, London/New York Hume D (2000) The problem of induction. In: Schick TJ (ed) Readings in the philosophy of science. From positivism to postmodernism. Mayfield Publishing Company, Mountain View, pp 38–41 Ioannidis JPA (2006) Evolution and translation of research findings: from bench to where. PLoS Clin Trials 1:1–5. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pctr.0010036 Jogalekar A (2013) Theorists, experimentalists and the bias in popular physics. Sci Am. http:// blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/popular-physics-is-there-an-experimen talist-in-the-house/. Accessed 24 Aug 2020 Lee M, Battilana J, Wang T (2014) Building an infrastructure for empirical research on social enterprise: challenges and opportunities. In: Short J (ed) Social entrepreneurship and research methods. Research methodology in strategy and management, vol 9. Emerald Group Publishing, pp 241–264 Levenson T (2015) The hunt for Vulcan, 1st edn. Random House, New York Marshall A (1920) Principles of economics. An introductory volume, 8th edn. Macmillan and Co, London Mintzberg H (1979) The structuring of organizations: a synthesis of the research. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs Muller D (2016) Is most published research wrong? Veritasium. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v¼42QuXLucH3Q. Accessed 11 Jan 2021 Murray BGJ (1992) Research methods in physics and biology. Oikos 64:594–596. https://doi.org/ 10.2307/3545180 Nagel E (1961) The structure of science. Problems in the logic of scientific explanation. Harcourt, Brace & World, New York Ployhart RE, Bartunek JM (2019) Editors’ comments: there is nothing so theoretical as good practice – a call for phenomenal theory. Acad Manag Rev 44:493–497. https://doi.org/10. 5465/amr.2019.0087 Popper KR (2000) The problem of induction. In: Schick T (ed) Readings in the philosophy of science. From positivism to postmodernism. Mayfield Publishing, Mountain View, pp 49–53 Popper KR (2005) The logic of scientific discovery. Taylor & Francis e-Library, London/New York Ragins BR (2012) Editor’s comments: reflections on the craft of clear writing. Acad Manag Rev 37: 493–501. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2012.0165 Schmenner RW, Van Wassenhove L, Ketokivi M et al (2009) Too much theory, not enough understanding. J Oper Manag 27:339–343. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2009.07.004 Shapira Z (2011) “I’ve got a theory paper – do you?”: conceptual, empirical, and theoretical contributions to knowledge in the organizational sciences. Organ Sci 22:1312–1321. https:// doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1100.0636 Shaw JD, Tima Bansal P, Gruber M (2017) New ways of seeing: elaboration on a theme. Acad Manag J 60:397–401. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2017.4002 The Economist (2009) The Gordon-Howell report of 1959. The more things change... A seminal critique of American business education, five decades on. Economist. https://www.economist. com/business/2009/06/04/the-more-things-change. Accessed 28 Nov 2020 The European Foundation for Management Development (2019) EQUIS standards & criteria. The European Foundation for Management Development, Brussels Thomas H, Lee M, Lynne T, Wilson A (2014) Securing the future of management education: competitive destruction or constructive innovation? vol 2. Emerald Group Publishing, Bingley Tsui AS (2013) The spirit of science and socially responsible scholarship. Manag Organ Rev 9: 375–394. https://doi.org/10.1111/more.12035

Reviving Methods of Speculative Philosophy

12

Towards a New Enlightenment in Organization Studies Arran Gare and Cristina Neesham

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Nature of Philosophical Inquiry: Three Interdependent Modes of Thinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moderate Versus Radical Enlightenment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Modernity: Analytical Versus Speculative Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Organization Studies: A Natural Space for Reviving Speculative Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Researching Organizations in the Context of Global Environmental Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion: Towards a New Enlightenment in Organization and Management Studies . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

220 221 223 226 228 229 232 232 232

Abstract

Traditionally, philosophy has utilized three methods: analysis, synopsis, and synthesis. The exclusion of synoptic and synthetic thinking from organization and management studies can leave us without the means to fully develop the discipline. Deployment of metaphors deriving from ecology, without recourse to speculative philosophy, has reinforced the prevailing Cartesian dualism that treats experiencing subjects as outside nature and nature as devoid of subjectivity. This has led to the development of mechanistic formulations of systems theory and

The authors wish to express their gratitude to Glenn McLaren, Michael Dix, Andrew Kirkpatrick, Brendan Cartmel, and all participating members of the Complex Processes Research Group in the Department of Social Sciences at Swinburne University, for their insightful comments on this chapter and the broader project it is seeking to establish. A. Gare (*) Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] C. Neesham Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_73

219

220

A. Gare and C. Neesham

legitimated the quest for central managerial control of organizations. Utilizing synopsis and synthesis and developing the tradition of the Radical Enlightenment to bring together a range of disparate disciplines, a more comprehensive and coherent account of organized human action is offered, one that grants a central place to human experience as an emergent component of a self-organizing nature. It is shown how this conception of human action might be applied to develop new perspectives on managing organizations that can improve our relations to ourselves, to each other and, most importantly, to our environment, offering new approaches to meeting global environmental challenges such as global warming. Keywords

Analysis · Management · Moderate Enlightenment · Organizations · Organizing · Radical Enlightenment · Speculative philosophy · Synopsis · Synthesis

Introduction The practice of philosophy is defined by three fundamental, complementary, and interdependent modes of inquiry: analysis, synopsis, and synthesis (Broad 1947). All three are needed, and philosophical contributions are most meaningful when these modes of enquiry are explicitly articulated to support each other. Accordingly, philosophical analysis combines logic, semantics, and syntax to clarify “the meanings of all the fundamental kinds of sentence which we habitually use” (Broad 1947, pp. 2–3). On the other hand, synopsis is the intellectual effort to hold in simultaneous contemplation apparently separate aspects of human experience and to seek (and find) interconnections between them. This effort, in turn, prepares the mind for synthesis, i.e., the creative act of producing new concepts and principles that integrate in a holistic perspective all aspects brought together by synopsis (Broad 1947). Despite arguments that these three modes of inquiry should be treated as intimately related in philosophical thinking, historical distinctions between analytical and speculative philosophy persist, with the former privileging analysis and the latter focusing on synopsis and synthesis. This divide is the legacy of a long-term ideological and methodological conflict between a moderate and, respectively, a radical version of the Enlightenment. To better understand how our contemporary cultures’ failure to heal the divide and reconcile destructive differences continues to influence our practice of the sciences, and of organization studies in particular, it is important to examine the history of these struggles within the Enlightenment and their extension into the practice of philosophy in modernity. At the same time, it is important to critically evaluate the overall effects of a dominant analytical inquiry, generalized as the supreme logic of the scientific method, on organization research and scholarship. In response, to offer a constructive approach to the problems identified by this critique, a revival of synopsis and synthesis as regular companions of analysis would enable us to reconsider the

12

Reviving Methods of Speculative Philosophy

221

foundational assumptions of our management and organizing theories and practices, to envision and legitimize alternative methodological solutions to the distorting and limiting effects of scientism, and to better focus organized human action towards addressing major problems (e.g., human-caused harm to the global ecosystem) that appear intractable in the current paradigms of thought. Combining history of ideas with applied philosophical methodology, this conceptual chapter outlines how organizational research can explicitly employ synopsis and synthesis to bring together a range of disparate disciplines to facilitate more comprehensive and coherent understandings of the nature of organized human action and the role of human experience within it. We argue that synopsis and synthesis are natural methods for management and organization research, and show how they can be applied to develop new perspectives on managing organizations to improve our relations with ourselves, with each other and with our environment. Starting from the premise that organization, as process and outcome of human action, is a complex phenomenon that requires synoptic investigation across disciplines, we ask, methodologically: what happens if we use only analysis in studying organizations? what is gained, and what is lost? what contributions do (and can) synopsis and synthesis make? The example we engage in our discussion refers to the problem of conceptualizing and theorizing organizational responses to global ecological challenges. We begin our argument by describing and illustrating analysis, synopsis, and synthesis, using the sense-perception problem discussed by Broad (1947) as an example, in order to identify the epistemological and methodological roles of each approach, and explain why privileging analysis over synopsis and synthesis has reductionist effects, impairing advancements in knowledge in important ways. We then examine how the divide between the Moderate and the Radical Enlightenment (Israel 2002) enabled the separation of analysis from the other two forms of philosophical inquiry; and how this separation has continued in modernity, with Quinian analytical philosophy adopting a “naturalist turn” that explicitly rejects speculative methods and their epistemological premises (Gare 2014). Informed by this broader cultural context, we explore the philosophical application of synopsis and synthesis through analogy and metaphor, beginning with Morgan’s (1996, 2006) evaluation of “images” of organization and continuing with an integrated philosophical reflection on the ontology of human organization as a coherent part of organization in nature. In other words, we seek to lay the foundations for a homological study of organizations. In doing so, we call for philosophically informed multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary research that can lead to a new Enlightenment in organization studies.

The Nature of Philosophical Inquiry: Three Interdependent Modes of Thinking It is widely acknowledged that any research practice is informed by philosophical assumptions about, for example, the nature of reality and the phenomena under study (ontology), the nature of human knowledge and the relationship between researcher

222

A. Gare and C. Neesham

and researched (epistemology), and the valuing processes that are involved in the researcher’s actions (axiology). These assumptions are so fundamental and indispensable to research that they are treated as axioms, or self-evident truths. In empirical research practice, however, treating philosophical assumptions axiomatically often results in losing sight of them, and forgetting that they too remain hypotheses open to verification (Popper 1963/2002). In this sense, we can say that an empirical researcher who is fully aware of the epistemic and methodological functions of all their assumptions must think philosophically about their practice. This involves being prepared to reflect regularly on the foundational axioms of their projects and amend them according to philosophically informed criteria. As noted, thinking philosophically involves three basic types of operations: analysis, synopsis, and synthesis (Broad 1947). By far the most commonly used out of the three, analysis is generally understood to involve breaking down sentences, propositions, concepts and/or percepts into their components, clarifying relevant semantic distinctions and thus sharpening our ability to make reality intelligible. But this immediately suggests that, on its own, analysis is unable to complete the knowledge generation process. It can help us examine any particular phenomenon that has attracted our attention – but it is unclear on how it would assist in bringing multiple analyses together. For this purpose, our thinking has to engage in a different process, namely synopsis, which is described by Broad as “the deliberate viewing together of aspects of human experience which are generally viewed apart, and the endeavour to see how they are inter-related” (p. 4). His examples of synopsis are drawn from perennial problems in philosophy, such as the problem of sense perception, the mind-body problem, and the free will problem. Let us briefly consider, for instance, the problem of sense perception. How can variations in our perceptions of the same object(s) be accounted for? Perceptions may vary between two observers of the same object at the same time, or between two observations of the same object, by the same observer, at different times. These types of variations can systematically be accounted for by particular sciences (e.g., geometrical optics) or arts (e.g., theory of perspective). Other kinds of perceptions may depart significantly from what we tend to appreciate as “normal,” e.g., hallucinations. How can such inaccuracies be explained? Furthermore, the human intellect can understand, via other means than the physical senses, phenomena that occur beyond the limits of our perceptions. For example, we perceive an object as it looked like when the light now reaching our eye departed from the respective object. This fact is negligible when looking at objects near us but it becomes important when contemplating the stars. Our perceptions do not help us in any way to grasp the phenomenon of light travelling in time. Furthermore, even when the visual stimulus is exactly the same, our perceptions are informed and conditioned by experiences we have had in the past or by expectations generated by current, familiar contexts – a fact that has been well documented by psychological experiments (Kosslyn 1980; O’Regan and Noë 2001). While our explanations for these types of cases taken separately may satisfy us locally and temporarily, they remain partial and do not amount to a comprehensive understanding of perception and its processes.

12

Reviving Methods of Speculative Philosophy

223

Furthermore, our language, a conceptualization medium inherited from our culture, is bound to frame our thinking based on our ancestors’ limitations in explaining perception. The very fact that we have developed the desire to group these different facts together and seek to reconcile the different explanations available to explain perception suggests an inextricable connection between analysis and synopsis. Broad argues that our ability to notice similarities across a wide range of different phenomena and our desire to find a common explanation (synopsis) motivates our desire to investigate, test, and establish the nature of our explanatory inconsistencies (analysis). But while synopsis enables us to hold all these different phenomena in one view, it does not produce a unifying explanation. To achieve this, we need to engage our mind in a creative process (synthesis) that may require us to go beyond reasoning and towards intuiting, imagining, and envisioning. The new conceptual solution created through synthesis generates new meanings, and sometimes new language, that may then be returned to analysis for clarification and validation. Every significant progress in knowledge in any discipline, and across disciplines, has involved constant cooperation among all three modes of thinking. Broad (1947) also mentions Einstein’s theory of relativity and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as examples of synthesis stimulated by synopsis and analysis. These examples enable us to understand how analysis can progress on its own within any given conceptual paradigm as long as there is no epistemic need to question its deeper, axiomatic assumptions. However, synopsis and synthesis are indispensable when this need becomes apparent. Both entail bringing and keeping the current paradigm’s foundational assumptions explicitly in view, and holding them to account so that the possibility of questioning, challenging, modifying, and/or replacing these assumptions is always present. Despite this insight, the practice of philosophy itself has increasingly formalized the separation of analysis from synopsis and synthesis. In the following two sections, we make a brief (and necessarily schematic) incursion into the contribution of the Enlightenment “schism” and, respectively, of the modern divide between analytical and speculative philosophy, to the neglect of synopsis and synthesis in contemporary research. This will enable us to better understand what the study of organizations stands to lose from excessive focus on analytical modes of thinking, and what it stands to gain from integrating philosophical synopsis and synthesis (or their appropriate recognition) in its core methodologies.

Moderate Versus Radical Enlightenment In traditional accounts of European history, the Enlightenment tends to be regarded as a unitary movement, characterized by the triumph of reason, ending religious wars, advancing science, and inaugurating the quest for reason in all facets of life, and the spread of democracy everywhere. Today, those who want to further advance these ideals are regarded as defendants of an enlightened vision of humanity.

224

A. Gare and C. Neesham

Like all schematic interpretations, this account oversimplifies European cultural history. It is becoming evident that, when it comes to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in particular, this interpretation is not only simplistic but highly misleading, in a way that distorts our understanding of the present. Relatively recent historical investigations have revealed that some of the main figures associated with the scientific revolution that influenced the eighteenth century Enlightenment (e.g., Descartes, Hobbes, Newton, Locke) were not so much advancing beyond the limitations of medieval thought as reacting against the political influence of the Renaissance (Skinner 1998). The Florentine Renaissance revived interest in the political principles of Roman republicanism and Athenian democracy, defending the quest for liberty understood in opposition to slavery. The Renaissance civic humanism advocated that, within the polis membership, no one should be politically or economically dependent upon people who could harm them, and that everyone should participate in one’s governance and the governance of the polis. Human understanding of nature was also reformed, by Nature Enthusiasts such as Giordano Bruno, from a medieval cosmology that regarded the Earth as the repository of the “dregs” of the universe to the much broader vision of an infinite, self-organizing universe full of suns surrounded by their own life-inhabited planets (Jacob 2003). In this worldview, cosmology and political philosophy were intertwined. And so were they throughout the scientific revolution, in a movement that emerged to oppose the Renaissance, defending a vision of the future in which nature and the many would be completely controlled and ruled by enlightened absolute monarchs (in the case of Hobbes) or oligarchs (in the case of Locke), encouraging people to devote themselves to commerce instead of participating in public life. With respect to metaphysics, nature was seen as inert matter in motion, governed by immutable laws. This scientific materialism was associated with possessive individualism, in which greed was lauded rather than criticized as a vice (pleonexia), as it had been in Ancient Greece and Republican Rome (MacPherson 1964). Unlike the Middle Ages, the scientific revolution movement tolerated different beliefs – but on condition that these were treated as private affairs and were not politically or socially disruptive. The figures we routinely identify with the Enlightenment today were in fact divided in their beliefs about nature, the human condition, and its political implications. Celebrated thinkers such as Voltaire indeed endorsed a greater tolerance for plural and conflicting ideas – but they also feared the political consequences of a general distribution of knowledge and power among the many, and accepted the inevitability of imperialism. These were proponents of what Israel (2002) characterizes as the Moderate Enlightenment. The alternative paradigm, the Radical Enlightenment, opposing imperialism and embracing democracy to its last consequences, was not only in ideological conflict with the moderate version but also promoted different ontological and epistemological premises. According to radical enlightened thought, nature was a complex creative force engendering life, and the role of society was seen as one of augmenting liberty and life for all rather than achieving technological mastery of nature through the mastery of some over others (Israel 2002).

12

Reviving Methods of Speculative Philosophy

225

Work on the history of science (see, e.g., Milton 2013) has demonstrated that the seventeenth-century scientific revolution was above all a metaphysical revolution, which replaced one framework of basic concepts defining reality with another. However, the nature of this revolution was disguised as nothing but an advance of empirical knowledge. “I feign no hypotheses,” Newton famously declared. The triumph of empiricist philosophy thus established scientific materialism as the dominant philosophy of inquiry and, at the same time, eliminated any place for questioning its key ontological and epistemological assumptions. On the other hand, the Renaissance gave birth to the humanities, a form of education and inquiry designed to produce citizens with the virtues and knowledge necessary to defend their liberty and govern themselves (Gare 2012). Civic humanism and scientific materialism coexisted but were hardly at peace with each other, given their fundamental incompatibilities, not only in the values they proclaimed but also in their conception of the nature of humans and humanity. For civic humanists, humans are responsible agents creating themselves by creating their culture and society; for scientific materialists, they are complex machines whose behavior is determined by their components and environments. It was Immanuel Kant, a major figure within the Radical Enlightenment (at least in its epistemic rather than political dimensions), who exposed the philosophical limits of scientific materialist assumptions. He argued that our observations are made in response to questions we raise about nature, and these questions in turn are formulated based on concepts that we have and use to organize our experience of the world (Kant 1781/1996). This means that our perceptual judgements have a synthetic or creative component to them, and also that we can have knowledge of the forms of these intuitions, of the conditions for our perceptual judgments. This knowledge is neither analytical nor empirical (i.e., purely acquired through the senses) but “synthetic a priori” (Kant 1781/1996, p. 19). Mathematics and metaphysics, Kant argued, are forms of synthetic a priori knowledge. Such knowledge can be gained through the powers of the productive imagination, as is the case with knowledge gained in geometry through the construction of geometric figures in thought or in diagrams. Synthesis through productive imagination was thus central to Kant’s philosophy. Furthermore, Kant modified Newton’s metaphysical concepts, defining matter as essentially active, and proposed alternative, nonmechanistic concepts for the understanding of life. This inspired other philosophers to embark on a more ambitious enterprise. Instead of accepting the contradictions between science and free will, they extended the notion of synthetic thinking to develop new concepts that could overcome these contradictions. Fichte (1795/1982) pioneered this further development of synthetic thinking into what Breazeale (2010) characterized as the “dialectical synthetic method.” Accordingly, the product of this method “cannot be analytically derived from the problematic set of concepts and propositions that it resolves. . .[I]t is not derived from experience, but is instead a product of pure thinking. . . and represents a synthetic a priori extension of our cognition” (Breazeale 2010, p. 55). Advancing this dialectical synthetic method further as speculative philosophy, Schelling (1803/1994) argued for a speculative physics to replace the entire

226

A. Gare and C. Neesham

cosmology of scientific materialism and to align physics, chemistry, and biology with the humanities, conceiving nature in such a way that humans, as conscious beings with the ability to take responsibility for their actions, could be seen as part of nature (Gare 2013a). Schelling and those who followed him revived and developed a conception of nature as self-organizing, creative, and engendering life, combined with a conception of humans as creative participants to (and within) nature, through history and cultures. Despite their dismissal by empiricists, the speculations of philosophers aligned with the Radical Enlightenment inspired major advances in the natural sciences and mathematics (Gare 2013b). The idea that nature is essentially active (Schelling 1803/ 1994) influenced the development of thermodynamics, which made the concept of energy and its conservation central to all modern science. Speculations by Schelling (1799/2004) for a new science uniting the study of light, magnetism, and electricity led to the revolutions in physics effected by Faraday and Maxwell (Gare 1999). It was the effort to reconcile this new physics with Newtonian physics that led to the theories of relativity, while the conflict between conceiving of matter as fields characterized by waves and conceiving of matter as particles led to quantum theory. The mathematics required for these advances were partly inspired by philosophers such as Schelling, who called for a new mathematics adequate to a dynamic nature (1799/2004). Grassmann’s (1844/1995) extension theory was inspired by these philosophers, and his work in mathematics now underpins most of the mathematics used in modern physics (Gare 1999).

Modernity: Analytical Versus Speculative Philosophy The quest to align science with the humanities through dialectical synthetic or speculative philosophy was central to the Radical Enlightenment (Gare 2011). However, in modernity, this project was undermined by analytical philosophy. Inspired by Bolzano, Frege, and Russell, philosophers such as Quine and Putnam focused on logic (Glock 2008). They contended that advances in philosophy are made by focusing on received claims to knowledge and by analyzing these carefully in order to validate or invalidate them. In this way, only knowledge that is certain is true knowledge, be it in philosophy or in science. While scientific materialists argued that knowledge is achieved by breaking everything down to its constituents, and then empiricists argued that genuine knowledge can be identified by analyzing experience down to the basic experiences or sense data on which all genuine claims to knowledge are based, analytic philosophers privileged propositions (or statements, or sentences) and logical relations. Bolzano (1838/2015) and Frege (1892/1952) claimed, in opposition to Kant, that these propositions and logical relations have an objective status, excluding any place for psychological processes, let alone imagination, in discovering and evaluating propositions. The truth of propositions was claimed to be either in their relation to the world (as in “The earth orbits the sun”) or in conceptual relations, making them analytically true (as in “All bachelors are unmarried”). The development of symbolic

12

Reviving Methods of Speculative Philosophy

227

logic, utilizing the techniques of algebra to examine these logical relations, facilitated the extension of logical analysis (e.g., by Frege), with the ultimate aim of creating a universal logical language (Toulmin 1991/2012). For logical positivists concerned to revive empiricism, this meant that mathematics was nothing more than a collection of tautologies, useful for organizing empirically validated propositions in order to make predictions. There was no place for Kant’s synthetic a priori knowledge or for Fichte’s and Schelling’s dialectical synthesis (Gare 2011). At the core of this trend, analytical philosophy tends to dismiss analogy and metaphor, central to creative synthetic thinking, as irrelevant to enquiry, or even misleading forms of thinking. While analogy (“A is like B”) can emphasize similarities between two different types of phenomena that are hitherto considered ontologically different, metaphor (“A is B”) treats similarity as identity. For scientists, positivist logicians and analytical philosophers, however, metaphor is nothing more than implied analogy, aided by elliptical language. Analogy (e.g., the impulses circulating between brain synapses are like the flow of electric current through a cable) may be used as an explanatory or educational tool, to facilitate understanding of an unfamiliar phenomenon through a comparison with another that is better known or familiar – but is routinely excluded from acceptable forms of evidence in traditional logic and scientific method, due to the possibility of fallacious reasoning such as false or weak analogies (see, e.g., Copi et al. 2016). Furthermore, the connotation and ambiguity usually associated with metaphor are deemed undesirable in scientific language (see, e.g., Johnson 1981 on objectivist semantics). However, as our previous examples from mathematics and the natural sciences are suggesting, the purely denotative precision of scientific language is an illusion. Far from being just add-on educational tools, analogy and metaphor are essential to the scientific process and the formation of knowledge. Einstein and Heisenberg had to think metaphorically when formulating counterintuitive hypotheses that were central to their revolutionary theories. Although analysis had to be called in to validate these hypotheses, it could not generate them. In the social sciences too, the contributions of analogy and metaphor are more profound than it is usually acknowledged. McCloskey (1998), for instance, has shown that the language of economists is essentially metaphoric – moreover, that it has to be so, due to the invisible, abstract nature of economic phenomena. While it is true that not all analogies and metaphors are the product of synoptic and synthetic philosophical reflection, we argue that analytical philosophy’s critique of the epistemic role of connotation tends to throw away the baby with the bath water: what we need in these circumstances is not a ban on analogy and metaphor but coherent methodological criteria to distinguish between philosophically informed analogies/metaphors and decorative figures of style. This legacy is deeply felt in contemporary social research practices, including organization studies. Here, neglect of synopsis and synthesis tends to close off questioning our deepest assumptions about organized human action and its relations to cultures, society, and nature – and to marginalize efforts to develop alternatives that could replace these assumptions. However, we argue that organization research has unique resources and motivations to avoid this impasse.

228

A. Gare and C. Neesham

Organization Studies: A Natural Space for Reviving Speculative Philosophy The analytical-speculative divide in natural and social sciences has also been shaping organization and management research, and the rift is running deep. When analysis dominates our philosophical reflections, the excesses of scientism become apparent. Interpretations of management as a science, in an analytical sense (e.g., via Taylorism and its followers), have routinely placed thinkers in a deterministic and reductionist mindset, consolidating scientific materialism as an unquestioned (and unquestionable) ideology (Adler 2007). Despite these pernicious influences, however, organization and management research remains particularly suited to speculative inquiry (see Cornelissen 2005). While each specialized science pre-establishes the nature of the phenomena it is to investigate, and defines its concepts accordingly (e.g., physics deals with physical phenomena, biology with biological ones, psychology with the psychological, and so on), organization research, in particular, focuses on an under-theorized class of phenomena: what kind of phenomenon can be denoted by “organization”? or “an organization”? or “organizing”? Such a complex, dynamic, difficult-to-define phenomenon naturally invites synopsis across our inherited specializations and disciplines, and can only be productive by engaging in synthesis. A useful starting point in this direction is Morgan’s (1996, 2006) compelling illustration of the paradigm-defining role of metaphor (as central instrument of connotation) in the history of organization research. His collection of metaphors of organizations (from machines to, more recently, instruments of domination) not only recategorizes and reinterprets the various traditions of organization studies across disciplinary boundaries but also points to the epistemic advances made through the use of these metaphors, in continuing efforts to better grasp the nature of organizations. His evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of each metaphor (itself a form of analysis) highlights the benefits of engaging speculative thinking in organization research, as well as the role of analysis in keeping it grounded and selecting its most significant results for future consideration. Each evaluation is a window opened towards further philosophical explorations of conceptual possibilities for explaining organizations. But the potential of this project also underscores its limits. Speculative philosophy goes beyond explaining, and settles on understanding as our overarching epistemic objective. As Lonergan (1988) notes, in an attempt to transcend the analytical-speculative divide, the ultimate aim is “neither truth nor certitude nor deduction nor necessity nor universality nor conception nor inquiry nor intuition nor experience nor a priori synthesis nor apperceptive unity nor description nor phenomenology nor induction nor, indeed, any mere combination of these. The relevant aspect is understanding” (p. 139). Hence, beyond Morgan’s analysis, we need to rethink the role and function(s) of metaphor in the formation of knowledge in the study of organizations and organizing. In sum, we need to integrate analysis, synopsis, and synthesis as forms of philosophical reflection, in order to identify those areas where analogy between

12

Reviving Methods of Speculative Philosophy

229

organization in human cultures and organization in nature can be contemplated and treated as homological (see Bourdieu 1990), i.e., where similarities can be traced back genealogically, to shared origins and histories between nature and human society. We need synopsis to help us hold in simultaneous view the multiple forms of organization in nature, including human organization; and synthesis to produce theories of organization that account for all these forms in coherent ways, while also doing justice to relevant ontological differences. As a starting point, if we contemplate organization as organizing, i.e., organized human action (Weick 1995), then we can refer to praxeology not only as the philosophy of relating theory to practice (Tsoukas and Chia 2011) but as the overarching philosophical study of organizing, thus integrating its ontological, epistemological, and axiological premises towards producing a philosophical methodology for organization and management research. To achieve this, we need a speculative – rather than analytical – approach to praxeology. This means moving beyond the analytic action theory traditions established through the works of Anscombe (e.g., 1957), Davidson (e.g., 1963), von Mises (e.g., 1966), and Kotarbinski (e.g., 1965), and apply processmetaphysical alternatives to atomistic foundationalism, reductionism, and reism (see Makowski 2017 for a critique of these aspects in Kotarbinski). In response to foundationalism, instead of assuming acts as the most basic entities that (like building blocks) form more complex entities such as actions, we should perhaps think of organizing in terms of events as defined by Whitehead (1978), i.e., as “happenings” with particular (fluid, dynamic, changeable) relations with other events and/or objects in space and time. In this context, the static metaphor of “building blocks” is inadequate and therefore unhelpful. In response to the reductionism that results from a “building blocks” perspective, the direction of conceptualizations should change from seeking the simpler to circumscribing and envisioning the complex. And in response to the propensity of analytical perspectives to assume that “only. . . spatio-temporal concrete objects exist” (i.e., reism, as defined in Makowski 2017, p. 110), we need to nuance our conceptions of existence, to allow for various degrees – and types – of “concreteness.” In what sense can we say that intentions, actions, and effects exist? What ontological relationships can be assumed, and what conceptual relationships can be established between them? Speculative (rather than analytical) naturalism allows us to conceptualize “things” as entities that do and become; nature as a vital, generative force; and matter as engendering agency and connectedness – rather than perceiving them all as made up of (and therefore reducible to) inert substances (Gare 2014).

Researching Organizations in the Context of Global Environmental Challenges A prominent example of an area where the methods of speculative philosophy, in particular through synopsis and synthesis, can make a profound contribution is the contemporary debate over how organizations should respond to and manage

230

A. Gare and C. Neesham

environmental challenges such as global warming, depletion of natural resources, or loss of biodiversity (Etzion 2007; Georg and Hoffman 2018). Global warming, for instance, is one of the most complex challenges facing humankind. The main causes of accelerated global warming (at unprecedented levels), with substantial destructive consequences for the natural environment (and in particular the human habitats), have been identified as: linear and overriding economic growth, industrialization, urbanization, linear production and consumption, and the imperative of reliable energy. This is reflected in the formulation of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (UNFCCC 2010; United Nations 2014). These accumulated excesses ignore externalized consequences that are more distant in time and space from local human affairs. Incremental human behaviors (Fischer Kuh 2011) that aggregate across regions and generations produce unprecedented global levels of environmental degradation, manifested in pollution, loss of biodiversity, destruction of natural ecosystems, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, extreme weather events, etc. (IPCC 2014). What we are interested in here is whether a speculative study of praxeology as the philosophy of (organized) human action can improve our understanding of (the sources of) these incremental human behaviors and generate norms for alternative behaviors that would lead to more harmonious relationships between humans and nature. Unreflective discussions of organizations as ecosystems and of organizational ecosystems (see Mars et al. 2012 for a detailed critique) illustrate what can happen when a metaphor is used as a discursive device, devoid of philosophical engagement. In this literature, the “eco-system” metaphor is understood materialistically, perpetuating the Cartesian mind-matter dualism and its undesirable effects (Heikkurinen et al. 2019). These effects appear in the context of having systems theory reduced to mechanistic formulations and reifications that lead to imperatives of centralized managerial control and hegemony. Adopting the “eco-system” metaphor in the context of organization and management research, while continuing to assume that human action and organization are somehow (ontologically, epistemologically, axiologically, and teleologically) different and separate from nature, is both misleading and unproductive. To counteract this trend, speculative dialectics should be considered as the central antidote to the linear thinking that currently dominates approaches to organizational engagement in environmental sustainability. By applying in synopsis and synthesis in the spirit of speculative philosophy, we are able to develop new ontological, epistemological, and axiological premises for organizations and organizing as part of (human) nature. We learn from this approach that Nature should be conceptualized as “creative, generative of emergent levels of organization not reducible to the conditions of their emergence” (Gare 2014, pp. 320–321). Furthermore, any “theory” of Nature should account for the evolution, within It, of human beings as “aware, conscious, creative social subjects” (p. 320). Science should not only avoid reductionist explanations of phenomena but be actively anti-reductionist. And this, in turn, leads us to a speculative (rather than analytical) understanding of ecology and (within it) organizational ecology. As human beings emerge from, and participate in, a complex array of

12

Reviving Methods of Speculative Philosophy

231

interdependent ecosystems, they have the potential to create, maintain, and destroy these ecosystems. Here is where organization and management research needs to become deeply conscious of its own axiology – and emphasize as its ultimate aim the continuing survival and flourishing of human civilization as part of nature. Inspired by the early environmentalist movement, we should apply (at both individual and collective levels) the principle that a behavior “is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community” and “it is wrong when it tends otherwise” (Leopold 1949, p. 224). With this purpose in mind, science should then inform a different approach to technology as well, i.e., technology should be developed as an instrument – not for converting nature into something subordinated to human control but for augmenting the general conditions of life and flourishing in wider ecosystems. One of the key factors supporting the dominance of linear thinking in organizations’ responses to the problem of global warming is its overemphasis of analytical metrics at the expense of synoptic focus on final purpose. However, despite their abstract (or, less concrete) nature, organizations can be conceived as having a telos, or a synthetic qua “creative” aim: as they do things, i.e., transform their environment(s), produce culture(s), and influence human (individual and/or group) behaviors. Hence, they can be said to have character – to be understood both as an axiological concept (principle) and a metaphor. The character of an organization has a significant impact on its “intentions,” actions, and effects – and also on its ongoing development and integrity. This insight prompts us to reflect: what is the character of an organization when it is dominated by analytical metrics in its knowledge generation processes? and how does the use of such metrics affect the integrity and stability of the organization? It is in this sense that we can appraise how a “good” organization can generate “good” behaviors and “good” cultures. Far from suggesting that the use of analytical metrics should be abandoned altogether, we propose that it should be embedded in a fundamentally different project. Once a teleological narrative of human beings, societies, and organizations as (integral but not dominant) part of nature is produced via synopsis and synthesis, and accepted as ultimate guide – this guide then determines what kind of analysis takes place, and whether (and when/ where) this should take precedence over other forms of inquiry. In the context of process metaphysics, as our knowledge formation is understood to depend more on flexibility than on precision, the purpose of language changes as well, from clarification and linear correspondence to richness of insight and suggestion; from the certainty of universal categories to generalizing from special cases based on emergent (rather than calculative) probability (Friel 2019). Philosophical inquiry should not fall into the trap that Whitehead calls “the fallacy of the perfect dictionary”: it should not limit itself to verbal analysis but “maintain an active novelty of fundamental ideas illuminating the social system” (Whitehead 1938, pp. 171–172). Organizational discourse should therefore be driven less by productivism as maximization of categorically defined outputs and more by holistic, circulareconomy perspectives on organizational processes, aiming at “peaceful coexistence between all earthbound objects” (Heikkurinen et al. 2019, p. 2).

232

A. Gare and C. Neesham

So, what should we be doing when researching how organizations should address complex challenges such as global warming? Speculative philosophy encourages a rethinking of the whole human organizing project: instead of systematic unification of abstract laws, we should strive for “imaginative synthesis” (Lonergan 1992, p. 112); instead of theoretical models applied to the investigation of reality “from the outside in,” we should favor inquiry “from the inside out,” constituting knowledge as the morphogenesis of experience.

Conclusion: Towards a New Enlightenment in Organization and Management Studies The homological study of organization has to be a multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary endeavor that employs integrated analytical-speculative philosophies to avoid the trap of reductionism and take theorizing in the opposite direction, to account for complexity and complexification (Tsoukas 2017). This should enable the study of human organization to generate solutions and responses to ecological challenges from a perspective of human organization as part of nature rather than as separate from it. Taking this perspective would redefine the purpose of organizations in terms of augmenting life and well-being in all the communities and environments in which they exist. The premises and methods of the Radical Enlightenment should be revisited and incorporated in this project.

Cross-References ▶ Creating an Effective Business Ethics ▶ Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics

References Adler PS (2007) The future of critical management studies: a paleo-Marxist critique of labour process theory. Organ Stud 28(9):1313–1345 Anscombe GEM (1957) Intention. Blackwell, Oxford Bolzano B (2015) Theory of science (trans: Rusnock P, Rolf G). Oxford University Press, Oxford. (Original work published 1838) Bourdieu P (1990) The logic of practice. Stanford University Press, Redwood City Breazeale D (2010) Doing philosophy: Fichte vs Kant on transcendental method. In: Rockmore T, Breazeale D (eds) Fichte, German idealism, and early romanticism. Rodopi, New York, pp 41–62 Broad CD (1947) Address: some methods of speculative philosophy. Proc Aristot Soc Suppl 21: 1–32 Copi IM, Cohen C, McMahon K (2016) Introduction to logic, 14th edn. Routledge, New York Cornelissen JP (2005) Beyond compare: metaphor in organization theory. Acad Manag Rev 30(4): 751–764

12

Reviving Methods of Speculative Philosophy

233

Davidson D (1963) Actions, reasons, and causes. J Philos 60(23):685–700 Etzion D (2007) Research on organizations and the natural environment, 1992–present: a review. J Manag 33(4):637–664 Fichte JG (1982) Foundamental principles of the entire science of knowledge. In: Heath P, Lachs J (eds and trans) The science of knowledge. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 93–119. (Original work published 1795) Fischer Kuh K (2011) Capturing individual harms. Harv Environ Law Rev 35(1):155–204 Frege FLG (1952) On concept and object. In: Geach P, Black M (eds and trans) Philosophical writings of Gottlob Frege. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, pp 42–55. (Original work published 1892) Friel C (2019) Lonergan and Bhaskar: the intelligibility of experiment. Heythrop J 60(1):55–78 Gare A (1999) Speculative metaphysics and the future of philosophy: the contemporary relevance of Whitehead’s defense of speculative metaphysics. Australas J Philos 77(2):127–145 Gare A (2011) From Kant to Schelling to process metaphysics: on the way to ecological civilization. Cosmos Hist J Nat Soc Philos 7(2):26–69 Gare A (2012) The liberal arts, the radical enlightenment and the war against democracy. In: Boschiero L (ed) On the purpose of a university education. Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, pp 67–102 Gare A (2013a) From Kant to Schelling: the subject, the object, and life. In: Van de Vijver G, Demarest B (eds) Objectivity after Kant. Georg Olms Verlag, Hildescheim, pp 129–140 Gare A (2013b) Overcoming the Newtonian paradigm: the unfinished project of theoretical biology from a Schellingian perspective. Prog Biophys Mol Biol 113:5–24 Gare A (2014) Speculative naturalism: a manifesto. Cosmos Hist J Nat Soc Philos 10(2):300–323 Georg S, Hoffman AJ (2018) Business and the natural environment: a research overview. Routledge, London Glock H-J (2008) What is analytic philosophy? Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Grassmann H (1995) The theory of linear extension. In: L Kannenberg (ed and trans) A new branch of mathematics, and other works. Open Court, Chicago, pp 3–314. (Original work published 1844) Heikkurinen P, Ruuska T, Kuokkanen A, Russell S (2019) Leaving productivism behind: towards a holistic and processual philosophy of ecological management. Philos Manag 1–16. https://doi. org/10.1007/s40926-019-00109-w IPCC (2014) Climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability: contribution of the working group II to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Israel JI (2002) The radical enlightenment: philosophy and the making of modernity 1650–1750. Oxford University Press, Oxford Jacob MC (2003) The radical enlightenment: pantheists, freemasons and republicans, 2nd edn. The Temple Publishers, Greensboro Johnson M (1981) Introduction: metaphor in the philosophical tradition. In: Johnson M (ed) Philosophical perspectives on metaphor. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp 3–47 Kant I (1996) Critique of pure reason (trans: Pluhar WS). Hackett, Indianapolis. (Original work published 1781) Kosslyn SM (1980) Image and mind. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Kotarbinski T (1965) Praxiology: an introduction to the sciences of efficient action (trans: Wojtasiewicz O). Pergamon Press, Oxford Leopold A (1949) Sand County almanac and sketches here and there. Oxford University Press, London Lonergan B (1988) Collection: papers by Bernard Lonergan. University of Toronto Press, Toronto Lonergan B (1992) Insight: a study of human understanding. University of Toronto Press, Toronto MacPherson CB (1964) The political theory of possessive individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford University Press, Oxford

234

A. Gare and C. Neesham

Makowski PT (2017) Kotarbinski’s praxiology and the analytic action theory. In: Gasparski WW (ed) Praxiological essays: texts and contexts. Routledge, London, pp 119–131 Mars MM, Bronstein JL, Lusch RF (2012) The value of a metaphor: organizations and ecosystems. Organ Dyn 41(4):271–280 McCloskey DN (1998) The rhetoric of economics. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison Milton JR (2013) The end of hierarchy: physics and metaphysics in the scientific revolution. In: Stone MWF, Wolff J (eds) Proper ambition of science. Routledge, London, pp 76–90 Morgan G (1996) Images of organization, 2nd edn. SAGE, Thousand Oaks Morgan G (2006) Images of organization, updated edn. SAGE, Thousand Oaks O’Regan JK, Noë A (2001) A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness. Behav Brain Sci 24(5):939–973 Popper K (2002) Conjectures and refutations. Routledge, London. (Original work published 1963) Schelling FWJ (1994) The philosophy of nature. In: Bowie A (ed and trans) On the history of modern philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 114–133. (Original work published 1803) Schelling FWJ (2004) Introduction to the outline of a system of the philosophy of nature, or, on the concept of speculative physics and the internal organization of system of this science. In: Petersen KR (ed and trans) First outline of a system of the philosophy of nature, pp 194–195. (Original work published 1799) Skinner Q (1998) Liberty before liberalism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Toulmin S (2012) The dream of an exact language. In: Göranzon B, Florin M (eds) Dialogue and technology: art and knowledge. Springer, London, pp 33–42. (Original work published in 1991) Tsoukas H (2017) Don’t simplify, complexify: from disjunctive to conjunctive theorizing in organization and management studies. J Manag Stud 54(2):132–153 Tsoukas H, Chia R (2011) Introduction: why philosophy matters to organization theory. In: Tsoukas H, Chia R (eds) Philosophy and organization theory. Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp 1–21 UNFCCC (2010) The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: report of the conference of the parties on its fifteenth session, held in Copenhagen from 7 to 19 December 2009. United Nations, New York United Nations (2014) Open working group proposal for Sustainable Development Goals. Available at: http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org von Mises L (1966) Human action: a treatise on economics. Yale University Press, New Haven Weick KE (1995) Sensemaking in organizations, vol 3. SAGE, Thousand Oaks Whitehead AN (1938) Modes of thought. The Free Press, New York Whitehead AN (1978) Process and reality: an essay in cosmology. The Free Press, New York

Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics

13

Norman Blaikie and Jan Priest

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rigorous Design of Management Research: Basic Choices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Scheme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Research Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Research Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Choice of Logic of Inquiry to Answer Research Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Choice of Research Paradigm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Practicalities That Can Influence Design Choices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Logics of Inquiry: Their Evolution and Uses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Traditional Logics of Inquiry and Their Uses: Induction and Deduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Logics of Inquiry for Making Discoveries: Peirce’s View of Retroduction and Abduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Retroductive Logic of Inquiry in the Social Sciences: Post Peirce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An Interpretive View of Abduction: Post Peirce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Combining Logics of Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Logics of Inquiry and Ontological Assumptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Variety of Research Paradigms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Logical Inconsistencies and Contradictions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Relevance to Management Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Treating Inconsistencies and Contradictions (ICs) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Big-Data and Small-Data Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fundamental Differences in Data-Oriented Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Traditional and Combinatorial Approaches Differ Yet Complement Each Other . . . . . . . . . . Comparing the Two Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

236 237 238 238 239 239 240 241 242 242 244 245 246 249 250 251 253 253 253 255 256 256 257 258 260

N. Blaikie (*) Melbourne, VIC, Australia J. Priest (*) Practice Research, InfoServ P/L, Hobart, TAS, Australia © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_64

235

236

N. Blaikie and J. Priest

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

260 262 262 262

Abstract

As a counter to the dominant tradition in management research, where the measurement and classification of a few variables is used to refine and test existing theory, to the neglect of theory generation, a more flexible, adaptable, and rigorous approach to the generation of both descriptive and explanatory new knowledge is offered. This scheme translates different types of reasoning into a set of logics of inquiry – inductive, deductive, abductive, and retroductive. Each logic has a characteristic starting point, steps, and end point, and is used within particular ontological assumptions. Consideration is also given to dealing with inconsistencies and contradictions between statements in bodies of knowledge. Traditional (pattern-context) driven and combinatorial (data-pattern) driven approaches to social inquiry are compared and these make possible the braiding of small-data and big-data. Keywords

Abduction · Contradiction · Deduction · Induction · Logic · Ontology · Paradigm · Research question · Retroduction

Introduction Researchers’ orientations to management studies have, for over a century, preferred theory building informed mainly by positivist studies in western industrial settings. Despite the socially complex and wicked nature of nonroutine management challenges, this dominant orientation has emphasized measuring and classifying relationships between a few variables considered as representative of business and management activities. Even today, theory refinement and testing exceed indigenous theory development and the richer and more penetrative treatments of context and process. This long-run focus on “average” or “typical” practices, rather than on what is unique to sustained successes or failures, has contributed general principles and heuristics about management practice that have largely failed to help management systematically sustain context-specific improvements in practice and outcomes. Confounding this positivist orientation have been ever-increasing specializations across more diverse discipline areas and a growing gap between managers’ needs for reliable and usable context-specific knowledge and more widely available yet more inaccessible codified knowledge. For managers, today’s nonroutine management thinking and action remains contextually wicked: socially and politically, technically and behaviorally, strategically and operationally, with the body of management-practice knowhow remaining

13

Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics

237

as diverse and still largely nonintegrated collections of practice-fragments that span many distinct disciplines. It has been developed through combinations of apprenticeship, cultural transmission (myths, storytelling, rewards, and sanctions), in-house and academic training, and wholesale adoption or appropriation of concepts and principles from related discipline areas as well as from the products of management research. Notwithstanding this variety of sources and influences, the persistent challenge for would-be and experienced managers is knowing what pieces of the management-practice knowledge puzzle are needed to address particular situations in particular contexts. These long-run themes and challenges underpin a chronic need for management research and outcomes that better combine researcher and practitioner orientations, and that generate management knowledge that can more systematically inform effective management practice. This chapter comments on three key aspects for researchers to consider when focusing and approaching future management studies. 1. Rigorous design of management studies – comprises three parts: a four-element scheme to produce rigorous designs; the evolution and role of logics of inquiry; and the nature and role of research paradigms. The discussion of logics of inquiry reviews the origins and development of inductive reasoning as “the scientific method,” its replacement by deductive reasoning, the introduction of retroductive and abductive reasoning, and the subsequent elaboration of all four forms for use in the social sciences. Three major research paradigms are then introduced and defined in terms of their ontological assumptions and dominant logic of inquiry. 2. Reasoning about inconsistencies and contradictions – highlights the need for research designs and conduct that systematically and explicitly distinguish between inadvertent versus materially important disjunctions between subsets of data that may later reveal important aspects of management. 3. The braiding of Big-Data with well-targeted Small-Data approaches to management studies – where braiding refers to a process in which apparently “opposing” activities periodically co-validate their progress according to rules that reflect their respective risk and contribution profiles (Priest 2000); a novel approach is offered to combining studies designed for “opposite” forms of data in order to reveal previously inaccessible insights about management knowledge-in-action.

Rigorous Design of Management Research: Basic Choices For more than 20 years we have been working on a scheme to help social researchers design more rigorous research projects, particularly novice researchers undertaking higher degrees. This has culminated in two publications (Blaikie and Priest 2017, 2019) where the scheme is elaborated in detail (see also Hallebone and Priest 2009).

238

N. Blaikie and J. Priest

The Scheme The scheme is comprised of four tasks, each with a set of core elements about which decisions need to be made. The typically iterative cycle of tasks is: Focusing, Framing, Selecting, and Distilling (see Table 1). There is a sequence to the order in which decisions about these elements need to be made. For example, it makes no sense to decide what data will be relevant until it is clear what research questions are to be investigated and within which research paradigm. However, the process of making these decisions is likely to require a few iterations. As all the decisions must be consistent, until all elements have been considered, it may not be clear whether this has been achieved. Only a few of the key elements will be briefly elaborated here, i.e., research problem, research questions, logic(s) of inquiry, and research paradigm(s).

Research Problem Without a research problem, there is nothing to research. This may be a trite statement, but it is amazing how much research is undertaken without one; there is a common view that research starts with a hypothesis. However, not all research requires them and, if they do, they are relevant much later in the process. A research problem is a phenomenon that lacks an adequate description and/or explanation. A problem may also be about a desire for change. However, in order to change anything, we need to know what is going on and why it is happening. Fundamentally, research is about solving intellectual puzzles, either theoretical or practical. Table 1 Four research design tasks and their core elements Tasks Focusing

Framing

Selecting

Distilling

Core elements Context of the research Topic of the research Problem to be investigated Questions to make problem researchable Purposes of the questions Logic(s) of inquiry Assumptions – ontological and epistemological Paradigm(s) – combinations of logic(s) and assumptions Data types and forms Data sources Methods of selection from sources Data collection/generation methods Data reduction and analysis methods Problems and limitations

Source: Blaikie and Priest (2019: 37–38)

13

Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics

239

It should be noted that phenomena of interest to social scientists are usually patterns or regularities in human social activity, not unique events or individual behaviors. Historians are mainly interested in unique events or sequences of events, and psychologists are mainly concerned with individual thoughts and behavior. Insofar as management occurs in social contexts, in organizations of some kind, management researchers are most likely to be interested in patterns and regularities and their explanations. For examples of research problems, see Blaikie and Priest (2017: 40–41, 73, 84–85, 128, 196, 2019: 260–295).

Research Questions Deciding on the research questions to be investigated is the real starting point. They not only make a research problem researchable, but they also define the aims and/or objectives of a study and begin to set limits to its scope. Some studies may have only one question while others may need a logical set of questions. In view of the time and resources available, a major issue to be resolved at this stage is how many questions can be entertained. Research questions can be worded in many ways, but they can be reduced to three types: WHAT, WHY, and HOW questions. WHAT questions seek descriptions, WHY questions seek explanations, and HOW questions are concerned with interventions to bring about change. When research is about people, WHAT questions can be concerned with types of people, their typical knowledge, beliefs, values, attitudes, aspirations, behavior, and social relationship, as well as the consequences of holding or doing these things. The primary concern is with establishing patterns or regularities among such characteristics. WHY questions are about explanations for these characteristics, patterns, and regularities. Why do people think and act this way, why do they exhibit these characteristics and regularities, and why do these activities have particular consequences. HOW questions are about changing these characteristics, patterns, and regularities or about slowing down or stopping change. They are about practical, problem-solving interventions. These three types of questions form a sequence. WHAT questions normally precede WHY questions, and these precede HOW questions. It is necessary to know what is going on and why it is happening before it is possible to propose interventions. Evidence-based policy formulation is a case in point. WHY questions are inevitably more challenging to answer than WHAT questions. For some practical suggestions on how to formulate research questions, see Blaikie and Priest (2019: 73–77). For examples of research questions, see Blaikie and Priest (2017).

Choice of Logic of Inquiry to Answer Research Questions Research questions can be answered in several ways, each of which has a starting point and a series of steps that will, hopefully, produce the required answer. Four such

240

N. Blaikie and J. Priest

procedures are available and are referred to as logics of inquiry. They are inductive, deductive, abductive, and retroductive logics. Inductive logic produces generalizations from data; deductive logic involves the construction of a theory that is tested by gathering and analyzing relevant data; abductive logic involves the generation of social scientific accounts from everyday, lay accounts of social life, both descriptions and explanations; and retroductive logic proposes underlying mechanisms and/or structures to explain a regularity, and then tries to establish their existence. Inductive and abductive logics are used to describe social phenomena in the form of established patterns and regularities, i.e., to answer WHAT-type research questions, and deductive, abductive and retroductive logics, in different ways, provide explanations for these patterns and regularities, i.e., answer WHY-type research questions. Logics of inquiry are much less relevant to the answering of HOW-type questions; policy formulation and evaluation are more likely to be relevant. We return to a detailed discussion of logics of inquiry later in the chapter.

Choice of Research Paradigm A more fundamental choice, and one that can influence all others, is the research paradigm or paradigms within which a study will be conducted. Like the choice of logic of inquiry, paradigm choice should be influenced by the purpose of the research, the context in which it is located, the nature of the research problem, the type and form of the research questions, a variety of practical issues, and how the results will be interpreted and used. Thomas Kuhn (1970), who introduced the concept of paradigm into philosophical and scientific discourses, argued that scientific communities share a “discipline matrix,” which consists of views of the nature of reality (ontological assumptions), concepts, theories, and techniques of investigation that are regarded as appropriate (epistemology), and examples of previous scientific achievements that provide models (exemplars) for scientific practice. He was concerned with understanding scientific revolutions, the transition from one dominant discipline paradigm to another. Kuhn applied his notion of paradigm to specialities or schools in the natural sciences and was skeptical about its relevance to the social and human sciences. He regarded mature sciences as having a dominant paradigm and, the fact that the social sciences have competing paradigms, deprives them of this status. However, central to his scheme are communities of practitioners of a scientific speciality, which can “approach the same subject from incompatible viewpoints” (Kuhn 1970: 177). Regardless of Kuhn’s view of the status of social sciences, they are certainly characterized by such competing schools. In a multidisciplinary field like management, the competition can be both within and between disciplines. It is our view that, whether recognized or not by researchers, social research is conducted within a variety of different ontological and epistemological assumptions (the latter refers to assumptions about how knowledge of an assumed reality can be produced). The choice among such assumptions, and the logic of inquiry that is

13

Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics

241

appropriately associated with them, de facto, is a choice of research paradigm. This is elaborated later in the chapter. It is possible that different paradigms might be appropriate for particular research questions, which means that a study may be conducted using a variety of ontological assumptions and with different logics of inquiry at different stages.

Practicalities That Can Influence Design Choices As indicated above, the choice of logic(s) of inquiry, and the research paradigm within which it/they will be used, should be determined particularly by the nature of the research problem, the research questions into which it has been translated, and the context in which the research is to be conducted. There is, however, a range of other influences on these choices: academic, social, economic, political, cultural, and technical. Research also occurs at a particular time and in a particular place, and what is regarded as an appropriate way to conduct research can vary between places and over time. And then there are personal influences, theoretical and methodological preferences, and ideological commitments. Researchers bring a particular set of experiences and skills, different cognitive, language and social capacities to any study, and these factors can also influence decisions about how it should be conducted. For a more detailed discussion, see Blaikie and Priest (2017: 238–242). It goes without saying that the aim in any research is to achieve the best possible results and outcomes. In the early stages of their development, research designs tend to present the ideal way to investigate a problem. However, this must be tempered by a range of practical considerations. We have divided these into three categories: local issues; mid-range issues; and big issues. Local issues include: • The existence of suitable data sources and ensuring that they will be accessible. • Having tools, support, and protocols for assembling, analyzing, and verifying data-related sources. In short, being able to get the desired data and being able to work with it. Mid-range issues include: • Satisfying ethical requirements and knowing how to deal with situations where the principles are in conflict or are ambiguous. • Accessing sufficient funding. • Particularly for student research, the availability of suitable supervisor(s)/advisor(s) who have the time and willingness to carry out this role. • Building in necessary administrative and accountability procedures. • In the case of multidisciplinary or multiparty research, defining and coordinating roles, and establishing problem raising and resolving procedures.

242

N. Blaikie and J. Priest

In short, this involves managing the research environment not only to obtain what is necessary to carry out the research but also all the activities necessary to do so. The big issues bring us back to some of the core topics already discussed: • Being able to deal with cultural, social, and academic influences and constraints, particularly on what is regarded as acceptable approaches and practices. • Dealing with dominant ontological and epistemological positions in relevant literature and working environments, particularly when these are different from the ones a researcher wishes to adopt. • Developing the appropriate knowledge and skills in the traditions of theory and research methods that need to be used, modified, or rejected. In short, these are fundamental aspects of research dealing with differences in or conflicts over assumptions, ideas, knowledge, skills, and practices.

Logics of Inquiry: Their Evolution and Uses The unique feature of our scheme is the emphasis given to the role of logics of inquiry in research. This is the way new knowledge is generated. These logics of inquiry provide different ways of doing this, each with its characteristic starting point, set of steps and type of conclusion. While different types of logical reasoning have been recognized for millennia, their application to research is poorly understood and the significance of their role, at best, is frequently underestimated or, at worst, is ignored. While some logics can be applied in both the natural and social sciences, there is one that can only be used in the latter. It will be given particular attention.

Traditional Logics of Inquiry and Their Uses: Induction and Deduction It is a widely held, common-sense view that inductive logic is used to produce new scientific knowledge; that conclusions are derived from appropriate data. The earliest form of inductive reasoning has been attributed to Aristotle and his disciples. It works from particulars to the general; from statements about singular instances or events to generalizations about them. More recently, although in substantially different versions, this logic was advocated and elaborated by Bacon (1620) and Mill (1843) as the foundation of “the scientific method” (see Blaikie 1993: 131–143). As the method of science, the ultimate aim was to produce not just general descriptions but such well-established generalizations that they could be regarded as universal scientific “laws.” “Let us first assemble the data; let us by observation and by making experiments compile the true state of Nature, taking care that our vision is not corrupted by preconceived ideas; then inductive

13

Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics

243

reasoning can go to work and reveal laws and principles and necessary connections” (Medewar 1969: 40). Going back to the 1930s, the inductive logic of inquiry has been subjected to many criticisms, focusing particularly on the claims that it can produce “true” theories. Popper was an ardent critic: “I do not believe that we ever make inductive generalizations in the sense that we start with observations and try to derive our theories from them. I believe that the prejudice that we proceed in this way is a kind of optical illusion, and that at no stage of scientific development do we begin without something in the nature of a theory” (Popper 1961: 134). Despite its many demonstrated weaknesses, inductive logic is essential in all research. However, its role is limited to establishing and describing patterns and regularities in social phenomena, not as universal generalizations but as general descriptions that are limited in time and space. In spite of their limitations, these descriptions are the essential starting points of any investigation; they describe what exists and what needs to be explained (Blaikie 2007: 63–70). Karl Popper turned inductive logic on its head. He argued that scientists should start out with a theory, the “truth value” of which is arrived at by deducing one or more conclusions from it and then testing them empirically, i.e., by using deductive logic. This form of reasoning has been discussed for more than two thousand years and is the foundation of Euclidian geometry. However, its use here, and in much of mathematics, involves determining a set of initial premises, together with some assumptions, and drawing conclusions within a closed system. If the logical reasoning is valid the conclusion will always be true. However, when used in open systems, in the real world, the use of deductive logic cannot have the same certainty. Popper argued that the aim of any science should be to try and falsify, rather than support or confirm, whatever theory we wish to propose as an explanation for a pattern or regularity. As ultimate confirmation of a theory is impossible, the role of scientific investigation is to dispose of false theories. In the end, any theory that survives the testing process must be regarded as tentative and open to modification, and even replacement by a better theory. This rigorous, critical process is designed to get as near as is humanly possible to “the truth,” but it is impossible to know if we have arrived at it (see Popper 1959: 32–33 for a summary of his approach). Science starts with problems, problems associated with the explanation of the behaviour of some aspects of the world or universe. Falsifiable hypotheses are proposed by scientists as solutions to the problem. The conjectured hypotheses are then criticized and tested. Some will be quickly eliminated. Others might prove more successful. These must be subject to even more stringent criticism and testing. When a hypothesis that has successfully withstood a wide range of rigorous tests is eventually falsified, a new problem, hopefully far removed from the original solved problem, has emerged. This new problem calls for the invention of a new hypothesis, followed by new criticism and testing. And so, the process continues indefinitely. It can never be said of a theory that it is true, however well it has withstood rigorous tests, but it can hopefully be said that a current theory is superior to its predecessors in the sense that it is able to withstand tests that falsified those (Chalmers 1982: 45)

244

N. Blaikie and J. Priest

The deductive logic of inquiry also has its limitations (for a review, see Chalmers 1982; Blaikie 2007: 75–79). As long as these limitations are recognized and modifications made to accommodate them, it is still a useful way to produce new knowledge.

Logics of Inquiry for Making Discoveries: Peirce’s View of Retroduction and Abduction One of the deficiencies of the deductive logic of inquiry, certainly as proposed by Popper, is that it provides no help in finding a suitable theory to test. Popper’s excuse was that, as this process is a matter of psychology, and involves human creativity, it is not amenable to logical analysis. This lacuna has been addressed by two other logics of inquiry, retroduction and abduction. Even before Popper was working on his criticism of inductive logic, and advocating the use of deductive logic, Charles Peirce (1931, 1934) was grappling with this issue. He drew on Aristotle’s three types of reasoning – induction, deduction, and reduction – and argued that all three are required. He elaborated reduction using three further concepts: “abduction,” “retroduction,” and, sometimes, “hypothesis,” which he used interchangeably. However, it is not clear why all three concepts are necessary. Peirce argued that these three forms of reasoning need to be used in a particular order: abduction/retroduction to invent a theory; deduction to produce a testable hypothesis from it; and induction to test it. Peirce presented a number of conceptions of induction. For a start, he made a distinction between “crude induction” and “gradual induction,” the former referring to the simple enumeration of instances, and the latter to a process in which each new observed instance provides a changing estimate of the truth. Crude induction seems to refer to the process of generalizing from a set of consistent observations, while gradual induction is a process used to search for a scientific law. Just how these two views of induction relate to the testing of hypotheses is not clear. To further complicate the matter, Peirce also presented a view of induction that looks more like what later philosophers have regarded as deduction. “Induction consists in starting from a theory, deducing from it predictions of phenomena, and observing those phenomena in order to see how nearly they agree with the theory” (1934: 105). Peirce gave deduction the very limited role of producing a conclusion from a set of premises by logical steps. Perhaps the most positive interpretation that can be given to these apparent inconsistencies in his views of induction and deduction is that the former translates the latter into practice; it offers a scientific procedure. Again, just what this has to do with “crude induction” and “gradual induction” is not clear. What can we conclude from this brief review of Peirce’s ideas? (For a more detailed discussion see Blaikie 1993: 163–168.)

13

Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics

245

• He had a variety of conceptions of induction, ranging from a simple accumulation of consistent evidence, to a search for “the truth,” to a process of theory testing. • He provided a very limited role for deduction, simply to draw a logical conclusion from a set of premises. • He regarded “retroduction” as having a central role in theory development but muddied the waters by moving between this concept and both “abduction” and “hypothesis”; the latter two concepts are redundant in his scheme. Peirce’s ideas received some attention in the 1960s and 1970s but very little outside the USA. There has been a revival of interest in his work in the past two decades (see, for example Paavola 2004, 2006), and its use has been advocated in management research (Bamberger 2018). Peirce thought that all established scientific theories are the result of the operation of abduction/retroduction but he continued to be puzzled about how the process occurred. He even thought it might be due to a kind of natural instinct, a certain insight (Peirce 1934: 107). In scientific inquiry we are building a cantilever bridge of induction, held together by scientific struts and ties. Yet every plank of its advance is first laid by Retroduction alone, that is to say, by the spontaneous conjectures of instinctive reason; neither Deduction nor Induction contributes a single new concept to the structure. (Peirce 1934: 324)

Such conjectures must be able to eliminate the puzzlement that arises from some surprising observation. He indicated this in a frequently quoted logical argument: The surprising fact, C, is observed. But if A were true, C would be a matter of course, Hence, there is a reason to suspect that A is true. (Peirce 1934: 117)

For Peirce, it is the sense of being overwhelmed by such an explanatory idea, which cannot be resisted, that gives a researcher grounds for entertaining it. He regarded science as being much more a struggle for intelligibility than it is a matter of strictly following logical procedures.

Retroductive Logic of Inquiry in the Social Sciences: Post Peirce So far the discussion of logics of inquiry has been conducted with reference to the natural sciences. But what relevance do they have for the social sciences? Elsewhere, we have argued that induction, deduction, and retroduction can all be used in the social sciences, separately or in some combination, depending on the nature of the research problem, the context of the research, and its aims (Blaikie and Priest 2017, 2019). However, because of a fundamental difference in the subject matters of the natural and social sciences, there is a fourth logic of inquiry that is only relevant to the latter. As far back as 1993, this was labeled “abduction” (see Blaikie 1993). It

246

N. Blaikie and J. Priest

should be noted that in this publication, and others (Blaikie 2000, 2007, 2010), all the logics of inquiry were referred to as “research strategies.” The idea of retroduction has been taken up by both philosophers of social science and its practitioners (see, in particular, Harré and Secord 1972; Bhaskar 1979; Keat and Urry 1975). This view of retroductive logic is based on the idea that patterns or regularities exist in both natural and social phenomena, that these can be identified and described, and that their explanation lies in the underlying structures and mechanisms that produce them. It is to the discovery of these structures and mechanisms that retroductive logic is applied: 1. In order to explain observable phenomena, and the regularities that obtain between them, scientists must attempt to discover appropriate structures and mechanisms. 2. Since these structures and mechanisms will typically be unavailable to observation, we first construct a model of them, often drawing upon already familiar sources. 3. The model is such that, were it to correctly represent these structures and mechanisms, the phenomena would then be causally explained. 4. We then proceed to test the model as a hypothetical description of actually existing entities and their relations. To do so we work out further consequences of the model (that is, additional to the phenomena we are trying to explain), which can be stated in a manner open to empirical testing. 5. If these tests are successful, this gives good reason to believe in the existence of these structures and mechanisms. 6. It may be possible to obtain more direct confirmation of these existential claims, by the development and use of suitable instruments. 7. The whole process of model-building may then be repeated, in order to explain the structures and mechanisms already discovered (Keat and Urry 1975: 35; see also Bhaskar 1979: 15). Clearly, the challenging stage in this process is the construction of an explanatory model of possible structures and mechanisms. A practical way of doing this has been proposed and used in social research by Pawson and Tilley (1997).

An Interpretive View of Abduction: Post Peirce As we have seen above, Peirce had a perfectly good concept for the third logic of inquiry, one that has been further elaborated since, i.e., “retroduction.” The label of “abduction” is particularly apposite for our fourth logic of inquiry as it relates to the everyday idea of “taking something” illegally. A researcher takes from research participants their everyday knowledge to use as ingredients in both descriptions and explanations. However, this everyday knowledge is not taken illegally but with the research participants’ consent and cooperation.

13

Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics

247

The need for this fourth logic of inquiry was partly stimulated by dissatisfaction with the rather loose and diverse interpretations being given to induction, particularly in grounded theory. We prefer to reserve inductive logic for the quite specific role of producing generalizations from a range of observed instances, a process used to establish patterns and regularities in social phenomena. Social actors, whose worlds are investigated, already possess concepts for and have developed interpretations of their actions, interactions, and relationships. This view is most clearly articulated in the work of Schütz (1963a, b) who, in his revisions and extensions of Weber’s ideas on meaningful social action (1964: 88–118), focused on the relationship this everyday “knowledge” (concepts and interpretations) has to concepts and theories social scientists need to describe and explain social phenomena. Schütz’s discussion centered on the role of typifications in social inquiry, everyday typifications, and social scientific typifications and, in particular, the relationship between them. The social scientists’ task is to derive social scientific typifications from everyday typifications. This is a “bottom up” approach to concept formation and theory generation, with the initial ingredients provided by social actors. This relationship has been expressed in various ways – e.g., between lay language and technical language – and its importance has been stated clearly by Bhaskar: “[T]he relationship . . . between social scientific description and lay descriptions . . . [is] the central question of method in the social sciences” (1979: 198). While the early versions of grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1965) might appear to have been occupying this territory, in spite of its claims, it was essentially concerned with “top down” categorization of data and associated theory construction rather than “bottom up” concept and theory generation. It does not explicitly start with social actors’ concepts and interpretations. Rather, its followers are predominantly concerned with coding passages of interview transcripts, a process that is now facilitated, and also constrained, by software. However, it must be acknowledged that later versions of grounded theory have introduced a more interpretive or constructionist approach to this process (see, e.g., Seale 1999; Clarke 2005; Charmaz 2014). The discussion of the role of types and typologies in social science goes back to Weber and many others who have since contributed to this tradition (see, e.g., Becker 1940, 1950; Martindale 1959; McKinney 1970; Rex 1971; Giddens 1976). However, not all these contributions adopt Schütz’s views on how social scientific types are produced. The problem in Schütz’s work is that he and others, who share his views, have provided little or no guidance on how his ideas could be put into practice. It was to this process that Blaikie decided to apply the concept of “abduction”: The starting point [in social research] is the social world of the social actors being investigated. The aim is to discover their constructions of reality, their ways of conceptualising and giving meaning to their social world, their tacit knowledge. The main access a researcher has to these constructions is through the knowledge social actors use in the production, reproduction and interpretation of the phenomenon under

248

N. Blaikie and J. Priest

investigation. Their reality . . . is embedded in their everyday language. Hence, the researcher has to enter their world in order to discover the motives and reasons that accompany social activities. The task is to then redescribe these actions and motives, and the situations in which they occur, in the technical language of social scientific discourse. Individual motives and actions have to be abstracted into typical motives for typical actions in typical situations. These social scientific typifications provide an understanding of the activities, and may then become the ingredients in more systematic explanatory accounts. (Blaikie 2007: 10)

The key concepts here are “redescription” and “abstraction,” to be elaborated further below. Use was made of Habermas’s (1970) distinction between “monological” and “dialogical” methods. According to Habermas, “monological” methods are used in the natural sciences – “sense experience” based on direct observation – and “dialogical” methods in the social (and cultural or hermeneutic) sciences – “communicative experience” in which understanding of meaning is derived from communication with social actors. Hence, the method used to put the logic of abduction into practice was labeled “dialogical” (Blaikie and Priest 2017: 231–237). Over the years, the method has been elaborated (Blaikie and Stacy 1982: 9–10; Drysdale 1985; Blaikie 2007: 97–98; Blaikie and Priest 2017, 2019) and put to use by a range of researchers (see, e.g., Priest 1997, 2000). A review of the history of its development can be found in Blaikie (2019). The most elaborate account of this approach to the use of abductive logic can now be found in Blaikie and Priest (2017: 116–124). It involves a series of reflexive cycles, each one requiring six important interwoven activities: sensitising, questioning, exploring, analyzing, theorizing, and checking: • Sensitizing: Substantive and methodological literature related to the research problem is used to alert a researcher to matters to be aware of and issues to be investigated. • Questioning: Involves exploring, elaborating, cross-checking and critically reviewing both the literature and participants’ accounts. • Exploring: Eliciting rich accounts from participants by asking them open starting questions, followed by drill-down questioning, and seeking clarification on gaps, apparent contradictions, points of confusion, paradoxes, and dilemmas in these accounts. • Analysis: Transforming all units of data into successively more abstract and compact descriptions that still account for their meanings; this transformation involves the researcher in a layered process of first recognizing everyday typifications; grouping them according to shared “sub-text” to form first-order abstracted categories; then abstracting them into second-order typologies of people, situations, processes, resources, and structures. • Theorizing: An iterative process that analytically and imaginatively generates discriminating insights about associations or relationships between one or more typologies or subtypes to provide an understanding of the regularity or problem being investigated.

13

Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics

249

• Checking: An iterative process by which a researcher checks with participants the degree to which they understand and concur with the researcher’s account of the area of their social life under investigation. Initially, each reflexive cycle is likely to lead to an increasing variety of data and richness in possible meanings. This variety will be reduced with the generation of abstract categories. At the same time, the increasing richness in meaning of them will begin to account for all or most of the data that have been generated. This process is facilitated by a mixture of familiarity and distance – immersion and withdrawal, involvement and reflection – in the generation and analysis of data. This helps to suspend premature closure on the number and meaning of types and can foster the disciplined abstraction of an embryonic typology to account for variation and patterns in the phenomenon. Each cycle raises issues to be explored, cross-checked, qualified, elaborated, and/or better illustrated or defined when next engaging with participants. The result is that participants and researchers co-produce data and meaning. Blaikie and Priest (2017: 116–124) have elaborated this logic and its methods, and illustrated their use in two research projects (2017: 127–167). For more explanation of this logic, see also Blaikie (2007, 2010), and Blaikie and Priest (2019).

Combining Logics of Inquiry Using a combination of induction and deduction, in a cycle of theory construction and testing, is now well accepted. It was initially formalized by Wallace (1971) and discussed by Blaikie (1993), followed by reviews in Blaikie (2007: 79–82) and Blaikie and Priest (2019: 143–144). As previously mentioned, Peirce had already argued that his three logics should be used in sequence. We also support the use of logics of inquiry in sequence, particularly when a research design has a set of research questions that move from description, to explanation, to change. Alternatively, abductive logic may be used to develop descriptions of everyday typifications and the generation of typologies, and these may be used with retroductive logic as a source of ideas about explanatory mechanisms. An overview of Harré’s work suggests this type of combination of logics. Similarly, when theories are generated by abductive logic, they may be formally tested using deductive logic. It all depends on the nature of a research problem, the context in which it is being investigated and the research questions into which the problem has been translated. It is important to note that combining logics of inquiry in these ways is likely to entail shifts in the ontological assumptions adopted at each stage (see Blaikie and Priest 2017, 2019: 89–105). These combinations need to be distinguished from the now popular mixing of methods. In our view, using logics of inquiry in sequence like this is a far more fundamental and significant activity than using combinations of methods of data collection and analysis. Choice of methods is made in association with logics of inquiry and the accompanying ontological assumptions. It is to a discussion of these assumptions that we now turn.

250

N. Blaikie and J. Priest

Logics of Inquiry and Ontological Assumptions Logics of inquiry are distinctly different; they arrive at new knowledge by different paths and the kind of knowledge they produce can also be quite different. This could be seen as a problem, but only if you believe that there is just one “truth” to be discovered. As we have seen, the choice of logic of inquiry is determined by the nature of the research problem, the research questions that are selected to investigate it, and a variety of practical considerations. In addition, however, there are fundamental philosophical issues to be considered, the most important of which is the characteristic ontological assumptions that are associated with each logic of inquiry. Consideration has to be given to the branch of philosophy concerned with ontology, with what exists, as social researchers have no alternative but to adopt assumptions about the nature of the social reality they investigate. This may also include some ideas about if and how social researchers might “make contact” with that assumed reality (epistemology). There has been much debate on these questions and a variety of positions have been advocated. We need to note in passing that social researchers have dealt with these issues in a number of ways: adopted and religiously defended a particular position; tried to ignore their relevance; or endeavored to be ecumenical and move between positions that were considered appropriate for the research problem at hand. It is possible to adopt this third position within a research project by using different logics of inquiry, with different ontological assumptions, to answer each research question. We reject the second position as being untenable, we view the first position as being too restrictive and encouraging unnecessary conflicts, and we advocate the third position for its openness and flexibility. In philosophy, two mutually exclusive ontological positions have had a long history; realist and idealist. In the realist position, both natural and social phenomena are assumed to have an existence that is independent of the thoughts and activities of the human observer. In its pure form, the idealist position assumes that what we regard as the external world is just appearances and has no independent existence apart of human thought. These positions have been elaborated and refined, particularly when applied to the social sciences. From a vast literature, we have identified six main positions: shallow realist, conceptual realist, cautious realist, depth realist, idealist, and subtle realist (Blaikie 2007: 13–18; Blaikie and Priest 2019: 101–105). We discuss only three of them here. Cautious realist • Reality has an existence independent of human minds. • However, direct access to this reality is not possible.

13

Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics

251

Depth realist • Social reality is viewed either as social episodes that are the products of the cognitive resources of social actors or as social arrangements that are the product of material but unobservable structures of relations. • Unlike natural structures, social structures are less enduring and do not exist independently of the activities they influence or of social actors’ conceptions of what they are doing in these activities. Idealist • Social reality is made up of conceptions and interpretations that social actors produce and reproduce as they go about their daily lives. • Idealist ontologies differ in the extent to which the existence of an independent external world is acknowledged and, if so, whether or not it constrains or facilitates individual and social activity. The deductive logic of inquiry is usually associated with a cautious realist ontology (see Popper 1959, 1961), retroductive logic with the depth realist ontology (see Harré and Secord 1972; Bhaskar 1979), and abductive logic with this version of an idealist ontology (Blaikie 2007: 16–17). While the inductive logic of inquiry was initially associated with a shallow realist ontology, also identified as naïve realist, empirical realist, or actualist (Bhaskar 1979), it can be associated with any ontological assumptions.

Variety of Research Paradigms Paradigms emerged in the social sciences soon after the founders established different approaches to social inquiry but, as we have noted, they now exist concurrently even if they did not all emerge at the outset. We have identified a total of ten classical and contemporary social scientific paradigms (Blaikie 2007: 109–198; Blaikie and Priest 2019: 105–112) and have reduced these to three major ones (Blaikie and Priest 2017). Here we restrict our discussion to these three, viz., Neo-positivism, Interpretivism, and Scientific (or Critical) Realism. In the social sciences, their roots can be traced back to Durkheim, Weber, and Marx, respectively. Neo-positivism is an updated version of the classical positivist paradigm, with some elements modified to overcome its deficiencies. Interpretivism elaborates an early version by drawing on contributions from hermeneutics and structuration theory. The third paradigm has emerged from more recent developments in realist science and social science, although realism itself has a long history. Each research paradigm offers a particular way of explaining social phenomena by providing different ways to answer WHY-type research questions. The style of

252 Table 2 Ontological assumptions and dominant logic of the paradigms

N. Blaikie and J. Priest

Paradigm Neo-positivism Interpretive Scientific realism

Ontology Cautious realist Idealist Depth realist

Dominant logic Deductive Abductive Retroductive

explanation is determined by the dominant logic of inquiry. The reason why each research paradigm is not exclusively identified with just one logic of inquiry is that the steps involved in producing explanations can involve the informal use of more than one logic (see Table 2). Consequently, each paradigm has its own particular road map. The starting point for research conducted within the Neo-positivist and Scientific Realist paradigms is a pattern or regularity that needs to be explained. The latter will have been established using inductive or, perhaps, abductive logic, with whatever methods are deemed appropriate, be they quantitative or qualitative. When the Interpretive paradigm is used, the start may be the same; an established pattern or regularity. However, this paradigm can also be used to produce such patterns or regularities but in an iterative way that is absent in the use of inductive logic. When research is conducted within the Neo-positivist paradigm, the process is to find or invent a theory that might explain the pattern or regularity, and then proceed to test it. This involves a two-step deductive argument: the first posits a theory from which the observed regularity follows; the second deduces, from the posited theory, tests that are designed to challenge or refute the theory. If the tests, and further evidence, corroborates the theory, it can be used until something better comes along. If the tests fail, the theory may be modified and retested, or discarded and a new one proposed. In a somewhat similar way, when using the Scientific Realist paradigm, the next step is to imagine what structure or mechanism might account for the regularity, present it as a theoretical model, and then proceed to find evidence for its existence. In the natural sciences, such mechanisms may not have been observed before, with the result that establishing their existence might be a long and difficult process. The discovery of the atom is a case in point; atoms were split before they were ever physically observed, but splitting them certainly provided evidence for their existence and nature. In the social sciences, structures and mechanisms are more likely to be known; the trick is to imagine which one or ones are relevant. This logic requires the use of imagination and creativity rather than the pulling together of propositions to create a deductive argument. The Interpretive paradigm requires that the researcher enter the social situation under investigation and, with an open mind and a willingness to learn from the social participants, become immersed in the everyday life that occurs there. Through an iterative process of immersion, withdrawal, reflection, and re-immersion the task is to generate social scientific accounts based on the social participants’ accounts.

13

Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics

253

Summary Choosing and using forms of reasoning that best serve a study’s context, purpose, and scope starts with the study’s research problem and its core WHAT, WHY, and HOW questions. Paradigm choices – ontological and epistemological – and choices about applicable forms of logical reasoning (inductive, deductive, retroductive, and abductive) are made to help answer particular research questions. These selections become foundation elements of a study’s research design. Practical challenges and solutions will also inform research designs, but paradigm and reasoning choices serve as architectural principles that enable and constrain the ability of a study to serve its purpose.

Logical Inconsistencies and Contradictions The previous discussion emphasized the importance of choosing logics of inquiry consistent with a paradigm orientation that best allows a study to answer the research questions about an important research problem. A common assumption is that consistency will exist between a study’s salient political, logistical, legal, social, and academic elements to allow chosen logical lines of inquiry to proceed. A common reality however is that inconsistencies and contradictions exist, not only within required bodies of data and literature, but within and between other materially significant elements of a study’s context. Being aware of materially important inconsistencies and contradictions, and developing justified and welldescribed ways of dealing with these, may also be a key design consideration. If a study aims to qualify or add salient knowledge to an important aspect of management, then a researcher’s ability to tackle important challenges of inconsistencies and contradictions will contribute to the study’s rigor. This short section notes some relevant considerations.

Relevance to Management Research The phenomenon of Inconsistencies and Contradictions (ICs) between collections of statements in bodies of knowledge is commonplace; a result of pairs of statements – each of which has arisen and become accepted in different social-time contexts and only later has been “read together” and recognized. Comparing documents that have been developed over time and in different academic or operational settings may often turn up contradictions and inconsistencies – each of which may be valid in its appropriate setting. Non-“trivial” inferences from theories, data bases, worldviews, beliefs, and arguments commonly contain inconsistencies; (non) trivial inferences being those for which it is (not) possible to derive any other proposition. Everyday examples include moral dilemmas, wicked problems, competing needs and

254

N. Blaikie and J. Priest

priorities, conflicted data and judgments, inconsistent laws and policies, diverse and often competing expert opinions. In social research, social actors’ accounts of their reflections on, or experiences of, typically complex or wicked phenomena often contain statements that are vague, incomplete, inaccurate, ambiguous, inconsistent, or even contradictory. This may be a result of their linguistic variety, variations in specific settings that actors refer to, retrospective rationalizing, or other influences (e.g., social, familial, career, cultural, ethical, political, economic) that may or may not be recognized by the participant or researcher. For researchers, evolving operational or academic settings may also contribute to this phenomenon. Operational settings commonly span cultural, political, geographic, economic, and technological habits, challenges and innovations. These evolving elements can underpin this phenomenon. Changing academic orientations reflect, inter alia, topical preferences, funding and other resource commitments, methodological biases and shifts in academies that are signaled by publication themes, preferences, awards, critical reviews, and acceptances or rejections. Individual researchers may also identify inconsistencies and contradictions between elements that make up the growing body of their own works. This is often evident across elements of their original or secondary research such as: descriptions of research problems and questions; salient literatures; their various ontological and epistemological positions; dominant and supporting logics; population and sample characteristics; data and analytic as well as synthetic methods, and accompanying trade-offs and findings as well as the results of verification. Throughout the last century, a majority of management research has proceeded with the Aristotelian assumption that inconsistencies and contradictions are signals of tainted data or potentially flawed reasoning. This assumption has led researchers to design and conduct studies that have sought to “factor out” inconsistent or contradictory data and perform analyses that have led to descriptions and explanations that were internally consistent and built on past work in ways that fulfilled tests of “mutual consistency.” Radical new theoretical ideas could tolerably be inconsistent with past work. However, contradictory theoretical constructs that were novel, elegant, and (potentially) comprehensive in their descriptive and explanatory power had first to survive substantive and philosophical challenges as well as political and economic challenges from established academic interests before gaining academic permission and, eventually, legitimacy. Compared to the many management studies that test existing theories, few studies generate new management theory or new knowledge about how to study management. So, a major challenge for management research remains the need for more methodological and/or substantive developments that advance valuable management knowledge, are widely accessible to practitioners, and enable improved management-practice outcomes. A strong reason for taking a fresh look at management researchers’ attitudes and approaches to ICs is the prospect that well-informed orientations to ICs may lead to methodological developments that can broaden the repertoire of rigorous and

13

Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics

255

insightful management researchers. Doing so may also encourage examination of richer accounts of (in)effective management practices and their outcomes, and this may help to complement, or even challenge, widely accepted theoretical ideas that have failed to lead to consistently more effective management practice outcomes.

Treating Inconsistencies and Contradictions (ICs) ICs can manifest within and between aspects of a study including its: context(s); patterns of interest; critical literature reviews; formulations of problems of interest and research questions; justified ontological positions; choices of dominant and supporting logics to answer questions; characteristics of population sample(s) and data; approaches to analysis; and ways to verify emergent findings. For researchers wanting to explicitly accommodate the identification and treatment of ICs, it may be helpful to incorporate the following two practices: identify ICs that impact the study and comment on why attending to these ICs is important; and use well-founded principles when dealing with the chosen ICs. The following three questions may help to identify and select potentially important ICs and justify refinements to the study’s design and conduct. These questions apply across all phases of a study and may help to sharpen the researcher’s choices and associated reasoning. • What accepted ICs challenge traditionally reported knowledge deserving of critical review? • What typically ignored ICs should be considered and why will this strengthen the study? • What impact will accepted/rejected ICs have on the study’s aims, scope, or conduct? To help reason about how selected ICs may impact the study’s emergent design and conduct, some principles are noted in Table 3. Each principle is stated as a “situation” and “response” and is adapted from developments in formal and applied logics but presented as a heuristic for use by social researchers. We know from the literature on formal and applied logics that in a well-defined context, nonexplosive inconsistencies and contradictions – that is, those for which no pairs of inferred inconsistent or contradictory propositions lead to triviality – and whole theories that contain them, may be quite informative. To help deal with problems associated with ambiguity, vagueness, and contradictory assumptions, systems of paraconsistent logics (Béziau 1999) have emerged; major classes include Adaptive, Discursive, and Relevance logics. It is important to remember that the aim is not to remove or “factor out” inconsistencies and contradictions but rather to accept them and use them as cues to enquire more deeply as to possible meanings and constructs that may account for them as well as the regularities that together make up the field of inquiry.

256

N. Blaikie and J. Priest

Table 3 Heuristics for treating ICs in research design and conduct Type Adaptive

Situation During the progressive development of inferences, some later inferences turn out to be inconsistent with previously inferred statements, and possibly even contradictory

Discursive

Different actors’ views about the same phenomenon are self-consistent but inferred claims about the phenomenon are inconsistent or even contradictory

Relevance

One or several actors produce a set of inferences based on their assumptions about a context. Inconsistencies, even contradictions, arise between the inferences

Response Modify the premise-set so the inferred set of statements returns to a more, or even fully, consistent state; OR, generate a new set of inferred statements that mostly, if not fully, achieves an internally consistent state Reason to a context and a set of concepts about the phenomenon that better account for the actors’ assembled views about the phenomenon. Better is meant in the sense that “if not entirely, then more comprehensively, and with less significant non-explosive consequences” Clarify (i.e., enrich) the elements and relationships that constitute the context so inconsistencies within the inference set are reduced or even totally avoided

Summary Inconsistencies and contradictions are a common part of the context and substance of social research. Clear identification and well-justified treatments of inconsistencies and contradictions can not only increase the prospect of a study’s practical passage from early identification to completion, but also the prospect of illuminating important aspects of the social world and the practices that are the study’s focus – aspects that have probably been ignored or poorly understood by past studies that have sought to “factor out” or otherwise ignore “outlier” inconsistencies and contradictions.

Big-Data and Small-Data Approaches This section introduces some very recent developments that underpin a fundamentally different approach to traditional social research – a combinatorial approach – so named because of the heavy reliance on computer-based approaches using combinatorial mathematics to analyze massive datasets (Big-Data). It is grounded in a topical interest together with access to large volumes of activity data and patternidentification algorithms that open new possibilities for investigating social phenomena that were previously inaccessible to traditional approaches alone. Using a combinatorial approach and/or a traditional approach that relies on welltargeted Small-Data requires a clearly justified choice. It is for the researcher to argue

13

Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics

257

for which, if not both, class of data better serves a study’s purpose, scope, and design. If both Big-Data and Small-Data are to be used, then this section sets out a suggested approach that may help ensure rigor while also producing important new knowledge for further important research. This section first notes some recent fundamental developments in formal logics and in mathematics that have become new discipline fields since the 1950s, and especially this century, and that underpin the emergence of a combinatorial approach. It then compares important differences between the traditional approach to social research and the combinatorial approach. It concludes with remarks about the important complementary nature of these two apparently opposing approaches and the way this opens new paths for social research and the consequent production of new knowledge.

Fundamental Differences in Data-Oriented Approaches Fundamental developments in formal logics and in mathematics have occurred especially since the middle of the twentieth century. Notable developments in formal logic have led to classes of logics beyond classic “two-valued” True or False logics. These developments include Fuzzy logics with truth values in the range (0,1) and, more recently, paraconsistent and dialetheic logics, which are systems of logics that admit inconsistencies and contradictions, and their related propositions that are True and False. These recent developments have informed computing, communications, and storage applications that have enabled automated natural language processing, deep learning, data classification, pattern identification, and pattern matching. Until recently, the absence of such technology-enabled methods has left social researchers largely ignorant of deeply embedded activity patterns in large datasets. Other consequences for social researchers have included: marginalizing or setting aside “outlier” data; looking for additional data or bias data-choices when confronted with patterns of contradictions or competing themes; arbitrating contradictions in validity checking; and manipulating theoretical constructs to be “consistent” when abstracting from data that presents contradictions. Such limitations and their consequences have constrained the reach of disciplined social inquiry. A notable development in mathematics concerns Ramsey theory, graph theory, category theory, and related developments that underpin the mathematical field of Combinatorics. Combinatorial mathematics together with major advances in communications, data, and computing (CDC) technologies have enabled machinelearning and deep-learning-based approaches for identifying patterns within and between large datasets (including BigData). Theoretical methods, and highly efficient computational methods to identify patterns in large datasets, do not yet exist. So, brute-force attacks that rely on massive computing power and very fast access to very large datasets are needed for pattern identification. Notwithstanding this inelegant approach, it offers researchers a fundamentally new way to study a growing body of social phenomena because the embedded patterns that signal these phenomena would otherwise not be identifiable by human effort alone.

258

N. Blaikie and J. Priest

Notwithstanding the potential of using such recent developments in mathematics, the challenges and practical limitations are often significant. A combinatorial approach to a social research study typically may require: • Access to relevant data sources – this typically involves ethical, legal, technical, and logistical challenges • Organizing appropriate teams for various phases of the study – typical required skills span mathematics, computing and storage systems, linguistics, philosophy, and logics • Logistics arrangements – these may require people with appropriate industry and/or government connections and influence in relevant geographic locations and jurisdictions • Funding and security arrangements – typically needed to access required computing, communications and storage infrastructure, and data handling services • Modeling and graphics capabilities – to translate suspected associations into effective pattern-searching algorithms and to represent computed patterns in forms that humans can apprehend and evaluate as spurious or potentially signaling some sociological phenomenon

Traditional and Combinatorial Approaches Differ Yet Complement Each Other Figure 1 (traditional approaches) and Fig. 2 (combinatorial approaches) both show three phases – each comprising a pair of reflexively related tasks in a predominantly left-to-right flow. Each phase focuses and constrains remaining phase(s). Within this overall scheme the line arrows indicate dominant flows between and within pairs of research tasks and the dotted arrows indicate minor flows. Notwithstanding this common structural character, the reasoning of each approach is “opposite” in character. In a traditional approach, the Problem (about a pattern in context) raises research Questions in the Context that is defined in the first phase and this provides the setting for selecting and interpreting Data in the third phase. In a combinatorial approach, activity data and suspected patterns are translated to pattern-searching, and the

Pattern Context

Problem Question

Data Answer

Fig. 1 The overall approach of traditional social research: Pattern-Context-driven inquiry

Data Model

Pattern Problem

Context Meaning

Fig. 2 An overall approach to combinatorial social research: Data-Pattern-driven inquiry

13

Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics

259

pattern-search solution raises the Problem of how to identify and validate a particular Context in which the patterned data obtain sociological meaning. Figure 1 highlights the early, middle, and late phases of a traditional approach to social inquiry: • The early phase transforms a topical interest into a comprehensively described pattern and context(s) in which it manifests. • The middle phase formulates a problem statement in relation to the pattern-incontext and then develops research questions about the problem. • The late phase designs and conducts work to acquire and analyze data and synthesize imaginative analytic insights even answers – to the research questions. Figure 2 comprises an early, middle, and late phase of a combinatorial approach to social inquiry that differs in three ways from the traditional approach: • A topical interest points to a population with several activity datasets and this leads to defining a target data pool that is the focus of later pattern searching. • Questions and resulting choices about possible associations between data-groups in the population’s target data pool are developed into a pattern-searching model with search algorithms. From the resulting pattern(s) a two-part problem statement is formulated concerning (i) the nature of the population activity that generated the data and its identified pattern(s) and (ii) the focus, assumptions, and constraints of the model that generated the patterns. • Candidate contexts (within the population) in which the generated pattern(s) obtain sociologically coherent meanings may be developed and validated, but if this is not achieved then the patterns remain problematic – with later research to show they are either spurious or potentially explicable. The two approaches are different in character, yet each complements the other and each can follow or precede the other, with discovery in one being subject to verification by the other. This is a key process in knowledge generation referred to as braiding (Priest 2000). Each starts with a topic of sociological interest and goes on to generate broad and deep knowledge about specific aspects of the topic. A topic of sociological interest becomes increasingly clear as the following features become clearer: associated discipline areas; participant characteristics; social space-time for phenomena of interest; activity characteristics; and associated participant attributes. A traditional research approach may generate rich descriptions and tentative theory based on a narrow population sample that exhibits some phenomenon. This may inform a combinatorial approach involving pattern-searching and subsequent context-identification using suitable activity datasets that may partly reflect the phenomenon of interest but across a broader population, with resulting knowledge about the tentative theory or adjusted theory defined for a broader context. The opposite may also be possible – a combinatorial approach may identify a tentative meaning for an activity pattern within a population’s particular context and this may inform a traditional inquiry that generates a more in-depth characterization of the

260

N. Blaikie and J. Priest

context and deeper sociological meanings for the types of participants and the particular activity types in which they engage.

Comparing the Two Approaches Table 4 compares the two approaches’ corresponding stages with highlights of their respective characteristic inquiry challenges. It is important to note that neither approach is more problematic than the other but that the challenges are different in nature and typically arise in different phases.

Summary A fundamental premise of dialetheic logics is that nonexplosive contradictory propositions can exist and there are systems of logics for handling them and inferences involving them. Dialetheic and paraconsistent logics provide philosophically sound bases for dealing with two challenges in social inquiry: (i) the existence of contradictory or ambiguous data about objects, activities, and associations that are part of some social phenomenon; and (ii) contradictory or ambiguous content or processes (e.g., data, analysis, synthesis, validation) as part of systematic social inquiry. These more recent logic systems challenge the fundamental binary “True or False” premise of Aristotelian logic on which traditional approaches to social inquiry rest. Together with combinatorial mathematics they underpin new ways to computationally identify deeply embedded patterns in massive datasets. The existence of patterns in any massive data set is theoretically assured according to developments in combinatorial mathematics such as Ramsey Theory. While such pattern-searching remains beyond the capability of teams of humans alone, brute-force methods that rely on massive data storage and computer processing power are available. This combinatorial approach reverses the traditional approach of focused inquiry that starts with known patterns or regularities in well-defined populations. Combinatorial approaches represent an alternative “scientific” approach to social inquiry that admits of gaps, inconsistencies, and contradictions and can start with large pools of activity data and only a suspicion or curiosity about the nature of some pattern within the pool that may signal some interesting social phenomenon. And, notwithstanding the very demanding nature of such a nontraditional approach, and the considerable extra burden that such an “uncommon” approach presents when describing and justifying its choices and details, it has the potential to evolve into a well-understood and accepted complement to traditional social inquiry and so usefully enlarge researchers’ repertoires. Traditional and combinatorial approaches can be viewed as having solid philosophical foundations and complementary rather than opposing roles. In the right circumstances, using both well can enlarge the contribution of rigorous social scientific inquiry.

13

Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics

261

Table 4 Comparison of characteristic phases of Traditional and Combinatorial Social Inquiry TRADITIONAL approach to social inquiry: PATTERN-CONTEXT driven “Heads up” questions about some enigmatic PHENOMENON suggests RESEARCH Social research is stimulated by trigger issues. (see note at bottom of this table) Traditional social research typically arises from a pattern or regularity in some social phenomenon plus salient research and opportunities to examine the pattern Develop a well-described pattern or regularity [e.g., repeated associations or a clear sequence, and conditions of (non)occurrence] for the phenomenon, . . . AND . . . a well-characterized context [social participants, e.g., population features and salient segments) and their respective social time/space/conditions (e.g., PESTEL factors) where the phenomenon manifests] PROBLEM Set the pattern and context against existing knowledge: • Critique existing knowledge (substantively, epistemologically, politically, etc.) • Identify strengths/weaknesses of what is known Vis-à-Vis pattern/context • Highlight gaps/opportunities/challenges with important knowledge

QUESTIONS From PROBLEM description generated above decide on, and justify: • Substantive question(s) – that stem from pattern/regularity and its context • Epistemological question(s) – key gaps/ weaknesses in extant knowledge • Practical question(s) – about what is doable in cells of S E matrix • State – the research question(s) to be answered and why chosen DATA • Devise and implement an approach (substantive, epistemological, political, practical) to find/generate/process the data to answer research question(s)

COMBINATORIAL approach to social inquiry: DATA-PATTERN driven Topical alert about DATA-RICH behavior suggests a prospect for RESEARCH Social research is stimulated by trigger issues (see note at bottom of this table) Combinatorial social research typically arises from a topical interest in a social phenomenon plus access to large amounts of activity data about the phenomenon Identify well-described BigData set(s) about activities for social behavior(s) involving a weakly defined population of partially known segments, . . . AND . . . Develop a detailed model to identify embedded patterns or categories in these data . . . that identifies regularities/associations and/or categories in these data PATTERN Identify pattern(s) about the population’s social behavior(s) activities and describe: • Substantive aspects of population’s activities that generated the patterned data • Epistemological aspects – model’s assumptions and constraints that generated the pattern(s) and gaps/weaknesses in the model and related activity knowledge • Note context-relevant questions that can be answered with help of S E matrix PROBLEM Critique existing knowledge about population’s use of these patterned data: • Identify substantive knowledge problems in identifying candidate contexts • Identify available data and criteria to help identify/select “best” candidate context • Identify leads that the pattern’s S E matrix offers for context identification • Prepare and critique a case for a candidate context or a spurious pattern CONTEXT • Design and implement a substantive, epistemological, political, practical way to identify and verify a context for population where the pattern(s) makes sense (continued)

262

N. Blaikie and J. Priest

Table 4 (continued) TRADITIONAL approach to social inquiry: PATTERN-CONTEXT driven ANSWER • Describe the findings and if/why/how these answer the research questions • Critique the approach used • Suggest important questions that the inquiry raises

COMBINATORIAL approach to social inquiry: DATA-PATTERN driven MEANING • Describe the context and pattern’s meaning and its verification • If none is found, then explain why not and critique the approach used • Suggest important questions that inquiry raises for the model and the topical interest

Note: Trigger issues are typically identified in prior research during literature scans and reviews or from reflecting on personal or collegial observations and experiences of some social phenomenon that raise a puzzle to investigate

Conclusion Today’s nonroutine management thinking and action remains contextually wicked – socially and politically, technically and behaviorally, strategically and operationally. Helping management to systematically sustain context-specific improvements in practice and outcomes requires research that is best designed to deal with the purpose and distinctive context of inquiry while also making good use of the rich variety of types and sources of data that can illuminate management thinking, action, and impacts. To help address widespread gaps in past management research, this chapter has noted three important aspects for researchers to consider when focusing and approaching future management studies: (1) careful and well-justified design choices that support rigorous inquiry; (2) recognition of, and approaches to, reasoning that accounts for materially significant inconsistencies and contradictions; and (3) consideration of the use of Big-Data with well-targeted Small-Data to illuminate hitherto unexplored aspects of management practice and its impacts.

Cross-References ▶ Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics ▶ How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business ▶ The Epistemology of Management: An Introduction

References Bacon F (1889) Novum Organon (trans: Kitchen GW). Clarendon Press, Oxford (First published in 1620) Bamberger PA (2018) AMD-clarifying what we are about and where we are going. Acad Manag Discov 4:1–10 Becker HS (1940) Constructive typology in the social sciences. Am Sociol Rev 5(1):40–55 Becker HS (1950) Through values to sociological explanation. Duke University Press, Durham

13

Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics

263

Béziau JY (1999) The future of paraconsistent logic. Logical Stud 2:1–28 Bhaskar R (1979) The possibility of naturalism: a philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences. Harvester, Brighton Blaikie N (1993) Approaches to social enquiry. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK Blaikie N (2000) Designing social research: the logic of anticipation. Polity, Cambridge, UK Blaikie N (2007) Approaches to social enquiry: advancing knowledge, 2nd edn. Polity, Cambridge, UK Blaikie, N (2010) Designing social research: the logic of anticipation. 2nd edn. Polity, Cambridge, UK Blaikie N (2019) Abduction. In: Atkinson PA, Delmont S, Cernat A, Sakshaug JW, Williams RA (eds) Sage research methods foundations. Sage, London. https://doi.org/10.4135/ 9781526421036785889 Blaikie N, Priest J (2017) Social research: paradigms in action. Polity, Cambridge, UK Blaikie N, Priest J (2019) Designing social research: the logic of anticipation, 3rd edn. Polity, Cambridge, UK Blaikie N, Stacy SJG (1982) The dialogical generation of typologies in the study of the care of the aged. Paper presented at the X World Congress of Sociology, Mexico City, August Chalmers AF (1982) What is this thing called science? 2nd edn. University of Queensland Press, St Lucia Charmaz K (2014) Constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis, 2nd edn. Sage, London Clarke AE (2005) Situational analysis: grounded theory after the postmodern turn. Sage, Thousand Oaks Drysdale MS (1985) Beliefs and behaviours of the community with regard to social justice: an application of dialogic method. MA thesis, RMIT University, Melbourne Giddens A (1976) New rules of sociological method. Hutchinson, London Glaser BG, Strauss AL (1965) The discovery of grounded theory. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London Habermas J (1970) Knowledge and interests. In: Emmet D, MacIntyre A (eds) Sociological theory and philosophical analysis. Macmillan, London, pp 36–54 Hallebone E, Priest J (2009) Business and management research: paradigms and practices. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK Harré R, Secord PF (1972) The explanation of social behaviour. Blackwell, Oxford Keat R, Urry J (1975) Social theory as science. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London Kuhn TS (1970) The structure of scientific revolutions, 2nd edn. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Martindale D (1959) Sociological theory and the ideal type. In: Gross L (ed) Symposium on sociological theory. Harper & Row, New York, pp 57–91 McKinney JC (1970) Sociological theory and the process of Typification. In: McKinney JC, Tiryakian EA (eds) Theoretical sociology: perspectives and developments. Appleton-CenturyCrofts, New York, pp 236–239 Medewar PB (1969) Induction and intuition in scientific thought. Methuen, London Mill JS (1947) A system of logic. Longman, Green & Co, London. (First published in 1843) Paavola S (2004) Abduction as logic of discovery: important strategies. Found Sci 9:267–283 Paavola S (2006) Hansonian and Harmanian abduction as models of discovery. Inst Stud Philos Sci 20:91–106 Pawson R, Tilley N (1997) Realistic evaluation. Sage, London Peirce CS (1931) Collected papers, vols 1 & 2. Edited by Hartshorne C, Weiss P. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Peirce CS (1934) Collected papers, vol 5. Edited by Hartshorne C, Weiss P. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Popper KR (1959) The logic of scientific discovery. Hutchinson, London Popper KR (1961) The poverty of historicism. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London

264

N. Blaikie and J. Priest

Priest J (1997) A framework to manage investments in information systems. M.Eng thesis, RMIT University, Melbourne Priest J (2000) Managing investments in information systems: exploring effective practice. DBA thesis, RMIT University, Melbourne Rex J (1971) Typology and objectivity: a comment on Weber’s four sociological methods. In: Sahay A (ed) Max Weber and modern sociology. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, pp 17–36 Schütz A (1963a) Concept and theory formation in the social sciences. In: Natanson MA (ed) Philosophy of the social sciences. Random House, New York, pp 231–249 Schütz A (1963b) Common-sense and scientific interpretation of human action. In: Natanson MA (ed) Philosophy of the social sciences. Random House, New York, pp 302–346 Seale C (1999) The quality of qualitative research. Sage, London Wallace WL (1971) The logic of science in sociology. Aldine-Atherton, Chicago Weber M (1964) The theory of social and economic organization (trans: Henderson MA, Parsons T). Free Press, New York

Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics

14

From the Province of Genius to the Province of Reason Alejandro Agafonow and Marybel Perez

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Types of Inferences and Discoveries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beyond Ingenuity in Scientific Inference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Selective Retroduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fictional Retroduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ampliative Retroduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Use of Retroduction in the Science of Organizational Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Retroduction of Transaction Costs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Filtering Retroduction Out of the Messy Scientific Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

266 268 270 271 272 273 275 276 279 281 282 282

Abstract

This chapter takes organization scholars and economists beyond the idea that scientific discoveries are first and foremost the product of a stroke of genius. Although that has been the dominant belief in the domain of twentieth century philosophy of science, there is today enough evidence that scientific discoveries pivot on more than ingenuity. By shedding light on the phases of the scientific inferential process which yield readily to examination, this chapter focuses on what increases the prior probability of hypotheses being right, before valuable time and resources are put into their falsification. In doing so, the limits of a A. Agafonow (*) ESSCA School of Management, Angers, France GRANEM, Université d’Angers, Angers, France e-mail: [email protected] M. Perez ESSCA School of Management, Angers, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_43

265

266

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

stroke-of-genius account are tackled: that is, by dwelling on ingenuity one fails to appreciate what exactly it is that sets hypotheses with potential scientific value apart from bizarre suggestions, daydreams, or wild hypotheses. This is illustrated with the inception of Oliver E. Williamson’s Transaction Cost Economics. Keywords

Retroduction · Abduction · Scientific discoveries · Hypothesis · Transaction costs · Oliver E. Williamson

Introduction Are discoveries in science in general, and in the science of organizational economics in particular, the product of a stroke of genius, or the outcome of the diligent production of conjectures? The purpose of the present chapter is to substantiate that the latter is the case. Ascertaining the role of the diligent production of conjectures is important, because how scientists actually achieve breakthroughs has been believed to be limited to the reasons for accepting a hypothesis, or a hypothesis’s posterior probability, which is a matter of empirical testing (Curd 1980). What moves a scientist to advance a fertile hypothesis in the first place, or a hypothesis’s prior probability (Curd 1980), has too often been deemed to be a matter of intuition, imagination, or hunch reserved for geniuses. But then one is confronted with the problem of how to avoid mistaking any bizarre suggestion (Hanson 1967), daydream (Hoffmann 2010), or wild hypothesis (Achinstein 1985) for hypotheses with potential scientific value. Dwelling on a stroke of genius as the source of scientific discoveries overlooks this problem. Thus, the present chapter seeks to help organization scholars and economists familiarize themselves with retroduction, a form of inference which, despite being long known in the philosophy of science, has been relegated to the edges of scientific practice, only tacitly present by virtue of being an ineluctable part of the conjecturing of hypotheses (McMullin 1992). Charles Sanders Peirce, who was among the first scholars to undertake the analysis of this form of inference, used interchangeably for this concept the terms retroduction, abduction, hypothesis, and even presumption (Niiniluoto 2018). In the present chapter, the term retroduction is favored because, according to Pietarinen and Bellucci (2014), it conforms to the use in the late period of Peirce’s work. In the social sciences, however, the term abduction is widely used instead. What characterizes retroduction is its ampliative nature, that is, the propensity to generate knowledge conducive to discoveries, which is a characteristic missing in both induction and deduction. That deduction does not generate new knowledge is not controversial, because deductive inferences work within the boundaries of an already established body of knowledge, which saw its inception in a past retroductive inference. Retroduction, deduction, and induction form part of a sequential analytical process where these inferential operations are intertwined

14

Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics

267

(Chiasson 2005). Thus, the knowledge built upon the groundwork laid by past retroductive inferences is essentially both a deductive and inductive enterprise (Hanson 1967, 2010). That induction alone, on the other hand, does not generate new knowledge has not been completely assimilated in certain social science circles yet, despite being common knowledge in the natural sciences. In short, that certain events have been shown to correlate in the past does not guarantee that they will be so in the future. To put it in a jargon familiar to scientists: “no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white” (Popper 2000, p. 50). Thus, scientists are wary of extrapolating traits observed in the past to events which have yet to happen, unless such a correlation is foretold by the advanced inferential framework of a theory (Nagel 1961). There is a paucity of explanation about how retroduction works. Unlike deduction and induction, this form of inference is the least understood and has been often relegated to the province of genius, tantamount to a primitive stage of thinking which hinges on enigmatic psychological processes, like a hunch (Hanson 1961). As a result, retroduction has simply been acknowledged for the most part as a mysterious and intrinsic quality of intellectual prowess, falling outside the scope of reason. For instance, Karl R. Popper held that such inferences are “the free creations of our own minds, the result of an almost poetic intuition, of an attempt to understand intuitively the laws of nature” (2002, p. 260). Likewise, Carl G. Hempel endorsed the view that “[t]he transition from data to theory requires creative imagination. Scientific hypotheses and theories are not derived from observed facts, but invented in order to account for them” (1966, p. 15). Mary B. Hesse also observed that a scientific discovery “is a product of creative imagination, of a mind which absorbs the experimental data until it sees them fall into a pattern, giving the scientific theorist the sense that he is penetrating beneath the flux of phenomena to the real structure of nature” (1953, p. 198). Similarly, for Rom Harré: “[a]ccess to the ultimate entities and structures of the world can only be by that combination of reason and imagination. . . Scientific thinking is done, in psychological terms, both by propositional thinking and by imagining things and structures, processes and unobserved events. . .” (1970, p. 260). In the field of organizations, Behfar and Okhuysen (2018) entertain a similar view when referring to “flashes of insight” and “conceptual leaps” in the research process, as do Locke et al. (2008), who observe how hunches can lead to eureka moments. Despite Peirce’s worthy efforts to bring to light retroduction’s syllogistic structure, he is in part responsible for its reception as the province of genius rather than reason, positing that “[i]t resembles instinct” (Peirce 1935, para. CP5.173) and that it “comes to us like a flash” (Peirce 1935, para. CP5.181). This is because, as Freeman and Skolimowski (1974) posited, “Peirce’s work is like the Bible: so all-embracing that it yields itself to diametrically opposed interpretations” (p. 514). It is their assessment that Peirce’s work has no center of gravity, suffering from certain incongruities. This position is also shared by Minnameier (2004), who advises against bids to tell how Peirce “knew it all some hundred years ago” (p. 77).

268

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

Contrary to the place of intuition, imagination, or hunch in retroduction emphasized by many, there is an important reason why it is worthwhile to consider evidence that casts doubts on ingenuity as the main source of scientific discoveries. Going beyond ingenuity is, to recapitulate, warranted if we want to avoid counting any bizarre suggestion (Hanson 1967), daydream (Hoffmann 2010), or wild hypothesis (Achinstein 1985) as a retroduction. That is, our inferences must hinge on something different from ingenuity alone if they are to pave the way for scientific breakthroughs. Geared toward that end, this chapter shows that, in a nutshell, retroduction consists of several phases that fall within the province of reason. First, the scientist notices a fact that is at variance with extant theory, and hence that fact comes across as surprising because it violates paradigm-induced anticipations. Next, the scientist experiences a back-into kind of thought, going backwards in search of the causes of the surprising fact. It follows that, because such causes are unaccounted for in extant theory and therefore unknown, the scientist is compelled to conjecture plausible yet putative causes, which have been unobserved to date. Further, the operation of conjecturing is circumscribed by the heuristics furnished by extant theory, which, despite failing in the explanation of the surprising fact, offers clues about where to look for putative causes. Retroduction is thus “primarily a search for intelligibility. . . Only secondarily is it a search for objects and facts (though the two endeavours are as hand and glove)” (Hanson 2010, p. 18). This chapter shows how this retroductive process drives breakthroughs in the science of organizational economics, while making punctual analogies with natural sciences. By way of example, the present chapter revolves around the retroductive inference behind the inception of Oliver E. Williamson’s Transaction Cost Economics, which was pioneered to make sense of the disjunction between decision-making and risk-bearing that baffled observers at the turn of the twentieth century, paving the way for why explanations of distinct organizational phenomena – in this case, transaction costs.

Types of Inferences and Discoveries The verb to discover can be misleading when used in the scientific domain, because it subsumes different forms of finding out something new, not previously ascertained, under a term that understates the intricacies of the scientific enterprise. To begin with, there is unanimous acceptance among philosophers of science that at least one form of discovery falls outside the scope of science, namely, the naked-eye observation of novelties (Agafonow 2019a) or, as put by Hanson (2010), seeing as a novelty which meets the eyeball. Thus, scientific findings are not simply the product of probes that begin anew, theory-wise, from a clean slate, with scientists stumbling across any oddity. The value of scientific findings is proportional to the degree that they violate “paradigminduced anticipations” (Kuhn 1996, p. 56). Hence, scientific findings, properly understood, “are interpretations in the light of theories” (Popper 2005, p. 90). That

14

Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics

269

is why “Millikan’s eyeball encountered positrons, but he did not discover them; D’Arrets’ eyeball first encountered Neptune, but he was not its discoverer; Flamsteed recorded Uranus in his notebooks, but he is not its discoverer” (Hanson 1967, p. 352). Discoveries in science have either a buttressing or an ampliative role. The former is meant to buttress, refine or round out an already existing body of knowledge by means of deductive inferences. Such inferences draw observation statements from a given theory to be corroborated by test implications (Hempel 1966), and they also explain residual effects, not initially accounted for, with a recourse to the theory itself, but without the need of substantial modifications (Lipton 2004). Thus, to discover in a deductive sense is to suggest a solution to a puzzling phenomenon with a full recourse to an extant theory, with the expectation that the phenomenon “will somehow come tumbling out of the observation framework” (Hanson 1967, p. 338). Thus, so-called puzzle-out discoveries ensue (Hanson 1967). Deductive inferences and the discoveries they make possible are thus buttressing in kind, for they are meant to refine an extant theory. The violation of paradigminduced anticipations is minimal, although challenging enough to suggest puzzles that are worth unravelling (Kuhn 1996). Hence, the deductive inferential exercise is concerned with the reasons for accepting a hypothesis or its posterior probability (Curd 1980), working in tandem with falsification (Popper 2002), which is inductive in nature, to shed light on the veracity of the observation statements deduced. The more fertile the theory is in terms of observation statements and the more accurate in terms of test implications, the more plausible it will be, arousing approval in the scientific community. However, puzzle-out discoveries say nothing about the reasons a scientist initially had for suggesting a hypothesis, that is, about its prior probability (Curd 1980). If hypotheses were suggested on a hunch, regardless of their prior probability, the risk of pursuing sterile lines of inquiry would be too high (Hanson 1967; Achinstein 1985; Hoffmann 2010). Therein lies the deficiency of a stroke-of-genius notion of discovery. Note that the prior probabilities of hypotheses made possible by deductive inferences are a nonissue, because they are guaranteed by the strength of the theoretical framework from which hypotheses stem. A hypothesis’s prior probability is made possible by the ampliative nature of another kind of inference, namely, retroduction. In the latter, the inference does not count on a full-fledged theoretical framework to accord hypotheses a high probability. Thus, being ampliative means that retroductive inferences extend, add or bring something new and foreign to the explanatory framework, to penetrate the cloud of ignorance that motivates the inquiry. As put by Peirce (1901), “[retroduction] is that kind of operation which suggests a statement in no wise contained in the data from which it sets out. . . By its very definition [retroduction] leads to a hypothesis which is entirely foreign to the data” (pp. 23–25). The discoveries made possible thus, or back-into discoveries, provide for the maximal violation of paradigm-induced anticipations, unlike puzzle-out discoveries which minimally violate such anticipations if only to make room for the possibility of proving a theory wrong when falsified. Hence, in back-into discoveries “there is a

270

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

strong resistance in the investigator against expecting such a discovery ever. He’s not neutral, and hence surprised by X; he’s ‘agin’ it, and hence does what he can to make X ‘go away’” (Hanson 1967, pp. 338–337). Made possible by retroductive inferences, such discoveries are the most valuable in terms of the potential breakthroughs they can bring about, yet they inspire resistance from the adherents of normal science (Kuhn 1996). As it will be shown next, back-into scientific discoveries happen when the advanced inferential framework of a theory, which in the past was successful in the production of why explanations, cannot account for new and surprising facts. The extant theory, now unable to explain, offers, however, a baseline that restricts the array of putative variables that need to be retroduced to overhaul the theory – or, as put by Einstein (1953), it offers a formal point of view to restrict countless possibilities. This is pivotal to increase the prior probability that new hypotheses serve as a beacon of lines of inquiry worth pursuing.

Beyond Ingenuity in Scientific Inference A step in the direction of telling the analytical aspect of retroduction apart from its creative dimension was taken by Peirce in the late or second period of his work (Minnameier 2004; Pietarinen and Bellucci 2014). Peirce (1935) proposed what was to become his canonical syllogistic structure for retroductive inferences. This inference starts from a fact that comes across as surprising, and hence fires up one’s thinking backwards into plausible, yet unknown causes, that is, a back-into kind of thought. As expressed somewhere else, retroduction infers “from consequent to antecedent” (Peirce 1935, para. CP6.469) or “from surprise to inquiry” (Pietarinen and Bellucci 2014, p. 357). In the words of Peirce (1935, para. CP5.189): (I) 1. The surprising fact, C, is observed. 2. But if A were true, C would be a matter of course. 3. Hence there is reason to suspect that A is true. Although more recent syllogistic forms have been proposed to improve upon Peirce’s (e.g., Hanson 1961, p. 33), we adhere hereafter to Peirce’s original formulation because of its parsimony. Hence, if ingenuity has any role to play, it will be framed by the syllogistic structure of (I), taking the place of A in step 2. We arrive thus at a crucial point where retroduction can either produce new knowledge instrumental in explaining, paving the way for sound theories, or derail the inferential exercise altogether. Such a crucial point lies in how to fill in, so to speak, the blank of A in step 2 on (I). As summarized in Table 1, we posit that there are at least three possibilities, only one of which is conducive to scientific breakthroughs.

14

Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics

271

Table 1 Inferences from surprise to inquiry Function Background knowledge Degree of surprise Phenomenon manifestation

Inferred cause Typical examples

SELECTIVE Selection Commonsense experience or vera causa Low/high

FICTIONAL Reverie Sheer imagination High

Matter-of-fact concomitance or correlation between observational feature and inferential construct Existing, preselected cause

A vision. Depends on the eye of the beholder Allegoric cause Artistic or prophetic revelation

Detective’s investigative work

AMPLIATIVE Discovery Extant theory High No direct concomitance between observational feature and inferential construct Putative cause Scientific breakthrough

Selective Retroduction A first array of retroductive-like inferences builds upon accidental or de facto universals (Nagel 1961), which are commonsense regularities as perceived by the naked eye of the beholder, without the help of the advanced inferential framework of a theory. Because here there is no violation of paradigm-induced anticipations, these inferences do not pave the way for discoveries in a scientific sense (Kuhn 1996; Popper 2005; Hanson 2010). This is the case when familiar facts are explained by selecting from a known menu of plausible causes, which is illustrated next with the example of human footprints. Thus, the first possibility is to fill the blank of A from a predetermined list of options, which has been called a form of selective or singular retroduction (Niiniluoto 2018). For instance, consider the following example by Fumerton (1980): The familiar fact of footprints on the beach (or C) was observed; but if a person walked on the beach recently (or A) were true, such footprints (or C) would be a matter of course. Hence, there is a reason to suspect that it is true that a person walked on the beach recently (or A). Provided that the footprints on the beach have the familiar shape of the bare feet of a species which by mere experience is known to inhabit the planet Earth (i.e., by virtue of being oneself a representative Homo sapiens whose footprint is typical), together with the knowledge of how ephemeral sand imprints are (and thus fossilized footprints are ruled out), it simply takes non-expert knowledge to retroduce or rather select A, namely, that a person walked on the beach recently. While the structure of this inference is retroductive, the knowledge needed to fill the blank of A is commonsensical, or a vera causa, defined by Peirce (1935) as “a state of things known to exist in some cases and supposed to exist in other cases, because it would account for observed phenomena” (para. CP6.242).

272

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

To fill the blank of A we need, in this case, to be sure of the uniformity of nature (Salmon 1967), which manifests in the intelligible notion of a human footprint as a de facto universal (Nagel 1961). Being typical of the Homo sapiens species, the footprint in question is highly entrenched and thus projectible (Goodman 1983) to any similar footprint we may come across on any other beach on Earth. Hence, there is an obvious matter-of-fact concomitance between the observable feature, i.e., a footprint, and the inferential construct, i.e., a Homo sapiens. All these render the premises built upon suitable for filling the blank of A. This selective kind of retroduction is remarkably similar to induction, and it has helped humans cope with their environments since antiquity – for example, in learning seasons’ patterns to develop basic agricultural technology. It also attests to our propensity to mistake retroduction for induction, which Peirce too admitted he did in the early period of his work: “Only in almost everything I printed before the beginning of this century I more or less mixed up [Retroduction] and Induction. . .” (1958, para. CP8.227). That may also help to explain why Simon (1977) limited his consideration of retroduction to pattern-guessing in a pile of data, selecting ostensible instances and extrapolating from them.

Fictional Retroduction The second possibility is to fill the blank of A not from a list of options already known by experience but to rely on sheer imagination, thus overlooking de facto universals to simply imagine the cause, no matter how implausible, of a given phenomenon. This form of inference is fictional, typical of dogmatic kinds of accounts which, in the history of science, have taken the form of teleological anthropomorphic interpretations, postulating mind-like entities that stand for a driving force known as an entelechy (Hempel 1966). For example, to explain planets’ orbits, Greek Epicurean philosophy relied on the divine capacity of planets to attract other matter across vacuum, which conjured up action at a distance, violating an earthly understanding of motion (Ducheyne 2011). No matter how implausible, the orbit of planets would apparently be accounted for by action across vacuum of a heavenly origin. Such an allegoric cause would be more akin to a daydream than to a serious effort to inquire into the true cause of planetary orbits, in part because the lack of de facto universals suited to celestial bodies makes retroduction too dependent on the subjectivity of the beholder. Newton’s response to this troubling action at a distance was to propose the existence of an elastic ether with inter-particular repulsive forces (Ducheyne 2011). It was not until Einstein that orbits could be explained by the effect of massive celestial objects on the space-time fabric on which they sit. Change the position of an object that is massive enough and it will have a rippling effect across the fabric, affecting other planets’ orbits (Levenson 2015). In the field of organizations, an entelechy was also postulated to make sense of the disjunction between decision-making and risk-bearing, which joint-stock companies laid

14

Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics

273

bare at the turn of the twentieth century. This is discussed in the section “Filtering Retroduction Out of the Messy Scientific Practice” below.

Ampliative Retroduction The third and most important possibility, akin to back-into scientific discoveries, builds upon nomological universals (Nagel 1961), which are elaborate why explanations of phenomena showing no direct concomitance between observational features and inferential constructs (Wakefield 1993). This is the case when surprising facts, which cannot be accounted for using extant theory, are explained by positing novel unobservable or putative causes for which there is no evidence as yet. This is illustrated next with the discovery of the human bloodstream’s circular flow as well as the information-carrying role of market prices, and later with transaction costs. This kind of retroductive inference is present not when one is confronted with familiar facts but when the facts to be explained are surprising in the sense of being explicable neither by a current list of plausible causes known by experience nor by deductions from extant theory. These kinds of problems require true ampliative inferences to be solved because either the uniformity of nature breaks apart (Salmon 1967), leaving no entrenched and thus projectible notion to induce from (Goodman 1983), or extant theories fail to deductively account for the surprising fact. Consider, for instance, the predicament that William Harvey confronted in the seventeenth century, when he realized that certain facts about the bloodstream did not quite square with the precepts of the Galenic physiology predominant at the time. The latter postulated that the blood flow was centrifugal and that it was consumed after reaching the body’s limbs, which warranted a constant replenishment of the body with new blood (Aird 2011). But Harvey found inconsistencies in this account. First, he measured the volume of blood expelled in a single heartbeat. When multiplied by the number of beats in 30 min, it resulted in a substantial volume of blood that must have been daily produced to replenish the one consumed, which was at variance with the total volume of blood known to be contained in the body at any given time. Second, an animal bled to death when Harvey cut its artery, which cast doubt on the replenishment thesis, otherwise the blood drained may have been filled in for. Third, by applying a tourniquet around a person’s upper arm, Harvey saw that veins, which are located more superficially in the tissue than arteries, swelled filled with blood. Instead of the blood being consumed, it was apparently trying to leave the arm back into the body (Aird 2011). These experiments helped to bring surprising facts to Harvey’s attention, which were in conflict with the centrifugal account of the bloodstream. Harvey inferred that, for these facts to make sense, a circular instead of a centrifugal bloodstream was warranted, which takes the place of A in Peirce’s retroductive inference thus: (II) 1. The surprising facts of a volume of blood lower than expected and veins unable to discharge blood (or C) were observed.

274

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

2. But if a circular bloodstream (or A) were true, C would be a matter of course. 3. Hence, there is a reason to suspect that a circular bloodstream (or A) is true. This retroduction was a building block for the discovery of a circular bloodstream, despite a key missing link in Harvey’s hypothesis, namely, for the bloodstream to be circular something must connect arteries, which carry blood away from the heart, to veins, which carry blood back to the heart, to complete the circuit. Harvey posited that such a missing link were porosities connecting arteries with veins (Aird 2011). At the time, however, there were no means to prove the existence of such porosities, today’s capillaries, because they were too small to be observed. Harvey did not have firsthand proof of capillaries, as we do in the case of a Homo sapiens with a typical footprint. Capillaries were a conjectural byproduct of the explanation of an odd volume of blood and veins behaving unexpectedly by going backwards into a putative circular bloodstream, which is the ampliative step needed to fill the blank of A. Hence, retroduction is defined as “‘self-evidencing’ explanations, where the phenomenon that is explained in turn provides an essential part of the reason for believing that the explanation is correct. . . Self-evidencing explanations exhibit a curious circularity, but this circularity is benign” (Lipton 2001, p. 185). Another example of ampliative retroduction is found in economics, which parallels the epistemological gap between mathematics and physics (Levenson 2015). In physics, Newton initially refused to advance an explanation of gravity, which he conceived “. . .without saying just how that force imparts its impulse to whatever it touched. No levers here, no gears, no mover, prime or not. . . There, gravity is simply a quantity, some number of units of force that can be calculated in a context of other quantities” (Levenson 2015, pp. 47–48). Similarly, the cornerstone of modern economics, i.e., general equilibrium, was an extraordinary mathematical feat which, notwithstanding its ingenuity, pivoted on the intuitive perception of the fluctuation of prices. But, just as everyday experience with falling bodies does not suffice to explain gravity, everyday experience with the ebb and flow of prices does not suffice to explain the market. An analogous epistemological gap between mathematics and economics fueled the impression that a central planner could supersede the market to allocate resources efficiently, solving the system of equations that the market solves in practice every day. The magnitude of the challenge was early illustrated by Pareto ([1906] 1971), who argued that a system of 70,699 equations results from an economy of only 100 individuals and 700 goods, which exceeds the human mind’s capacity to perform algebraic calculations. Therefore, a centrally planned economy able to allocate resources efficiently was, in fact, unfeasible. This surprising fact fired up Friedrich A. Hayek’s thinking backwards into the plausible causes of the solution to the economywide system of equations. And this paved the way for a breakthrough in our understanding of the market system, which Williamson (1991a, b, 1993a, 1996a, b) repeatedly praised as tantamount to what he was trying to achieve in the realm of organizations. Hayek (1945) posited, then, that market prices played a key information-carrying role for any one person in command of resources to fulfill ends whose relative importance only that person knows. Thus,

14

Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics

275

the surprising fact of an economywide system of equations whose solution no single mind is able to compute (or C) was observed; but if information-carrying prices (or A) were true, the solution of an economywide system of equations (or C) would be a matter of course. Hence, there is a reason to suspect that information-carrying prices (or A) are true. What distinguishes the selective from the truly ampliative retroduction is that in the former there is no need to conjecture putative causes to make sense of a certain fact. One simply selects causes from a predetermined list of de facto universals. On the other hand, the stroke-of-genius notion of discovery can easily degenerate into conjecturing as pulling rabbits out of a hat, which is the problem of fictional retroduction that preoccupied Achinstein (1985), Hanson (1967), and Hoffmann (2010). Dwelling on a stroke of genius overlooks what increases the prior probability of hypotheses. That is, the framework offered by nomological universals as manifest in an extant theory constrains the conjecturing of putative variables that leads to new modes of conceptual organization, forcing the scientist to forsake the optical aspects of seeing, embracing instead the conceptual aspects of seeing (Hanson 2010). The truly ampliative kind of retroduction requires a more complex inferential framework offered by extant theory, which proves to be incomplete or even defective when it cannot deductively account for a fact that is surprising. Following the trail of a surprising fact requires ingenuity to tinker with the extant theory, yet such an ingenuity is circumscribed by the boundaries of the theory itself. That is what Einstein (1953) thought when asserting that “[i]n order to construct a theory, it is not enough to have a clear conception of the goal. One must also have a formal point of view which will sufficiently restrict the unlimited variety of possibilities” (p. 256). Thus, what prevented Harvey from positing that, let us say, witchcraft was to be credited for an odd volume of blood was not his lack of imagination but the formal point of view given by the Galenic physiology he was familiar with. Today it is known that such a formal point of view, codified into a theory, or into expert knowledge more generally, furnishes the scientist’s mind with advanced heuristics, which are decisive when following clues as to how to solve the puzzle of explaining the surprising fact C on (I). Such was the outcome of the experiments carried out by Bryan R. Lawson, which showed how the cognitive strategies of experts reduced search time and planning errors when confronted with a problem within their domain, compared to a control group whose expertise was alien to the problem at hand (Lawson 1979; Agafonow 2019b). Such being the case, ampliative retroduction is said to ultimately rely on “some sort of short list mechanism. . . to generate a very limited list of plausible hypotheses” (Lipton 2004, p. 149).

The Use of Retroduction in the Science of Organizational Economics The development of the science of organizational economics has also followed the path made possible by ampliative inferential operations, encapsulated in Peirce’s retroductive syllogistic structure. A far-reaching surprising fact in economic science

276

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

has been that the owner of a firm, who normally bears the risk of decision-making, may not always be the one who makes decisions about how to manage the firm. This issue is known today as the separation of ownership and control. Thus, decision-making is delegated to a hired manager who, by virtue of being an employee, does not bear the full wealth-consequences of such decisions. This is the case of both privately held companies, whose owners hold interests in many other companies and thus are not able to engage directly in decision-making, and the typical publicly held corporation, whose shares are traded on stock exchanges and held by many shareholders who remain distant from the company’s daily operations – or joint-stock companies, for short. Joint-stock companies, despite being known since at least the 1600s with the inception of the East India Company used by British private interests to exploit colonial territories, were uncommon before the twentieth century and thus bemused observers. Schrader (2006) documents how the joint-stock company was received at the turn of the twentieth century, when economists perceived this form of organization as an anomaly, hence predicting its decline due a breakdown of incentives or, in a manner of speaking, how could livestock fatten without the gaze of their master? The incentives to manage efficiently were apparently absent, because it was not the hired manager who bore the full wealth-consequences of the decisions made, but the company share owners, who were far removed from the daily operation of the firm. This motivated, for instance, a candid interpretation from the economist Alfred Marshall, who declared: “It is a strong proof of the marvelous growth in recent times of a spirit of honesty and uprightness in commercial matters, that the leading officers of great public companies yield as little as they do to the vast temptations to fraud which lie in their way” (Marshall 1920, p. 303; see also Schrader 2006, p. 12). While Marshall is known for being among the first to relax the assumption of perfect rationality and market equilibrium prevalent in the economic thinking at the time, he still could not fathom the impact that thriving joint-stock companies were about to have on the dawn of a theory of the firm. What the emergence of joint-stock companies did more generally for the science of organizational economics, was to draw attention to the presence of a gulf between those who bear the risk of decision-making and those who make such decisions. Such a gulf follows the delegation of decision-making in any organization with more than one individual, the joint-stock company being but the farthermost instance. The latter is in sharp contrast with the idealized case of a firm controlled and managed by a single rational individual, which has its most realistic counterpart in companies tightly held by a single bounded-rational person, viz., a simple structure company in its very inception (Mintzberg 1993). Thus, the problems that stem more generally from the split between decision-making and risk-bearing were major tributaries of some of the most prominent organizational economic theories of the twentieth century, including Transaction Cost Economics (TCE).

The Retroduction of Transaction Costs If a firm with a disjunction between decision-making and risk-bearing was functional, i.e., operational and with no apparent signs of being on the brink of

14

Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics

277

collapse, it must have been for a reason overlooked by observers. A recourse to a spirit of honesty and uprightness does not cross the bridge between the overt aggregate behavior of the firm and the choices made by the individuals that form it (Buchanan and Tullock 1965). Thus, it leaves unanswered the question of why employees were not mishandling the assets under their control in the absence of the owner’s gaze. To retroduce the cause of the surprising fact, it was necessary to acknowledge the limits of the fiction of a firm where decision-making and risk bearing are tightly bound together. Oliver E. Williamson’s TCE was in part a response to that fiction. To stand the test of science, such fiction must imply that firms are simply an extension of the arm’s-length kinds of transactions found in the market, a view which was still held among economists well into the twentieth century. For instance, Alchian and Demsetz (1972) articulated the widespread view that both ordinary markets and firms were to be considered as, fundamentally, two types of markets, with the firm having an advantage over the ordinary market when arrangements to promote competition between team members were possible. In such a case, team production would have an added value compared to the market, but the mechanisms to prevent the erosion of the link between decision-making and risk bearing would be, in the main, no different from the ordinary market. Williamson took issue with this way of understanding the firm: Alchian and Demsetz (1972: 777) originally took the position that the relation between a shopper and his grocer and that between and employer and employee was identical in contractual respects. . . But to regard the corporation only as a nexus of contracts misses much of what is truly distinctive about this mode of governance. . . But wherein do the fiat differences between market and hierarchy arise? If, moreover, hierarchy enjoys an “advantage” with respect to fiat, why can’t the market replicate this?. . . I propose a separate and complementary explanation: The implicit contract law of internal organization is that of forbearance. (Williamson 1991a, p. 274)

Williamson’s apprehension about the firm as a continuation of the market by other means involved the work of an early fellow transaction cost economist, Ronald H. Coase, who earned recognition for bringing back into economics the institutional barriers which the nineteenth century general equilibrium theories assumed away. Intendedly or not, Coase’s work banked on a redefinition of property rights with the intention of increasing allocative efficiency. Objecting to this way of portraying the firm, Williamson posited in reference to Coase: Property rights were thus viewed not merely as the key that unlocks many of the puzzles of economic organization but as the means by which to realize superior economic performance. Always and everywhere, define and enforce property rights. As it turns out, efforts to explain complex forms of economic organization largely or entirely in property rights terms are instructive but oversimple. (Williamson 1997, p. 25, emphasis added)

Against this background, it is thus possible to understand the otherwise surprising attribution of a zero-transaction cost assumption to Coase when, in connection with the hyperrationality warranted by general equilibrium, Williamson states:

278

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

. . .the Coase theorem. . . similarly assumes zero transaction costs (Coase, 1960). Analyses of both kinds make patently unrealistic assumptions about the cognitive ability of human actors to receive, store, retrieve, and process information. (Williamson 1996c, p. 8, emphasis added)

Whether Williamson’s interpretation does justice to Coase is something for historians to determine. What matters from a methodological perspective is that such an interpretation arguably paved the way for Williamson’s breakthrough. The Coase theorem has thus gone down in history as espousing a rethink of the boundaries of the firm by redefining property rights, outsourcing transactions to the market whenever possible in order to increase allocative efficiency. On that account, the way was opened for Williamson to conceive of a less fanciful mechanism – when compared to Marshall’s spirit of honesty and uprightness – which did not stop short of a redefinition of property rights. To that end, Williamson filled the blank of A in step 2 on (I) with the forbearance governance regime of hierarchies. In Williamson’s (1985, 1991a, b) construal, bringing market mechanisms inside the firm is not feasible because the nature of the contractual arrangements leaves the fine print of contracts unspecified (i.e., contracts are even more incomplete compared to the market), otherwise risking valuable assets built upon a high degree of dependency between team members (i.e., asset specificity). To protect team members from the risk associated with the dependency that specificity conveys, and with the assets that thus ensue, hierarchies rely on forbearance or the low-powered incentives of patient and, at times, forgiving managerial practices to bring rogue team members in line with the organization’s objectives. As put by Williamson himself: The application of forbearance doctrine to internal organization means that parties to an internal exchange can work out their differences themselves or appeal unresolved disputes to the hierarchy for a decision. But this exhausts their alternatives. When push comes to shove, “legalistic” arguments fail. Greater reliance on instrumental reasoning and mutual accommodation result. This argument contradicts Alchian and Demsetz’s (1972: 777) claim that the firm “has no power of fiat, no authority, no disciplinary action any different in the slightest degree from ordinary market contracting.” That is exactly wrong: firms can and do exercise fiat that markets cannot. (Williamson 1991a, p. 276; see also Williamson 1991b)

Thus, the surprising fact of a functional firm with a disjunction between decisionmaking and risk-bearing (or C) was observed; but if the forbearance governance regime of hierarchies (or A) were true, such firms (or C) would be a matter of course. Hence, there is a reason to suspect that forbearance (or A) is true. Forbearance is needed to govern inside-firm transactions, which are tightly knitted exchanges across technologically separable interfaces (Williamson 1981), because such transactions lack a higher degree of standardization, which in the case of the market allows sellers and buyers to more clearly assess and protect their interests by turning to exit options at low cost. Inside-firm transactions are less standardized and more idiosyncratic, and therefore exit options are more costly because, when joining the enterprise, team members have accepted to invest resources

14

Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics

279

(i.e., time, effort, the commitment of revenue streams, etc.) in assets which, by virtue of being specific, increase the team member’s dependency on the continuity of the enterprise (Williamson 1981, 1999a, b, 2002, 2005). A counterintuitive conclusion that contrasts with neoclassical economics follows. Namely, to economize on transaction costs is not to aim at the optimal, most efficient solution. In fact, the forbearance governance regime is more costly to run compared to the market, yet such costs are warranted by the added value of hierarchies. Williamson is thus credited for accepting that real-world organizational layouts are inherently suboptimal, instead of forcing parsimonious optimal solutions into organizations. However inefficient hierarchies are when seen from a neoclassical perspective, costly organizational responses are ofttimes the best feasible solution given the circumstances. As put by Williamson and Bercovitz (1996): . . .much mischief and little useful purpose is served by pronouncing failure if no superior alternative can be described. . . Thus even if mode A is judged to be inefficient in relation to mode B on a simple side-by-side comparison, if mode A is in place and mode B incurs set up costs, then mode A may prevail. Also, and related, it may not be possible to implement mode B for lack of political support (p. 332).

The increased dependency of team members produced by the specificity of the assets invested in, and the costlier exit options available, warrant a forbearance governance regime. That explains why a firm with a disjunction between decisionmaking and risk-bearing is not doomed to collapse. Neither a spirit of honesty and uprightness alone, nor market-like competition between team members can guarantee the perpetuation of inside-firm transactions. The forbearance governance regime makes team members more disposed toward recognizing their mutual dependence and honoring their commitments, or otherwise accepting a loss when parting ways with the enterprise.

Filtering Retroduction Out of the Messy Scientific Practice The retroductive inference that gave rise to TCE did not originate in commonsense experience or a vera causa. Hence, it was neither selective nor did it hinge on the perception of patterns in a pile of data only. Before the emergence of that theory, economists were bewildered by the gulf that separates those who bear risks and those who make decisions, being unable to select a tentative cause from their known menu of plausible causes. They could only either explain away joint-stock companies, predicting their collapse, or make sense of them with a recourse to a spirit of honesty and uprightness, as documented by Schrader (2006). This retroductive inference was not fictional either, because the theory in question did not rely on teleological anthropomorphic interpretations to explain the disjunction between decision-making and risk-bearing. However, Marshall’s spirit of honesty and uprightness fits well with the fictional kind of inference, because it accounts for the apparent absence of incentives to manage efficiently by referring to an

280

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

incorruptible moral virtuosity of unspecified origin, which resembles a mind-like entity or entelechy that is common during the infancy of scientific thought (Hempel 1966). A cautionary tale worth bearing in mind is that such entelechies have survived in a part of today’s organizational thought, where the risk of opportunistic behavior that gives rise to the checks and balances warranted by Williamson’s forbearance governance regime (Williamson 1993b, c, 1996d), has been objected to as being the product of a self-fulfilling prophesy, foretold by the very theories that have inspired such checks and balances. This is the position of Ghoshal and Moran (1996), proposing instead to rely on moral theories to instill a sense of responsibility among employees (Ghoshal 2005). It must be evident by now that they have not progressed much further from Marshall a century ago. TCE did rely on an emerging account of bounded rationality, which challenged the assumption of perfect rationality common in market equilibrium theories. Williamson has repeatedly acknowledged his intellectual debts to James G. March, Herbert A. Simon, and others credited with having laid the foundations of bounded rationality (e.g., Williamson 1996a, 2010). Similar to the inferential pathway in other sciences, bounded rationality plus the mastery of the challenged theory (i.e., Coase’s version of transaction costs) offered an anchor that kept Williamson’s retroductive inference within limits, preventing the pursuit of an unlimited variety of possibilities, which is the weakness of fictional inferences. Neither was the concept of transaction costs entirely new. In the nineteenth century, Edgeworth (1881) and Walras (2010) made explicit abstraction of the obstacles of communication between a large and dispersed number of people, anchoring their theory of perfect equilibrium to communication as if happening between people gathered in a single place, or informed about the terms of the exchange as if they were in a stock market trading floor. Half a century later, Coase (1937) rescued transaction costs from oblivion by bringing back these obstacles, comparing the relative advantage of outsourcing vs. in-house production. Yet the Coase theorem banks on the redefinition of property rights to outsource transactions to the market (Williamson 1996c). It was Williamson’s (1981, 1996c) merit to unpack what transactions entail, thus advancing a comparative discrete structural analysis of organizational forms. To account for the surprising disjunction between decision-making and riskbearing, and despite the apparent absence of incentives to manage efficiently, one had to conjecture unobservable or putative causes for which evidence was either fragmentary or not available. In point of fact, Godfrey and Hill (1995) have disputed the relevance of a focus on how realistic the causes retroduced by Williamson must have been. Because there is no direct concomitance between risk-bearing and the incentives to manage well, an inferential roundabout is needed to pierce the cloud of ignorance that obscures the inner workings of organizations. That roundabout is built by putative causes inferred within the limits of an extant account of bounded rationality and the cost of transactions. But if both ampliative and fictional retroductive inferences rely to some extent on creative imagination, what then distinguishes an ampliative putative cause from a

14

Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics

281

fictional allegoric cause? The answer is the empirical thrust of the former. Thus, the litmus test of the success of a retroductive inference is whether it yields test implications (Hempel 1966). In the case of TCE, the postulation of the kinds of transactions governed by forbearance, instead of high-powered market incentives, has led to the subsequent discovery of a wider array of transactions and their corresponding governance regimes. Thus, the combination of inputs to affect production happens along a pattern of sourcing decisions, where exchanges across technologically separable interfaces, or transactions, are sorted out according to certain properties (Williamson 1981). Placed along a continuum, with less asset specificity coupled with higher standardization at one extreme, and more asset specificity and less standardization at the opposite extreme, different governance mechanisms have been found to explain a part of the variety of organizational forms observed in a real-world economy (Williamson 1984). This has opened the way for a comparative analysis of a discrete – meaning discontinuous or separate – structural kind, which breaks with the more traditional form of marginal analysis in economic thinking (Williamson 1991a). From pure market transactions characterized by the lowest asset specificity and the highest standardization, there is a sequence of organizational forms that progressively build up toward the opposite extreme, along franchises, joint ventures, strategic alliances and supply-chain system networks – or hybrids in the TCE jargon (Williamson 1991a; Ménard 2010; Perez 2019) – moving next to the holding company (H-form), the multidivisional corporation (M-form), the unitary form corporation (U-form), and social-purpose hierarchies (Agafonow 2019b), until the organizational form of clans is reached, where asset specificity or, more accurately, clan-member interdependence is the highest (Ouchi 1980).

Concluding Remarks The thesis that discoveries are the province of genius has merit, for it can hardly be denied that making a scientific discovery demands some intellectual prowess. Thus, this chapter should not be read as an attempt to deny that. Instead, that thesis is supplemented by bringing attention to the scrutable phases of the scientific inferential process, and by preventing the reduction of ingenuity to the imagination of random hypotheses. Avoiding the latter idea is of utmost importance, because otherwise organization scholars and economists may be left with no means of telling apart bizarre suggestions (Hanson 1967), daydreams (Hoffmann 2010), or wild hypotheses (Achinstein 1985) from hypotheses with potential scientific value. For a hypothesis to be worth the time and resources put into its falsification, it must be deemed to convey certain prior probability, which can be increased by learning the phases of the scientific inferential process that yield readily to examination. To sum up, the scientist first confronts facts that do not square well with extant theory. By violating paradigm-induced anticipations, such facts may be worth exploring in an effort to push forward the frontiers of knowledge.

282

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

Second, in a Peircean syllogistic fashion, the scientist deems the surprising facts to be the consequence of unknown causes, which do not simply await to be spotted by the naked eye. Because such causes fall outside the scope of the predominant paradigm, they are by definition invisible and often consist of theoretical constructs rather than physical entities. Third, the scientist is obliged to conjecture causes that, for the time being, have putative status. Although there may be a place for ingenuity in guiding the scientist’s guesswork, the latter is sharply constrained by the expert knowledge embodied in the extant and now defective theory in need of a revamp – or, if one prefers, in need of a revolution in Kuhn’s (1996) sense. Fourth, having devoted a career to becoming well-versed in the extant theory, the scientist is already in possession of heuristics that will play the role of a short-list mechanism preventing the scientist from conjecturing implausible causes. An amateurish command of the subject field, or a blind confidence in the power of data collection and processing techniques, can frustrate the conjectural enterprise. Last but not least, the whole enterprise is a search for intelligibility that pivots on the conceptual instead of the optical features of seeing, which is the thesis of Hanson (2010). That is, the retroductive enterprise is a quest for intelligibility made possible by the conjecturing of putative variables, which takes precedence over the search of facts. This is arguably the path followed by Oliver E. Williamson, who, in search of the causes of what binds a company together, conjectured that forbearance – instead of arm’s length transactions or morality alone – governs inside-firm transactions. It serves as the glue that keeps enterprise members from parting ways, because the specificity of the assets contributed to the venture limits members’ license to alienate decision rights inside the organizational space and, therefore, unfeasible arm’s length transactions must be replaced with forbearance, or else hierarchies collapse to give way to the market. Forbearance, thus, entails a mutual dependence that explains why inside-firm transactions tend to be more enduring compared with the transiency of transactions in the market.

Cross-References ▶ Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics

References Achinstein P (1985) The method of hypothesis: what is it supposed to do, and can it do it? In: Achinstein P, Hannaway O (eds) Observation, experiment, and hypothesis in modern physical science. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 127–145 Agafonow A (2019a) Design thinking and social enterprises: a solution-focused strategy for social enterprise research. Eur Manag Rev 16:799–813. https://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12152 Agafonow A (2019b) From hybrid organizations to social-purpose hierarchies: toward a transaction cost economics of social enterprises. J Interdiscip Econ:1–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0260107919846791

14

Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics

283

Aird WC (2011) Discovery of the cardiovascular system: from Galen to William Harvey. J Thromb Haemost 9(Suppl 1):118–129. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1538-7836.2011.04312.x Alchian AA, Demsetz H (1972) Production, information costs, and economic organization. Am Econ Rev 62:777–795 Behfar K, Okhuysen GA (2018) Discovery within validation logic: deliberately surfacing, complementing, and substituting abductive reasoning in hypothetico-deductive inquiry. Organ Sci 29:323–340. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1193 Buchanan JM, Tullock G (1965) The calculus of consent: logical foundations of constitutional democracy. University of Michigan Press, Michigan Chiasson P (2005) Abduction as an aspect of retroduction. Semiotica 153:223–242. https://doi.org/ 10.1515/semi.2005.2005.153-1-4.223 Coase RH (1937) The nature of the firm. Economica 4:386–405. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14680335.1937.tb00002.x Curd MV (1980) The logic of discovery: an analysys of three approches. In: Nickles T (ed) Scientific discovery, logic, and rationality. D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht/ Boston/London, pp 201–219 Ducheyne S (2011) Newton on action at a distance and the cause of gravity. Stud Hist Phil Sci 42:154–159. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.SHPSA.2010.11.003 Edgeworth FY (1881) Mathematical physics. An essay on the application of mathematics to the moral sciences. C. Kegan Paul & Co, London Einstein A (1953) The fundaments of theoretical physics. In: Feigl H, Brodbeck M (eds) Readings in the philosophy of science. Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York, pp 253–261 Freeman E, Skolimowski H (1974) The search for objectivity in Peirce and Popper. In: Schilpp PA (ed) The philosophy of Karl Popper, I. The Open Court Publishing, La Salle, pp. 507–515 Fumerton RA (1980) Induction and reasoning to the best explanation. Philos Sci 47:589–600. https://doi.org/10.1086/288959 Ghoshal S (2005) Bad management theories are destroying good management practices. Acad Manag Learn Educ 4:75–91. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMLE.2005.16132558 Ghoshal S, Moran P (1996) Bad for practice: a critique of the transaction cost theory. Acad Manag Rev 21:13–47. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMR.1996.9602161563 Godfrey PC, Hill CWL (1995) The problem of unobservables in strategic management research. Strateg Manag J 16:519–533. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250160703 Goodman N (1983) Fact, fiction, and forecast, 4th edn. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA/London Hanson NR (1961) Is there a logic of scientific discovery? In: Feigl H, Maxwell G (eds) Current issues in the philosophy of science. Symposia of scientists and philosophers: proceedings of section L of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, pp 21–35 Hanson NR (1967) An anatomy of discovery. J Philos 64:321–352. https://doi.org/10.2307/ 2024301 Hanson NR (2010) Patterns of discovery. An inquiry into the conceptual foundations of science. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Harré R (1970) The principles of scientific thinking. Palgrave Macmillan, London/Basingstoke Hayek FA (1945) The use of knowledge in society. Am Econ Rev 35:519–530 Hempel C (1966) The philosophy of natural science. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs Hesse MB (1953) Models in physics. Br J Philos Sci 4:198–214 Hoffmann MHG (2010) “Theoric Transformations” and a new classification of abductive inferences. Trans Charles S Peirce Soc 46:570–590. https://doi.org/10.2979/trancharpeirsoc.2010. 46.4.570 Kuhn TS (1996) The structure of scientific revolutions, 3rd edn. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago/London Lawson BR (1979) Cognitive strategies in architectural design. Ergonomics 22:59–68. https://doi. org/10.1080/00140137908924589

284

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

Levenson T (2015) The hunt for vulcan, 1st edn. Random House, New York Lipton P (2001) Inference to the best explanation. In: Newton-Smith WH (ed) A companion to the philosophy of science. Blackwell Publishing, Malden/Oxford, pp 184–193 Lipton P (2004) Inference to the best explanation, 2nd edn. Routledge, London/New York Locke K, Golden-Biddle K, Feldman MS (2008) Making doubt generative: rethinking the role of doubt in the research process. Organ Sci 19:907–918. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1080.0398 Marshall A (1920) Principles of economics. An introductory volume, 8th edn. Macmillan and Co, London McMullin E (1992) The inference that makes science. The aquinas lecture. Marquette University Press, Milwaukee Ménard C (2010) Hybrid organizations. In: Klein PG, Sykuta ME (eds) The Elgar companion to transaction cost economics. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham/Northampton, pp 176–184 Minnameier G (2004) Peirce-suit of truth: why inference to the best explanation and abduction ought not to be confused. Erkenntnis 60:75–105 Mintzberg H (1993) The simple structure. In: Structure in five. Designing effective organizations. Prentice Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, pp 157–162 Nagel E (1961) The structure of science. Problems in the logic of scientific explanation. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York Niiniluoto I (2018) Truth-seeking by abduction. Sringer, Cham Ouchi WG (1980) Markets, bureaucracies, and clans. Adm Sci Q 25:129–141. https://doi.org/10. 2307/2392231 Pareto V (1971) Manual of political economy. Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, New York Peirce CS (1901) The proper treatment of hypotheses: a preliminary chapter, toward an examination of Hume’s argument against miracles, in its logic and in its history. University of Navarra, Navarra. http://www.unav.es/gep/1887_1914.html Peirce CS (1935) The collected papers of charles sanders peirce, vols. 1–6: pragmatism and pragmaticism. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Peirce CS (1958) The collected papers of charles sanders peirce, vols. 7–8: science and philosophy. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Perez M (2019) Transaction cost perspectives on cooperation: a study of hybrids through foundations lobbying in the EU. Voluntas 30:408–421. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-017-9928-z Pietarinen A-V, Bellucci F (2014) New light on Peirce’s conceptions of retroduction, deduction, and scientific reasoning. Int Stud Philos Sci 28:353–373. https://doi.org/10.1080/02698595.2014. 979667 Popper KR (2000) The problem of induction. In: Schick T (ed) Readings in the philosophy of science. Mayfield Publishing Company, Mountain View, pp 49–53 Popper KR (2002) Conjectures and refutations. The growth of scientific knowledge, 3rd edn. Routledge, London/New York Popper KR (2005) The logic of scientific discovery. Taylor & Francis e-Library, London/New York Salmon WC (1967) The foundations of scientific inference. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh Schrader DE (2006) The corporation as anomaly. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Simon HA (1977) Does scientific discovery have a logic? In: Models of discovery and other topics in the methods of science. D. Reidel Publishing Company, Boston, pp 326–337 Wakefield JC (1993) Limits of operationalization: a critique of Spitzer and Endicott’s (1978) proposed operational criteria for mental disorder. J Abnorm Psychol 102:160–172. https://doi. org/10.1037/0021-843X.102.1.160 Walras L (2010) Elements of pure economics. Or the theory of social wealth. Routledge, London/New York Williamson OE (1981) The modern corporation: origins, evolution. Attributes J Econ Lit 19:1537– 1568 Williamson OE (1984) The economics of governance: framework and implications. J Inst Theor Econ 140:195–223

14

Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics

285

Williamson OE (1985) The economic institutions of capitalism. Firms, markets, relational contracting. The Free Press and Collier Macmillan Publisher, New York/London Williamson OE (1991a) Comparative economic organization: the analysis of discrete structural alternatives. Adm Sci Q 36:269–296. https://doi.org/10.2307/2393356 Williamson OE (1991b) Economic institutions: spontaneous and intentional governance. J Law Econ Organ 7:159–187 Williamson OE (1993a) Transaction cost economics and organization theory. Ind Corp Chang 2:107–156. https://doi.org/10.1093/icc/2.1.107 Williamson OE (1993b) Opportunism and its critics. Manag Decis Econ 14:97–107. https://doi.org/ 10.1002/mde.4090140203 Williamson OE (1993c) Calculativeness, trust, and economic organization. J Law Econ 36:453–486. https://doi.org/10.1086/467284 Williamson OE (1996a) Transaction cost economics and the carnegie connection. J Econ Behav Organ 31:149–155. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-2681(96)00898-0 Williamson OE (1996b) The mechanisms of governance. Oxford University Press, New York/ Oxford Williamson OE (1996c) Prologue: the mechanisms of governance. In: The Mechanisms of Governance. Oxford University Press, New York/Oxford, pp 3–20 Williamson OE (1996d) Economic organization: the case for candor. Acad Manag Rev 21:48–57. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1996.9602161564 Williamson OE (1997) Transaction cost economics and public administration. In: Boorsma PB, Aarts K, Steenge AE (eds) Public priority setting: rules and costs. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht/Boston/London, pp 19–37 Williamson OE (1999a) Public and private bureaucracies: a transaction cost economics perspectives. J Law Econ Organ 15:306–342. https://doi.org/10.1093/jleo/15.1.306 Williamson OE (1999b) Strategy research: governance and competence perspectives. Strateg Manag J 20:1087–1108. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-0266(199912)20:123.0.CO;2-Z Williamson OE (2002) The theory of the firm as governance structure: from choice to contract. J Econ Perspect 16:171–195. https://doi.org/10.1257/089533002760278776 Williamson OE (2005) The economics of governance. Am Econ Rev 95:1–18 Williamson OE (2010) Transaction cost economics: the origins. J Retail 86:227–231. https://doi. org/10.1016/J.JRETAI.2010.07.006 Williamson OE, Bercovitz J (1996) The modern corporation as an efficiency instrument: the comparative contracting perspective. In: Kaysen C (ed) The American corporation today. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 327–359

No Organizations for Today’s Einsteins Organizational Impacts on Scientific Discoveries

15

Alejandro Agafonow and Marybel Perez

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scientific Discoveries and Mental Faculties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Organizing for Scientific Discoveries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Traditional Organizational Layout of Universities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Standardization in Today’s Universities and Business Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Standardization Impinges on Scientific Discoveries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Organizational Structures That Are Most Propitious for Scientific Discoveries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discussion: The Inherent Suboptimality of Real-World Organizational Layouts . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

288 289 291 293 294 297 300 302 304 306 306

Abstract

This chapter delves into how organizational structures bear upon scientific production, answering the question: What kinds of organizational structures are in keeping with hospitable conditions for scientific discoveries? Thus, there is every indication that the organizations that are most propitious for scientific discoveries consist of functional units with a narrow span of control, where the complexity of the supervisory task is high because of the specific kind of knowledge involved in scientific production. Hence, line managers are seasoned scientists able to qualitatively gauge the value of the output produced. This is the polar opposite of a trend toward output standardization at universities and business schools, which A. Agafonow (*) ESSCA School of Management, Angers, France GRANEM, Université d’Angers, Angers, France e-mail: [email protected] M. Perez ESSCA School of Management, Angers, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_69

287

288

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

contrasts sharply to the direction followed by the most innovative corporations. Thus, university administrators and deans are invited to exercise caution when transposing organizational mechanisms that are not fit for the purpose of the scientific enterprise. Keywords

Scientific discoveries · Organizational structure · University · Business school · Scientific misconduct · Publish or perish

Introduction Reflecting on his personal experience as scientist and academic, the Nobel laureate Peter Higgs, after whom the Higgs boson in physics was named, thinks that he would have difficulties finding employment at a university today because he would not be considered productive. He adds: “It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964” (cited in Aitkenhead 2013). Although people tend to cast a positive light on the past (or “the good old days,” as the saying has it), it is remarkable to note that only 37 percent of the 50 Nobel laureates surveyed by Times Higher Education and the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings believe they could make their Nobel-winning discoveries in today’s academic environment. Of these, 47 percent think there is a possibility that they could, while 16 percent think that they probably could not (Grove 2017). Higgs’s daunting appraisal invites us to ponder whether organizations have any bearing on scientific discoveries or, more specifically, to ask: what kinds of organizational structures are in keeping with hospitable conditions for scientific discoveries? To advance an answer, this chapter builds upon extant knowledge about what scientific discoveries are, deepening our grasp of the tentative association between organizational structures and Kuhn’s (1962/1996) normal versus revolutionary science, which Mintzberg (1979) brought up in a footnote. The study of how scientific discoveries actually happen has helped to overcome the simplistic idea of a discovery as an instant flash of insight, a hunch, or a eureka moment – as explained in the chapter titled ▶ Chap. 14, “Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics,” also published in this handbook. It has then been possible to identify a part of the cognitive mechanisms that intervene in the problem-solving process of making scientific discoveries, helping to shed light on how organizations either facilitate or prevent those cognitive mechanisms by which scientists are likely to achieve breakthroughs. Thus, in a nutshell, this chapter posits that, while discoveries arguably depend on scientists’ capacity to muse or make introspections, the organizations that house scientists can offer more or less hospitable conditions to put such a capacity to good use. Organizational structures can be more or less propitious for scientific discoveries, depending on whether they enhance or inhibit the cognitive mechanisms that allow scientists to carry out the highly unprogrammed tasks that discoveries entail.

15

No Organizations for Today’s Einsteins

289

There may be, therefore, an organizational layout most propitious for musing and introspection, namely, departmentalized organizations with expense center performance evaluation systems and an unsophisticated technostructure. Expounding upon that argument, it is posited here that, by its very nature, scientific knowledge is costly to oversee. This calls for placing only a small number of staff under the responsibility of any one supervisor, which warrants a meaningful, qualitative evaluation of scientific output. Straightforward comparisons between staff and functional units to meter performance are limited because scientific knowledge cannot be standardized and, hence, can hardly be reduced to a quantitative unit. Proxies for intended scientific objectives are, thus, very inaccurate. This latter factor hinders the efficacy of high-powered incentives in increasing efficiency, understood either as the maximization of units produced within a range of costs, or the minimization of costs per unit produced, irrespective of how a unit of scientific production is defined.

Scientific Discoveries and Mental Faculties That scientific discoveries entail an “almost poetic intuition” (Popper 2002, p. 260), “creative imagination” (Hesse 1953, p. 198; Hempel 1966, p. 15), or the “combination of reason and imagination” (Harré 1970, p. 260) has reached the status of selfevident truth. However, not every kind of scientific discovery demands the same creative mental faculties, that is, the ability to engender something novel or original. The so-called puzzle-out discoveries (Hanson 1967), for instance, are built upon deductive inferences that advance as-yet-unknown observations based on the deductive implications of extant theory. Thus, puzzle-out discoveries are said to “come tumbling out of the observation framework” (ibid., p. 338), which conforms with an understanding of scientific discoveries as “interpretations in the light of theories” (Popper 2005, p. 90). For instance, the observation that product quality debasement results when output quantity is monitored and quality is not easy to observe depends on extant organization theory. When the US Veterans Affairs medical system tried to improve veterans’ access to medical services, it heavily relied on quantifiable wait-time data as a proxy for timely and appropriate access. Seeking to conform to such performance standards, physicians were involved in wait-time data falsification and maneuvers to reduce patient follow-up visits at the expense of patients’ wellbeing (Oppel and Goodnough 2014). Highly specific knowledge about the pattern of veterans’ access to health services, which is costly to master and centralize from upper echelons of the organizational hierarchy, prevented managers from noticing that the quality dimensions of timely and appropriate access were in fact neglected by physicians (Jensen and Meckling 1998a). An emphasis on measurable output is advised against by extant theory because, under these circumstances, employees are incentivized to meet actual, objective measures, while overlooking the intended objectives of their tasks (Jensen and Meckling 1998b; Zimmerman 2011).

290

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

Similarly, the discovery that the universe is expanding is an observation that depends on extant atomic theory, which attributes to photons certain wavelengths that behave similarly to the sound pitch of an ambulance siren when the ambulance approaches or moves away, i.e., the so-called Doppler effect. Just as the siren’s sound pitch decreases when the ambulance moves away because sound waves reach the listener’s ears farther apart, distant galaxies emit light waves with more spacing between them and have a distinctive red color, shifting further to the red end of the spectrum with the recession of galaxies (European Space Agency n.d.). Thus, the expansion of the galaxy was a novel observation that tumbled out of the observation framework offered by atomic theory. Hence, to advance the novel observations of product quality debasement and galaxy recession, a thorough command of extant theory and the ability to make deductions from it take precedence over sheer creativity. There is, however, another kind of scientific discovery where creativity takes a more central role, namely, back-into scientific discoveries (Hanson 1967). These are characterized by the uncharted inferential terrain scientists have to tread when extant theory cannot account for surprising facts or apparent anomalies, which have famously been described by Kuhn (1962/1996) as scientific revolutions. For instance, by the time Albert Einstein made his breakthrough, there was a surprising fact which Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity had failed to explain, that is, an apparent anomaly in the orbit of Mercury (Levenson 2015). For Mercury’s orbit to make sense, the difference between acceleration and weight postulated by Newton had to be wrong (Janssen 2002). One day, Einstein saw a man fixing something on a roof and he wondered what the sensation would be if the man slipped off the roof: weightless, the answer was, the same as with zero gravity. Thus, the same cause could explain both free-fall and un-accelerated motion, i.e., the gravity pull the man felt while standing on the roof and an analogous upward push while someone stands on the cabin of a cruising spaceship (Levenson 2015). The anomaly in Newton’s theory of gravity seemingly contributed to inspiring Einstein’s thinking backward for plausible causes, in a back-into kind of thought accounted for by a syllogistic inference or retroduction (Peirce 1955).1 Einstein thus posited that a hypothetical equality between acceleration and weight, instead of explaining the pull produced by matter alone, as postulated by Newton, may explain gravity as a bending force that results from “the dings and dips in space-time produced by all the matter and energy in their vicinity” (Levenson 2015, para. 153). Einstein’s theory of general relativity would later account for the orbital anomaly, which Newton’s theory could not explain. Similarly, joint-stock companies bemused observers at the turn of the twentieth century. Many had a hard time understanding how such companies could thrive if their owners transferred the company’s control to managers employed for that purpose (Schrader 2006). To put it in the terms of a saying, “the eye of the master

For an explanation of retroduction, refer to Agafonow and Perez, ▶ Chap. 14, “Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics,” also published in this handbook.

1

15

No Organizations for Today’s Einsteins

291

fattens his cattle.” It was not the master, however, who was pulling the levers of the company, but an employee hired for that purpose. Thinking backward into plausible causes that could explain why joint-stock companies did not collapse, despite the apparent erosion of the link between decision-making and risk-bearing, organization scientists ventured to retroduce putative causes, including, for instance, transactions governed by forbearance.2 Compared to puzzle-out discoveries, back-into scientific discoveries require a higher degree of creativity. This is because, in conjecturing forbearance, just like a bending force in space-time, scientists have to venture into unexplored terrain without the assurance offered by deductive inferences. That is not to say that puzzle-out discoveries are error-proof, because, after all, there is always a chance to prove deductive inferences wrong, i.e. to falsify them (Popper 2002). However, because in back-into scientific discoveries the violation of paradigm-induced anticipations is maximal (Kuhn 1962/1996), such discoveries require a greater intellectual license compared with puzzle-out discoveries because they demand the retroduction of unknown causes.3

Organizing for Scientific Discoveries Both puzzling-out novel test implications of extant theory and thinking backward into the plausible causes of surprising facts left unexplained by extant theory require mental faculties that enable scientists to muse or reflect introspectively, which is in turn conducive to scientific breakthroughs. Organizations that house scientists’ intellectual production may enhance or inhibit these mental faculties. It may not be a coincidence that Einstein’s breakthrough happened during the slack time made possible by his position as a clerk in the Bern patent office, in Switzerland, which he entered in 1902. It was during this period that, gazing through his window in the patent office’s third floor, absorbed in his thought experiments, he spotted the man on the roof mentioned earlier. Einstein’s contributions, spread across four papers, were written down in 1905, 4 years before he quit the patent office to join the University of Zurich. Conversely, consider what prevented Microsoft from being the first to develop an electronic reader like the Amazon Kindle, which would allow customers to download and display written material in a digital version. Despite a head start in the electronic reader project, Microsoft transferred the technology unit in charge of the project to a product division that was overseeing the development of software. As is well known, division performance evaluation is ex post, revolving around profits (Mintzberg 1980, 1993; Williamson 1985). Steve Stone, a founder of the technology unit, reflecting on the experience, declared: “We couldn’t be focused anymore on developing technology that was effective for consumers. Instead, all of a sudden we 2

ibid. ibid.

3

292

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

had to look at this and say, ‘How are we going to use this to make money?’ And it was impossible” (Eichenwald 2012). The Microsoft case illustrates the well-established organizational wisdom that performance evaluation systems revolving around the easy-to-measure dimensions of a task (i.e., profitability in this case) distract employees from pursuing the hard-to-measure dimensions of the job (i.e., creating the first electronic reader). This has led to the postulation of Gresham’s law of planning, which predicts that programmed – and therefore easy-to-measure – tasks take precedence over highly unprogrammed tasks (March and Simon 1993). Similar conclusions were reached when trying to make sense of the paucity of high-powered, monetary incentives in certain contractual arrangements, including the employment of the sales force in some industries. Thus, Ouchi (1977) and Holmstrom and Milgrom (1991) concluded that paying a fixed salary instead of performance bonuses is actually efficient when employees perform a mix of tasks, because they will not then be lured away by the incentives rewarding the accomplishment of the most ostensible tasks and, consequently, will not overlook hard-tomeasure tasks. Gresham’s law of planning originates in human cognitive mechanisms that, first, make humans split a problem into several roughly independent parts that can be handled more easily than the problem in its entirety, and, second, motivate humans to avoid the frustration that ensues from aspirations being above actual achievements (March and Simon 1993). Thus, the problem-solving process of reducing a problem to essentials contributes to avoiding the frustration of missing a solution. The predicament arises when such cognitive mechanisms crowd out the hard-to-measure dimensions of a task, without which the intended objectives of a pursuit cannot be met. The musing and introspection required by scientific discoveries allude to the hard-to-measure dimensions of scientists’ intellectual pursuit, which raises the questions: how do scientists avoid falling prey to their own, only too human, cognitive mechanisms to pursue the highly unprogrammed tasks that discoveries entail? and, do organizations have anything to do with this? To put it simply, should Einstein have pursued his breakthrough for the sake of the reward which comes with the Nobel Prize, it is unlikely he would ever have achieved it. Hence, Einstein’s confidence in his general theory of relativity should not be mistaken for his being driven by the prospect of winning the Nobel Prize. Einstein’s breakthrough happened only 4 years after the first Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded. Twenty years later, he pledged to give his wife the Prize money upon divorce should he win it. He indeed won the Prize in 1922 but in recognition for another of his contributions and not for his relativity theory (Wolff 2016). Thus, the organizations that can pave the way for scientific discoveries are those likely to prevent scientists from falling prey to their all-too-human cognitive mechanisms. Such organizations will mute strong incentives to prevent scientists, out of frustration, from falling back on the easy-to-measure dimensions of the simplified independent parts of a problem. This is most clearly the case for back-into scientific discoveries, which, as previously mentioned, require a greater intellectual license

15

No Organizations for Today’s Einsteins

293

because they are highly unprogrammed. On the other hand, puzzle-out discoveries, despite being heavily reliant on the assurance offered by deductive inferences, require a degree of mastery of the extant body of knowledge that only a career devoted to long-term systematic learning can offer. Accordingly, and because becoming an expert does not guarantee infallibility in making deductions that are immune to falsification, puzzle-out discoveries also involve a great deal of hard-tomeasure aspects.

The Traditional Organizational Layout of Universities It, therefore, does not come as a surprise that the organizational layout of universities in the twentieth century was cognate with muting the kinds of incentives that would make scientists trade off hard-to-measure tasks for tasks that are easier to measure. If universities aimed at removing from the discretion of scientists what tasks to execute and how to execute them, universities would have had to standardize either the work process itself or the output produced. That is, however, challenging because the output of scientists is characterized by very specific knowledge that cannot be centralized (Jensen and Meckling 1998a), let alone comprehended, by managers located higher up in the organizational hierarchy (Blau 1968). In short, universities – at least the ones fostering the advancement of science – are unlikely to be run like factories. Control over scientists’ output used to be effected both by scientists themselves, in groups of professionals with a common disciplinary background (Weick 1976), and by the scientific societies committed to the conceptual features that render a given body of knowledge intelligible (Hanson 2010), which nurture scientific practice as a normal science (Kuhn 1962/1996). There was certainly a degree of bureaucratic control within the university for housekeeping purposes, in the form of grouping scientists specialized in different disciplines into a number of functional departments, the fixing of teaching schedules, the allocation of workloads, etc. This was typically done by a technostructure staffed with clerical personnel, which by all accounts remained small and less sophisticated compared with what is found in a traditional bureaucratic organization whose tasks yield readily to standardization (Mintzberg 1979). Academic departments experienced a narrow span of control (Ouchi and Dowling 1974; van Fleet and Bedeian 1977), which means that supervision was a collegial exercise involving small groups of peers often headed by a seasoned academic. This requires a peer to qualitatively estimate the value to the university of academics as highly specific human assets (Williamson 1985, 1991), whose output can hardly be reduced to a quantity (Jensen and Meckling 1998b; Brickley et al. 2016). Thus, the so-called expense centers, which hinge upon the qualitative evaluation of output, were ordinarily used to hold academic departments accountable. That is why the universities of the twentieth century were typically described as collegial organizations, i.e., having authority vested equally among colleagues, or even inverse pyramids, where operators (i.e., academics) were located at the top and

294

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

administrators at the bottom and at the service of academics (Etzioni 1959; Mintzberg 1979). This is because at universities “. . .power resides in expertise; one has influence by virtue of one’s knowledge and skills,” while in a traditional bureaucracy “. . .power and status reside in administrative office; one salutes the stripes, not the man” (Mintzberg 1979, pp. 360–361). To characterize the twentieth-century university as a democracy is, however, misleading. The delegation of power over the work carried out by scientists was not the product of membership, as it is in the case of cooperatives and volunteer organizations, but the product of expertise, which in the case of a scientific discipline cannot be centralized and therefore controlled from higher levels within the organization. Hence, universities were better characterized as meritocratic rather than democratic organizations (Mintzberg 1979). In short, what the twentieth-century university offered to scientists was hospitable conditions for the musing and introspection that both puzzle-out discoveries and back-into discoveries call for. Neither the latter, i.e., deducing test implications out of a theory (Hempel 1966) and developing such a theory to account for further residual effects initially neglected (Lipton 2004), nor the former, i.e., overturning extant theory by building new conceptual features to make sense of surprising facts (Peirce 1955; Hanson 2010), could be achieved under organizational structures that push scientists to focus on the easy-to-measure aspects of the scholarly practice. There are certainly puzzle-out discoveries of the experimental kind which, in addition to the organizational conditions described so far, warrant the cooperation of many scientists from different disciplines brought together into projects. Consider, for instance, that it took 50 years and over 1000 researchers from over 20 countries to conceive and build the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in the USA, which in 2015 detected the gravitational waves deduced from Einstein’s general theory of relativity (The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 2017). Although the university described herein has survived the turn of the twenty-first century, it has experienced changes in its organizational layout which, if our account of the organizational bases of scientific discoveries is correct, offer good reasons to be skeptical about its capacity to keep fostering the progress of science. The key to these organizational changes lies in a move away from expense centers – where accountability was the product of a central place given to the qualitative evaluation of scientific output, due to the irreducibility of such output to a quantifiable unit of account (Jensen and Meckling 1998b; Brickley et al. 2016) – and toward cost centers, which are to be explained next.

Standardization in Today’s Universities and Business Schools Unlike expense centers, the implementation of a cost center hinges on the measurement of individual units of output – let us say, the number of articles published in dedicated outlets, the amount of research funding attracted, the number of hours taught, the rating of teaching skills, etc. These are rather imperfect proxies for the output produced by academic staff, due to both the specific knowledge involved in

15

No Organizations for Today’s Einsteins

295

the production process and the complexity of the output’s intended objective, such as scientific breakthroughs or the transfer of higher-order skills to students (Hannaway 1992). Hence, a cost center requires the definition of a cost object, let us say, X number of publications in peer-reviewed journals of a conveniently defined category (e.g., top-ranked journals according to a professional body, like the CNRS list in France, the ABDC list in Australia, or the ABS list in the UK) within a time period Y. It will thus be possible to calculate an allocation base to such an object, so that the cost of any given academic to his employer can be calculated according to the quantity of such publications produced (i.e., the cost object). As is obvious, that process requires an allocation method consisting in the loading of a budget onto the cost object, which is assumed to maximize the university’s objective (Zimmerman 2011). This will lead the university to follow a human resource policy that minimizes the total cost per publication, that is, to hire academics in a certain compensation range and who are likely to produce the greatest number of publications, or any combination of cost objects for that matter. A cost center performance evaluation system implies that the university can, in theory, increase the span of control in a quest for budgetary efficiency (Ouchi and Dowling 1974; van Fleet and Bedeian 1977). That is, a move from the qualitative evaluation of the output of an academic department toward its quantitative evaluation reduces, by all appearances, the complexity of the managerial task. Supervision can now be moved up the organizational hierarchy, to either increase the number of academics accountable to a single line manager or to dispense with the scientific qualifications of a line manager, who was in earlier times a peer familiar with the complexity of the tasks performed. In fact, evidence indicates that the profile of the average university manager is changing from a seasoned academic with a solid scholarly track record to the so-called professor by administration, who has a background in anything but a scholarly domain (Wilson 2016; Beardsley and Hills 2017). Moreover, that trend has been accompanied by an increase in the number of administrative staff which, at the University of Oxford, for instance, is nowadays three times higher than it was about 15 years ago (McDonagh 2015), while in the USA the administrative staff-tofaculty ratio at both public and private universities has doubled since the 1970s (The Economist 2018). This trend is not in contradiction with a more efficient, wider span of control, because the information system needed to manage a quantitative performance evaluation system requires an army of administrative staff. This staff category used to be small at universities compared with other organizations where standardization is a matter of course (Mintzberg 1979). It is a truism that the output of academics is today subject to standardization and the evidence is overwhelming. The sources of standardization are multiple, ranging from a publish-or-perish culture to journal-based metrics like the impact factor and journal rankings, university and business school rankings, government policies such as the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), and accreditation labels such as the AACSB, EQUIS, and AMBA (see Table 1). A rare glimpse at the standardization of today’s scholarly production was offered by a business press article looking into the secret behind the extreme research

296

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

Table 1 Academic output evaluation, calibrated by comparison with an objective measure SOURCE OF STANDARDIZATION Publish-or-perish organizational culture

Journal-based metrics, e.g., Clarivate’s Journal Impact Factor

Institution and/or program rankings, e.g., Financial Times

Government policies, e.g., UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF)

Accreditations, e.g., the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the EFMD Quality Improvement System (EQUIS), and the Association of MBAs (AMBA)

OBJECTIVE MEASURE • Tenure awarded based on X number of publications in peer-reviewed journals of a conveniently defined category within the time period Y • Index based on the citation of all article types published by Journal X within the time period Y, irrespective of the quality of any one article in that journal • Number of publications in 50 dedicated academic and practitioner journals, weighted for faculty size • Proportion of teaching hours from core courses in dedicated subject areas Staff diversity by gender and nationality • The REF appoints a number of experts who are expected to assimilate and rate academics’ total output produced during a period of 6– 7 years, against the quality levels: 4*, 3*, 2*, 1* or “unclassified.” Note that the chartered Association of Business Schools (ABS) journal guide, widely used in the UK, classifies social science journals along a similar rating, which may offer REF experts a shorthand to expedite the analytical burden of assessing a staggering volume of contributions. Similar lists exist for virtually every scientific discipline • Volume of intellectual production as measured by the number of publications in peer-reviewed journals, books, etc. • Apparent quality of intellectual production as measured by 1) peer-reviewed journals of a conveniently defined category, 2) relevance to the institution’s markets and stakeholders, 3) apparent contribution to management practice, etc. • Citation and download counts • Number of competitive grants awarded by national and international agencies, and thirdparty funding for research projects • Number of patents awarded

productivity of Ipag, an AACSB-accredited business school in France. Duc Khuong Nguyen, deputy to the research dean, conceded that he juggles between 30 and 40 drafts at a time, revealing the business school’s strategy: There are always three or four of us on an article. In the team, I’m the one who plans the papers. I mainly write introductions and conclusions, and I check the consistency between the papers’ sections. . . The rest is delegated to one or more researchers, often outside the school, chosen for their specialty and their ability to respect deadlines (cited in Gless 2014).

15

No Organizations for Today’s Einsteins

297

When asked about the probity of this strategy, Ipag’s general director Guillaume Bigot declared: We were not the ones who put the rules in place. From the moment the rules were written by others and imposed on us, we started to go by the book (cited in Gless 2014).

Standardization is meaningless unless it informs managerial decisions about tenure, redundancy, remuneration, promotion, etc. Here is where the biggest problem arises, for two reasons. Firstly, the objective measures upon which a cost center is built are vulnerable to the same problems of measurement scales. The latter are more accurate the closer the concomitance is between the measure and the natural structure of the phenomenon to be measured. Unfortunately, nature can rarely be taken at face value and measures are often roundabout approximations (Michell 2002). There is little doubt that the natural structure of scientific output is complex and thus difficult to capture by the measures or cost objects warranted by cost centers. Thus, the management of scientists based on this type of performance evaluation system requires the assumption that the measures used accurately reflect intended scientific performance (Milgrom and Roberts 1992), thereby offering a degree of ordinality that justifies granting either tenure or redundancy to some academics instead of others. It has already been mentioned, however, that the typical units of output used in performance evaluation are imperfect proxies for intended scientific performance. It is thus doubtful that performance measured as such has additive properties, hence its suitability for comparisons across different individuals is called into question. To put it plainly, can the theoretical contribution of Albert Einstein and the experimental contribution of Arthur Eddington, who first proved Einstein right, be put on a scale to inform tenure or redundancy decisions? The answer is no, and it may not be an exaggeration to posit that today’s Einsteins and Eddingtons are being penalized by ill-suited cost centers. Secondly, cost center performance evaluation systems do not take into consideration the gaming aspects of social planning (Simon 1996). That is, given the inaccuracy of proxies for intended scientific performance and the incentives created by performance evaluation systems, scientists are likely to change their behavior to comply with the actual objectives reflected in the proxies instead of the intended objectives of the scientific practice. It is in this context that scientific misconduct has been explained as the result of the pressure to publish imposed upon academics, which creates an excess supply of papers and few outlets for their publication (Young et al. 2008). The resulting evolutionary dynamics contribute to the natural selection of bad science that stems from an emphasis on publication output instead of discoveries (Smaldino and McElreath 2016).

How Standardization Impinges on Scientific Discoveries Output standardization may pose a threat to the capacity of today’s universities to foster scientific discoveries. This threat takes the form of an organizational layout

298

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

that breeds inimical conditions for musing and introspection. Output standardization demands laying aside the qualitative evaluation of scientific output by a peer versed in a scholarly domain, to oversee, instead, the production of X number of outputs within the time period Y to minimize the total cost per cost object X. Such conditions are detrimental to a calm, lengthy, and intent consideration of both the intricacies of an extant body of knowledge needed to succeed in deducing novel test implications (Hempel 1966; Lipton 2004) and the focus needed to identify the surprising facts that extant theory is unable to account for, so that scientists can engage in a back-into kind of thought to build new conceptual features likely to make sense of such surprising facts (Peirce 1955; Hanson 2010). The implementation of a cost center to oversee scientific production requires setting a deadline (i.e., the time period Y, which may vary from 3 to 5 years, depending on the university or business school) for the production of output (i.e., a cost object X). Imposing deadlines on scientific output is not only naïve but it also conflates proxy measures with intended scientific achievements. Proxy measures are, thus, attributed bogus additive properties based on which ill-advised comparisons will be made to inform employment and promotion decisions. As a result, and on account of scientists’ bounded rationality, cost centers cannot but motivate scientists to turn their attention to the fulfillment of the easy-to-measure dimensions of the problem confronted (March and Simon 1993), that is, to achieve X number of outputs to secure tenure or avoid redundancy, instead of striving to make a scientific discovery. Given the shift of attention from discoveries to proxy measures, scientific misconduct becomes a highly effective means to achieve the latter. Aside from blatant misconduct and substandard research methods, a generalized reduction of quality in research has been, for instance, attributed in the UK to the REF, which reportedly “was part of a system that rewarded those who ‘published early and often,’ which often led to a ‘frenetic’ production of papers that offered few or no insights” (cited in Grove 2016). Others have posited: If you work in a fast-paced field such as computer science, an evaluation every five years may not matter so much in terms of which projects you pursue, or which journals you publish in. . . But if your projects can take more than five years, the REF can be really disruptive (cited in Pells 2018).

More traditional academic tasks are not exempt either. As witnessed by one of this chapter’s authors in the early stages of his career, a monetary prize granted to academics with the best teaching evaluations moved them to treat students with donuts, and the prize did often go to those colleagues. The implications of cost center performance evaluation systems for scientific discoveries may come as a surprise, yet organization scientists have long since been warning about such implications in more traditional organizational settings where the quality of the output produced is not easily observable from higher echelons of the organizational hierarchy (as illustrated by selected quotations in Table 2). In short, when output quality is not costlessly observable, the use of cost centers risks

15

No Organizations for Today’s Einsteins

299

Table 2 Sample quotations warning against the use of cost centers when output quality is not easily observable “To evaluate the performance of a cost center, its output must be measurable. . . Manufacturing departments like a parts manufacturing department in a factory are usually cost centers. . . In addition to measuring the quantity of output, its quality must be monitored effectively. If not, cost center managers who are evaluated on costs can meet their targets by cutting quality” (Zimmerman 2011, p. 173). “Because it reduces measured costs, the cost center manager has incentives to reduce quality below the optimal level as well. This means that cost centers will tend to work better when it is inexpensive to measure both quantity, quality, and the cost functions. . . When it is expensive to measure quantity and quality and when the knowledge required to make the optimal quantity and product mix decision is specific and inaccessible to those higher in the hierarchy, it will be difficult to operate the division as a cost center” (Jensen and Meckling 1998b, pp. 350–351). Regarding the impact of cost centers on scientists: “Consider the performance-measurement process used to evaluate junior faculty. . . The problems arising from making such an evaluation formula explicit are obvious: assistant professors would devote time and effort to maximizing the explicit performance measure. Ex post, it would be plainly obvious, at least in few cases, that good performers as measured by the formula were not the best scholars” (Baker et al. 1988, p. 598). “[To] rely relatively more heavily on output control for coordinative purposes, [comes] at the cost of sometimes misrepresenting true subunit performance or even causing subunits to respond in a manner which will yield favorable performance measures but unfavorable outcomes for the organization” (Ouchi 1978, pp. 175–176). Regarding the creativity needed in back-into scientific discoveries: “When desired behavior and output are unknown, any systematic or universalistic control system will reward only a limited class of behaviors or outputs and will inhibit exploratory or creative behavior. . .” (Ouchi 1977, p. 99). “Many managers seek to establish simple, quantifiable standards against which to measure and reward performance. Such efforts may be successful in highly predictable areas within an organization, but are likely to cause goal displacement when applied anywhere else” (Kerr 1975, p. 12).

debasing the quality of the output produced, which, in the context of scientific production, amounts to misconduct. Scientific misconduct and, more generally, the paucity of scientific discoveries can thus be interpreted as manifestations of maladaptive behavior caused by the adoption of a control system (i.e., cost centers) that rewards the attainment of a narrow range of proxy measures that hardly reflect intended scientific achievements (i.e., discoveries). This has also been considered a major cause of organizational decline in more traditional organizational settings (Ouchi 1979). More generally, Williamson (1985) advised against transposing organizational mechanisms when the circumstances that motivated their creation are not well understood, or else a form of asset misutilization ensues: To attempt to ‘hold the rules as nearly constant as possible’, on the theory that what works well in one regime ought to apply equally to another, is thus mistaken. The powers and limits of each form of organization must be discovered and respected. (p. 140)

300

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

Organizational Structures That Are Most Propitious for Scientific Discoveries There are, then, several organizational building blocks that may be most propitious for the genesis of scientific discoveries, in the sense of offering hospitable conditions for the musing and introspection that scientific discoveries call for, or for the “peace and quiet” that Nobel laureate Peter Higgs laments he no longer sees in today’s academic climate (Aitkenhead 2013). As summarized in Table 3, such building blocks are, first, a narrow span of control, which limits the number of staff that a single line manager can meaningfully oversee (Ouchi and Dowling 1974; van Fleet and Bedeian 1977). Because scientific production hinges on a complex and specialized area of expertise, the knowledge that can be covered by any one manager is limited in scope and, therefore, to be effective, supervision must deal with the substantive aspects of the scholarly domain in question. Furthermore, to the extent that the practice of scientific discovery is difficult to standardize, a large degree of sway over decision making falls within the jurisdiction of individual staff and outside the formal line of command, which explains why, at universities, such supervision has been predominantly a collegial exercise (Etzioni 1959; Mintzberg 1979). Secondly, a line manager in a narrow span of control, like the one required by scientific production, must obviously be a peer (Ouchi and Dowling 1974; van Fleet and Bedeian 1977). Only a person conversant with the scholarly domain where discoveries are sought will be qualified to gauge the value of the output produced. Often, such a peer will be distinguished by seniority and a proven track record in a cognate area of expertise. Although effective at overseeing puzzle-out scientific discoveries, these line managers can stand in the way of back-into scientific breakthroughs because the violation of paradigm-induced anticipations is maximal in the latter. Kuhn’s (1962/1996) obstacles to scientific revolutions fully apply here. Thirdly, the supervisory task is a complex one, as opposed to what is expected when output is highly standardized. Because the practice of scientific discovery is

Table 3 Propitious and unpropitious organizational layouts for the genesis of scientific discoveries ORGANIZATIONAL BUILDING BLOCKS Span of control Line manager Supervisory task Type of evaluation Technostructure Type of knowledge Degree of ordinality Efficiency Divisional performance evaluation system

PROPITIOUS FOR DISCOVERIES Narrow Seasoned academic Complex Qualitative Small or nonexistent Specific Low Low Expense center

UNPROPITIOUS FOR DISCOVERIES Wide Professor by administration Simple Quantitative Large and sophisticated General High High Cost center

15

No Organizations for Today’s Einsteins

301

unlikely to be reduced to a series of sharply defined and measurable steps, neither can the work process be costlessly monitored nor can the output be anticipated. Thus, supervision is atypical, losing its instrumental and top-down nature. Fourthly, a certain type of evaluation follows naturally from an atypical, as opposed to a standardized, supervisory task (Jensen and Meckling 1998b; Brickley et al. 2016). Accordingly, such an evaluation can only be qualitative because, in the absence of easy-to-measure attributes characterizing the practice of scientific discovery, managers are left with no sharply defined steps to quantify. Fifthly, it follows that the organization’s technostructure is small or nonexistent. The technostructure is the place in an organization where work processes are formalized or standardized to facilitate planning and control (Mintzberg 1979). Since the practice of scientific discovery revolves around the substantive aspects of a scholarly domain, it is intensive in costly specific knowledge that remains within the purview of scientists alone and, therefore, it is impossible to be grasped by administrative staff for control purposes. There is, however, a minimal degree of control for housekeeping purposes, which concerns the nonscientific aspects of the job. Sixthly, the knowledge required in the practice of scientific discovery is highly specific, which is very costly to transfer from staff to higher supervisory levels employing performance evaluation systems. The latter are often built on the assumption that either work processes or outputs are quantifiable, thus reducing the cost of transferring knowledge. However, such transfer is in fact very costly, given the specific nature of scientific knowledge (Jensen and Meckling 1998b). Seventhly, the degree of ordinality of the practice of scientific discovery is very low or negligible, because there is no straightforward concomitance between the measurement of the tasks and outputs involved (e.g., the number of articles published in dedicated outlets, the amount of research funding attracted, citation counts, etc.) and the natural structure of the practice of discovering. On that account, any performance measure would instead have weak additive properties (Milgrom and Roberts 1992; Michell 2002), which calls into question comparisons between academic staff undertaken to inform tenure and redundancy decisions. Eighthly, this organization is not designed to achieve efficiency, understood as the means to maximize the production of cost objects within the range of remuneration of scientists or, conversely, to minimize the cost of production per cost object (Zimmerman 2011). The root of the inefficiency of this structure lies in the lack of standardization of the scientific practice and the high uncertainty of discoveries to come. Moreover, the high cost of communication (Perrow 1970; Mintzberg 1979) is another source of inefficiency in puzzle-out discoveries of the experimental kind, because they require projects that involve the cooperation of a large number of scientists, such as the case of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory mentioned earlier. Ninthly, all of the above aspects converge toward the application of a very specific kind of performance evaluation system, namely, an expense center, which is suitable for organizations (or their sub-units) whose production does not lend itself easily to measurement (Zimmerman 2011; Brickley et al. 2016). If imperfect proxies

302

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

are used to substitute for the abstruse inferential process of discovering or its uncertain output, a low degree of ordinality obtains and scientists may be tempted to achieve proxy measures by any means, including scientific misconduct, hence falling short of the intended objectives of the scientific pursuit. This organizational layout makes highly uncertain scientific discoveries possible because scientists can then invest their lives in mastering the scientific method, confident that their outputs are not to be stacked up against competitors in a tournament adjudicated by imperfect proxies for scientific production that are easier to fulfill. This has been understood by some of the most innovative corporations that shield specific human assets, i.e., scientists and engineers, from the high-powered incentives implemented somewhere else in the corporation (Williamson 1985, 1991). It is the case of the longstanding IBM Fellows program, for instance, which gives the company’s knowledge-oriented employees broad latitude to work on projects of their choosing. As a result, IBM fellows have been awarded five Turing Awards and five Nobel Prizes (IBM 2019). Google was also a case in point. In its heyday, the company implemented a 20%time policy that is credited for its employees having developed Gmail, AdSense, and other innovative products. It consisted in allowing employees to work 1 day a week without formal oversight on a side project of their choosing (Mims 2013). The pressures to keep up with profitability once a firm is past its IPO, however, has long since pushed corporations to explore alternatives, such as acquiring part of the shares of small, highly innovative firms without fully consummating a merger. As revealed in 1984, when General Motors bought equity in Teknowledge, “[i]f we purchased such a company outright, we would kill the goose that laid the golden egg” (cited in Williamson 1985, p. 159).

Discussion: The Inherent Suboptimality of Real-World Organizational Layouts The most propitious organizational structures for scientific discoveries are confronted with a paradoxical trade-off between employee discretion and personal responsibility. That is, such structures foster hospitable conditions for musing and introspection by way of placing the exercise of a considerable degree of judgment in the hands of employees and away from the formal line of command. But the discretion that individual judgment allows for requires a great deal of personal responsibility, or else slack and opportunistic behavior can get in the way of scientific discoveries. Even if our account were correct and output standardization were likely to prevent today’s universities from fostering scientific discoveries, the twentieth-century university, despite having a more favorable organizational layout, has bred conditions for slack and opportunistic behavior in the form of academic inbreeding and lack of meritocracy. These problems have been acknowledged and may have been carried over the turn of the century, crossing geographical and cultural frontiers.

15

No Organizations for Today’s Einsteins

303

In Northern Europe, for instance, Warodell et al. (2017) have found that in Sweden a sizable number of faculty positions were granted without being publicly advertised, despite legal rules to the contrary, and that 60% of Swedish faculty were employed by their alma mater, a figure that reached 80% at one of the largest departments of the University of Gothenburg. Similarly, at the University of Oslo’s Faculty of Social Sciences, four of every five PhD fellows had been trained at the same university (Enge and Skjong 2012). At the Southern end of the continent, seven university professors were recently arrested in Italy, after they were recorded colluding to forge examination results to appoint their team-mates (Kington 2017). Stratagems serving similar ends have been denounced in Spain, where a foreign academic was excluded from an apparently competitive selection process for not bringing to the interview his lifetime’s work in print, according to an unwritten rule that served the interests of insiders (Matthews 2017). In the light of this paradox, output standardization has an advantage over the qualitative evaluation of scientific output. That is, insofar as the discretion to attain objective measures resides with academic staff and not with their line managers, output standardization increases the apparent objectivity of performance evaluation (Adler and Harzing 2009), which can help to prevent politicking or the capture of managers to bias their assessment. As long as objective measures – let us say, the number of publications in dedicated peer-reviewed journals – are not under the control of managers, how they personally feel toward scientists or their research is immaterial for performance evaluation purposes. It must be noted, however, that this increase in the objectivity of performance evaluation is only apparent. Confusing actual, measurable objectives for intended objectives is precisely at the root of organizational structures that do away with hospitable conditions for scientific discoveries. We can only speculate that the adoption of objective performance evaluation systems at universities and business schools, and the concomitant changes in their organizational structures, stem from a thirst for achieving optimal solutions, which drives policy advice grounded on neoclassical economics. For instance, drawing from that tradition, Lacetera and Zirulia (2011) posit that: [S]tronger pressure to publish in order to obtain promotions and funds may reduce, and not increase, scientific misconduct as it stimulates more monitoring. (p. 572)

This is contrary to the present chapter’s conclusion, namely, that scientific misconduct is likely to result from a shift of attention from discoveries to proxy measures implemented under strong pressure to publish. Similarly, Bénabou and Tirole (2016) submit that: [O]nline tools allowing instant counts of researchers’ publications and citations all arguably raise high-ability agents’ productivity advantage. . . (p. 340)

On the contrary, the present chapter has argued that to blindly bank on actual, measurable objectives in scientific production is to mistake imperfect proxies for the

304

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

intended objectives of the scientific pursuit. This claim is supported by evidence that scientists are increasingly tampering with citation counts (Van Noorden and Chawla 2019; Baccini et al. 2019). It transpires that there is an incongruity in the neoclassical account of incentives inside organizations where scientists do not have the power to alienate decision rights (Jensen and Meckling 1998b), that is, in the absence of markets inside the organizational spaces that house scientists. Such an incongruity has been, however, tackled by organizational economics, which advises against the extension of highpowered, market-like incentives inside organizations to prevent asset misutilization4 (Williamson 1985). Thus, instead of aiming at parsimonious optimal solutions to the problem of inbreeding and lack of meritocracy that the twentieth-century university arguably bred, organizational economics invites us to recognize the inherent suboptimality of real-world organizational layouts. That is, not all inefficiencies are remediable, and often imperfect organizational responses offer the best feasible solution given the circumstances (Williamson and Bercovitz 1996). If traditional universities were inefficient when seen from a neoclassical perspective, the new organizational layout of universities fostering output standardization does not lack shortcomings either, for it has engendered a dynamic that rewards methods and practices for securing the fulfillment of proxy measures, irrespective of how consequential they are for scientific discoveries, which is analogous to a detrimental evolutionary dynamic (Smaldino and McElreath 2016). If the trend is not reversed, it can be expected that scientific production will suffer from the same problem that afflicts occupations built on highly specific human assets when exposed to market-like, high-powered incentives. That is, because such assets are productive only in a narrow occupational niche, their exit options are limited and they cannot be redeployed costlessly, which causes divestment in those occupations unless they are protected (Williamson 1985, 1991; Milgrom and Roberts 1992). Hence, few will be willing to invest in mastering the scientific method if in doing so the odds are stacked against scientists when tenure and redundancy decisions are made.

Conclusion Kuhn’s (1962/1996) normal science consists in puzzling out novel test implications from extant theory in a deductive fashion, leading thus to the so-called puzzle-out scientific discoveries (Hanson 1967). On the other hand, Kuhn’s (1962/1996) revolutionary science consists in thinking backward into the plausible causes of surprising facts left unexplained by extant theory, thus leading to the so-called back-into scientific discoveries (Hanson 1967). Although back-into scientific discoveries warrant a higher degree of creativity because they require 4

ibid.

15

No Organizations for Today’s Einsteins

305

venturing into unexplored terrain without the help of deductive inferences, puzzle-out scientific discoveries are not less demanding, let alone error-proof, because there is always a possibility for deductive inferences to be falsified (Popper 2002). Both kinds of discoveries call for musing and introspection, which can be thwarted by performance evaluation systems and their corresponding organizational structures if they rely on objective measures of an often short time span for the evaluation of academic staff performance (e.g., number of articles published in dedicated outlets, amount of research funding attracted, number of citations, etc.), thereby assuming a degree of ordinality which is not present. It is therefore inappropriate for such measures to inform tenure or redundancy decisions. The organizational structures that are most likely to foster scientific discoveries are those that encourage scientists to focus on the hard-to-measure dimensions of the problem-solving process involved in the scientific inquiry, without which the intended objectives of the scientific pursuit will be missed. Conversely, organizational structures can contribute to heightening the scientist’s human cognitive mechanisms that tend to crowd out the hard-to-measure dimensions of the scientific pursuit. Organizations that house scientific production can either mute or exacerbate the cognitive mechanisms that defeat scientific discoveries, pushing scientists to narrowly focus on the easy-to-measure dimensions of their practice to avoid the frustration of missing the solution to a problem. Thus, the organizations that are most propitious for scientific discoveries consist of functional units with a narrow span of control, where the complexity of the supervisory task is high because of the specific kind of knowledge involved in scientific production. Hence, line managers are seasoned academics able to qualitatively gauge the value of the output produced. Such an output can hardly be reduced to a quantitative unit and therefore cannot be standardized. This, in turn, prevents straightforward comparisons between staff and between functional units, reducing the efficiency of the organization. This much Mintzberg (1979) did not unravel when hinting at the link between organizational structures and Kuhn’s (1962/1996) normal versus revolutionary science. This description corresponds to departmentalized organizations with expense center performance evaluation systems and an unsophisticated technostructure, mostly found in universities typically organized as professional bureaucracies perhaps with adhocratic characteristics, but also in some corporations punctuated by spaces shielded from the high-powered incentives that drive other parts of the corporation. Skepticism about the capacity of today’s universities to foster the progress of science is thus commensurate with the extent to which they have distanced themselves from the organizational layout just outlined. A departure from suitable organizational structures is attested by increasing steps toward the standardization of scientific output through imperfect proxy measures, brought out by university and journal rankings, government policies for the allocation of budgets on a competitive basis, accreditation labels, and, more generally, a publish-or-perish culture.

306

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

Cross-References ▶ Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics ▶ Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics

References Adler NJ, Harzing A-W (2009) When knowledge wins: transcending the sense and nonsense of academic rankings. Acad Manag Learn Educ 8:72–95. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2009. 37012181 Aitkenhead D (2013) Peter Higgs: I wouldn’t be productive enough for today’s academic system. In: Guard. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-sys tem. Accessed 20 Aug 2020 Baccini A, De Nicolao G, Petrovich E (2019) Citation gaming induced by bibliometric evaluation: a country-level comparative analysis. PLoS One 14:1–16. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone. 0221212 Baker GP, Jensen MC, Murphy KJ (1988) Compensation and incentives: practice vs. theory. J Finance 43:593–616. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1988.tb04593.x Beardsley S, Hills S (2017) Can non-academics make good university leaders? In: Timeshighereducation.com. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/can-non-academics-makegood-university-leaders. Accessed 16 Sept 2019 Bénabou R, Tirole J (2016) Bonus culture: competitive pay, screening, and multitasking. J Polit Econ 124:305–370. https://doi.org/10.1086/684853 Blau PM (1968) The hierarchy of authority in organizations. Am J Sociol 73:453–467. https://doi. org/10.1086/224506 Brickley JA, Smith CW, Zimmerman JL (2016) Managerial economics and organizational architecture, 6th edn. McGraw-Hill Education, New York Eichenwald K (2012) Microsoft’s lost decade. In: Vanity Fair. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/ business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer?currentPage¼all#. Accessed 26 Nov 2019 Enge C, Skjong HJ (2012) PhD “inbreeding” at the Faculty of Social Sciences. In: Universitas.no. https://universitas.no/nett/57066/phd-inbreeding-at-the-faculty-of-social-sciences/. Accessed 19 Feb 2020 Etzioni A (1959) Authority structure and organizational effectiveness. Adm Sci Q 4:43–67. https:// doi.org/10.2307/2390648 European Space Agency (n.d.) What is “red shift”? https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/ Space_Science/What_is_red_shift. Accessed 13 Nov 2019 Gless É (2014) Ipag: les secrets d’une progression “fulgurante” en recherche. In: EducPros L’Etudiant. https://www.letudiant.fr/educpros/enquetes/ipag-les-secrets-d-une-progressionfulgurante-en-recherche.html. Accessed 31 Mar 2020 Grove J (2016) Does the REF motivate or discourage research staff? In: Timeshighereducation.com. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/does-ref-motivate-or-discourage-research-staff. Accessed 28 Mar 2020 Grove J (2017) Do great minds think alike? The THE/Lindau Nobel Laureates Survey. In: Timeshighereducation.com. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/do-greatminds-think-alike-the-the-lindau-nobel-laureates-survey. Accessed 7 Dec 2019 Hannaway J (1992) Higher order skills, job design, and incentives: an analysis and proposal. Am Educ Res J 29:3–21. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312029001003 Hanson NR (1967) An anatomy of discovery. J Philos 64:321–352. https://doi.org/10.2307/ 2024301

15

No Organizations for Today’s Einsteins

307

Hanson NR (2010) Patterns of discovery. An inquiry into the conceptual foundations of science. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Harré R (1970) The principles of scientific thinking. Palgrave Macmillan, London/Basingstoke Hempel C (1966) The philosophy of natural science. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs Hesse MB (1953) Models in physics. Br J Philos Sci 4:198–214 Holmstrom B, Milgrom P (1991) Multitask principal-agent analyses: incentive contracts, asset ownership, and job design. J Law Econ Organ 7:24–52. https://doi.org/10.1093/jleo/7.special_issue.24 IBM (2019) IMB fellows. https://www.ibm.com/ibm/ideasfromibm/us/ibm_fellows/. Accessed 28 Feb 2020 Janssen M (2002) The Einstein-Besso manuscript: a glimpse behind the curtain of the wizard. In: Freshman colloquium: introduction to the arts and science. The University of Minnesota, pp 1–16 Jensen MC, Meckling WH (1998a) Specific and general knowledge and organizational structure. In: Jensen MC (ed) Foundations of organizational strategy. Harvard University Press, Cambridge/London, pp 103–149 Jensen MC, Meckling WH (1998b) Divisional performance measurement. In: Jensen MC (ed) Foundations of organizational strategy. Harvard University Press, Cambridge/London, pp 345–361 Kerr S (1975) On the folly of rewarding a, while hoping for B. Acad Manag J 18:769–783. https:// doi.org/10.5465/255378 Kington T (2017) Seven professors arrested in Florence university nepotism row. In: The Times. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/seven-professors-arrested-in-florence-university-nepotismrow-xjv5fj8dn. Accessed 19 Feb 2020 Kuhn TS (1962/1996) The structure of scientific revolutions, 3rd edn. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago/London Lacetera N, Zirulia L (2011) The economics of scientific misconduct. J Law Econ Organ 27: 568–603. https://doi.org/10.1093/jleo/ewp031 Levenson T (2015) The hunt for Vulcan, 1st edn. Random House, New York Lipton P (2004) Inference to the best explanation, 2nd edn. Routledge, London/New York March J, Simon HA (1993) Organizations, 2nd edn. Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge/Oxford, UK Matthews D (2017) Lecturer barred from job interview “for not bringing life’s work.” In: Timeshighereducation.com. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/lecturer-barred-jobinterview-not-bringing-lifes-work. Accessed 19 Feb 2020 McDonagh M (2015) How come our cash-strapped universities can afford so many administrators? In: Spect. https://www.spectator.com.au/2015/06/how-come-our-cash-strapped-universitiescan-afford-so-many-administrators/. Accessed 6 Dec 2017 Michell J (2002) Stevens’s theory of scales of measurement and its place in modern psychology. Aust J Psychol 54:99–104. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049530210001706563 Milgrom P, Roberts J (1992) Economics, organization and management. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs Mims C (2013) Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead. In: Quartz. https://qz.com/115831/googles-20-time-which-brought-you-gmail-andadsense-is-now-as-good-as-dead/. Accessed 15 Aug 2020 Mintzberg H (1979) The structuring of organizations: a synthesis of the research. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs Mintzberg H (1980) Structure in 5’s: a synthesis of the research on organization design. Manag Sci 26:322–341. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.26.3.322 Mintzberg H (1993) Structure in five. Designing effective organizations. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs Oppel RAJ, Goodnough A (2014) Doctor shortage is cited in delays at V.A. Hospitals. New York Times Ouchi WG (1977) The relationship between organizational structure and organizational control. Adm Sci Q 22:95–113. https://doi.org/10.2307/2391748

308

A. Agafonow and M. Perez

Ouchi WG (1978) The transmission of control through organizational hierarchy. Acad Manag J 21:173–192. https://doi.org/10.5465/255753 Ouchi WG (1979) A conceptual framework for the design of organizational control mechanisms. Manag Sci 25:833–848. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.25.9.833 Ouchi WG, Dowling JB (1974) Defining the span of control. Adm Sci Q 19:357–365 Peirce CS (1955) Abduction and induction. In: Buchler J (ed) Philosophical writings of Peirce. Dover Publications, Mineola, pp 150–156 Pells R (2018) REF cycles ‘force academics to rush out poorer quality research.’ In: Timeshighereducation.com. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ref-cycles-force-academics-rushout-poorer-quality-research. Accessed 28 Mar 2020 Perrow CB (1970) Organizational analysis: a sociological view. Wadsworth, Belmont Popper KR (2002) Conjectures and refutations. The growth of scientific knowledge, 3rd edn. Routledge, London/New York Popper KR (2005) The logic of scientific discovery. Taylor & Francis e-Library, London/New York Schrader DE (2006) The corporation as anomaly. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Simon HA (1996) The sciences of the artificial, 3rd edn. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA/London, UK Smaldino PE, McElreath R (2016) The natural selection of bad science. R Soc Open Sci 3:1–17. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.160384 The Economist (2018) The rise of universities’ diversity bureaucrats. In: Econ. https://www. economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/05/08/the-rise-of-universities-diversity-bureau crats. Accessed 6 Dec 2019 The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2017) The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics – Press release. In: Nobel Media. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2017/press-release/. Accessed 2 Dec 2019 van Fleet DD, Bedeian AG (1977) A history of the span of management. Acad Manag Rev 2:356–372. https://doi.org/10.2307/257693 Van Noorden R, Chawla DS (2019) Policing self-citations. Nature 572:578–579. https://doi.org/10. 1038/d41586-019-02479-7 Warodell JA, Olsson EJ, Almäng J (2017) Swedish academia is no meritocracy. In: Timeshighereducation.com. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/swedish-academia-is-no-meri tocracy. Accessed 19 Feb 2020 Weick KE (1976) Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems. Adm Sci Q 21:1–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/2391875 Williamson OE (1985) The economic institutions of capitalism. Firms, markets, relational contracting. The Free Press/Collier Macmillan Publisher, New York/London Williamson OE (1991) Comparative economic organization: the analysis of discrete structural alternatives. Adm Sci Q 36:269–296. https://doi.org/10.2307/2393356 Williamson OE, Bercovitz J (1996) The modern corporation as an efficiency instrument: the comparative contracting perspective. In: Kaysen C (ed) The American corporation today. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 327–359 Wilson D (2016) Ersatz professors should be booed off the stage. In: Timeshighereducation.com. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/ersatz-professors-should-be-booed-off-thestage. Accessed 22 Oct 2019 Wolff B (2016) The Nobel Prize in Physics 1921 – what happened to the prize money? In: Albert Einstein World Wide Web. https://www.einstein-website.de/z_information/nobelprizemoney. html. Accessed 27 Nov 2019 Young NS, Ioannidis JPA, Al-Ubaydli O (2008) Why current publication practices may distort science. PLoS Med 5:1–19. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050201 Zimmerman JL (2011) Accounting for decision making and control, 7th edn. McGraw-Hill Irwin, New York

The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder: Implications for the Social Sciences and Management Practice

16

Jerome C. Wakefield and Jordan A. Conrad

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Importance of “Disorder” as a Conceptual Foundation for the Mental Health Profession . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Importance of “Disorder” for the Management of Psychiatric Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . Szasz’s Attack on the Concept of Mental Disorder and Why It Failed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conceptual Analysis and the Essentialist Nature of Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Value Versus Scientific Views of Disorder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The HDA and the Social Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Implications for the Management of Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

310 311 314 316 317 319 322 325 327 328 329 329

Abstract

Psychiatry has long been criticized for being a pseudoscientific discipline masquerading as a genuine medical field because the meaning of its central concept, “mental disorder,” was imprecise and subject to mistaken “false positive” diagnoses of non-disordered conditions as disorders. In response, philosophers have analyzed the concept of mental disorder to establish its legitimacy and clarify the distinction between genuine disorder versus nonclinical distress or social deviance. The most cited such analysis by mental health professionals is the harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA), which holds that a J. C. Wakefield (*) Center for Bioethics and Silver School of Social Work, New York University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: jerome.wakefi[email protected] J. A. Conrad Institute of Philosophy, Katholiek Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium Center for Bioethics, New York University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_44

309

310

J. C. Wakefield and J. A. Conrad

disorder consists of the failure of some internal mechanism to perform a function for which it was naturally selected, and this failure causes direct harm to the individual as judged by social values. The HDA reflects essentialist analyses of meaning in philosophy of language, which anchor meaning in inferred causal processes rather than observable properties, and evolutionary conceptions of biological design in philosophy of biology. The analytical strategies used by psychiatry to justify its status as a legitimate branch of medicine and understand its key concept of “mental disorder” hold lessons for the broader social sciences and for management practice. Many social science concepts, from personality and racial prejudice to broader organizational concepts such as “social enterprise,” are best understood by looking beyond superficial properties to deeper structural properties in order to distinguish genuine from nongenuine instances of the concept. Keywords

Philosophy of psychiatry · Philosophy of biology · Function · Harmful dysfunction analysis · False positive · Concept · Disorder · Essentialism · Dysfunction · Philosophy of management

Introduction Over the last 50 years or so, there has been a vigorous multidisciplinary debate about the concept of mental disorder that is at the foundation of psychiatric diagnosis. The need for a conceptual analysis of “mental disorder” became urgent above all due to the antipsychiatry movement that rose to prominence in the 1960s and directly challenged the legitimacy and conceptual coherence of psychiatry as a medical discipline. Antipsychiatric arguments ranged from Thomas Szasz’s (1974) critique of the “myth of mental illness” and R.D. Laing’s (1967) argument that schizophrenia is a normal reaction to abnormal family environments (both from within psychiatry itself) to sociologist Thomas Scheff’s (1966) labeling theory of diagnosis and historian-ofideas Michel Foucault’s (1965) “history of madness” portraying mental disorder as a socially constructed category. In response, philosophers of psychiatry attempted to provide an adequate account of medical disorder that legitimized the medical status of psychiatry by establishing the coherence of the concept of mental disorder. The key challenge was the false positives problem of how to distinguish genuine mental disorders from normal disvalued conditions that may superficially resemble mental disorders due to shared symptoms, such as problems of living, normal-range distress, and social deviance. Concern about a tidal wave of false positives (Wakefield 2013, 2015, 2016b), which was the major issue in the intense disputes surrounding the publication of DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association 2013), was expressed vividly by Allen Frances, the editor of an earlier DSM edition, as follows: DSM-5 will turn temper tantrums into a mental disorder. . ..Normal grief will become Major Depressive Disorder. . ..The everyday forgetting characteristic of old age will now be misdiagnosed. . .creating a huge false positive population. . ..Excessive eating 12 times in 3 months is no longer just a manifestation of gluttony and the easy availability of really great

16

The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder: Implications for the. . .

311

tasting food. DSM-5 has instead turned it into a psychiatric illness. . ..Many millions of people with normal grief, gluttony, distractibility, worries, reactions to stress, the temper tantrums of childhood, the forgetting of old age, and “behavioral addictions” will soon be mislabeled as psychiatrically sick. (Frances 2012)

The prudent management of psychiatric and medical practices and welfare institutions obviously depends on being able to accurately draw a conceptually anchored distinction between mental disorder and normal forms of distress. However, such challenges are not unique to psychiatry and apply to management practices in general. False positives are problems in all sciences and practices aiming at precision in analysis and the identification of true cases among potentially similar but false cases. The issue of false positives poses a particularly difficult challenge for social sciences; without a principled way to determine genuine instances of the studied subject matter from lookalikes (e.g., gold vs fools-gold, depression vs sadness, social enterprises vs commercial business), the legitimacy of the field itself is threatened. Within philosophy of management, the issue of false positives emerges, for example, in identifying various organizational types, including those with the mission to improve society (i.e., social enterprises) and which may be deserving of public resources on those grounds. Being able to distinguish a genuine social enterprise on conceptual grounds from a company that simply mimics its effects is therefore a matter of public interest and may be the focus of philosophers of management. False positives are not unique to psychiatry, but philosophy of psychiatry has found a way out that may be instructive to management sciences. The most widely accepted solution to this challenge in the mental health professions is Jerome Wakefield’s (1992a, b, 2007) harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA), a conceptual analysis of “medical disorder” that applies to both physical and psychological conditions. The HDA rests on elements from several areas of philosophy, including philosophy of medicine, philosophy of biology, philosophy of language, and value theory. In this chapter, we review the HDA and the central insights that led to it. We suggest that what was learned in arriving at the HDA has potential application to challenges of achieving conceptual clarity in other areas of the social sciences, including philosophy of management.

The Importance of “Disorder” as a Conceptual Foundation for the Mental Health Profession The importance of having an adequately worked out concept of disorder that avoids false positives may not be immediately appreciated by those outside the mental health professions. As psychiatry increasingly expanded from institutional care into the community with all its stressors and distress, the problem of distinguishing disorder from nondisorder became critical. The distinction between disorder and other forms of distress and socially stigmatized behavior is important for treatment and hospitalization decisions, policy and funding opportunities, forensic purposes (ranging from the “insanity” defense to sexual predator laws that allow indefinite incarceration for those with certain mental disorders), prognostic

312

J. C. Wakefield and J. A. Conrad

projections, practical and judicial decision making (e.g., ranging from life insurance issuance decisions and removal of children from a family’s home to the awarding of custody of children in divorce actions) and in social attitudes expressed in everyday life. Despite the power vested in the concept of mental disorder, it is a controversial concept that has traditionally been ill-defined, and the lack of principled or uniform ways to make diagnostic judgments allowed different schools of psychiatric thought or geographical locales to use their own, mutually incommensurable, criteria. This made research comparisons among rival perspectives difficult or impossible. Concerns about diagnostic unreliability increased when a US-UK study revealed that schizophrenia was diagnosed much more frequently in America than in the United Kingdom due to looser US diagnostic criteria (Zubin and Gurland 1977). Similarly high levels of diagnostic unreliability emerged among US mental health professionals who, presented with the same clinical evidence, often reached very different diagnostic conclusions. More disturbing than diagnostic unreliability was the fact that the undefined nature of mental disorder made it easier to create entirely bogus diagnoses for oppressive social purposes. As Michel Foucault (1965) has argued, social science theories are often weak in terms of scientific evidential support and explanatory power, but they may be accepted nonetheless because they cohere with a society’s values and goals. This includes theories of mental disorder and the diagnostic practices that psychiatrists use in distinguishing mental disorders from normal distress and social deviance. The rapid advancements that physical medicine has made in modern times can be sharply contrasted with the continued uncertainty about both the effective treatment and etiology of psychiatric illnesses which, due to the paucity of etiological information, are generally distinguished just by their symptomology. As a result, it is quite possible to confuse normal-range conditions that are socially problematic with mental disorders that have similar symptoms. The potential error of attributing the label “mental disorder” to normal-range difficulties yields the central problem of “false positives” – that is, mistakenly labeling various kinds of problems of living that are not in fact disorders as mental disorders. As Foucault and others have observed, such a lack of clarity in disorder attributions, as when socially deviant people are mislabeled disordered, can become a mechanism of social control in which society enforces its values by portraying local cultural norms not as cultural impositions but as universal standards of health with an objective basis in human nature. Examples of disorder-as-social-control abound in the literature and include the Soviet Union’s diagnosis of political dissidents as having “sluggish schizophrenia” that was treated by institutionalization, medication, and forced labor; Victorian beliefs that masturbation and female clitoral orgasm were pathologies, with surgeries performed to end these symptoms; and the antebellum South’s proposed diagnosis of “drapetomania,” a supposed disease of enslaved people who attempt to run away from their enslavement. Given these historical abuses, an adequate account of the concept of medical, including mental, disorder was urgently needed to defend the field from charges of being a pseudoscientific agent of social control. The antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Foucault 1965; Scheff 1966; Szasz 1974)

16

The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder: Implications for the. . .

313

viewed all diagnoses as an equally bogus exercise of medical power in the service of controlling socially disapproved behavior and reinforcing prevailing social values. Indeed, they charged that labeling a psychological condition as a “mental disorder” indicated that it was socially disvalued and little else. Moreover, the antipsychiatrists were joined in their skepticism about mental disorders as medical disorders by the influential American behaviorist movement. Behaviorists, although inside the mental health system, viewed all behavior, even seemingly abnormal behavior, as the lawful outcome of normal learning processes due to previous experience. No matter how unusual or socially undesirable an individual’s behavior might be, it was a normal outcome of the laws of learning and did not indicate anything medically wrong with the individual, although it might be unusual because of unusual environmental stimuli. Consequently, behaviorists denied that there are mental disorders in a medical sense and considered mental disorders to be any socially disapproved behavior that warranted change efforts. Aside from such challenges, psychiatry’s need to distinguish disorder from nondisorder was exacerbated by its own growing success in developing psychoactive medications to treat mental disorders. In some areas, this led to seeming miracles, such as the use of the anti-psychotic chlorpromazine to empty mental institutions of hundreds of thousands of indefinitely incarcerated individuals. In addition, the development of lithium for treating bipolar disorder, benzodiazepines for anxiety, and the tricyclics for depression gave new hope to millions suffering from mental disorders. However, in some cases neither the medications nor the physicians prescribing them respected the boundary between disorder and normal-range distress. For example, antianxiety medications were so widely prescribed that the Rolling Stones were able to satirize the situation, singing of a yellow pill that is “mother’s little helper” and that, although she is not ill, she takes to get through her day – somewhat analogous to the widespread use of antidepressant and sleep medication today. The situation was so out of control that Congress stepped in and passed legislation requiring that drug approvals could only be given for medications that addressed legitimate biomedical conditions – that is, disorders. An additional immediate trigger for attention to the concept of mental disorder was the activism of the gay rights movement that objected to homosexuality being classified as a mental disorder. The consideration of eliminating homosexuality from the classification of mental disorders by Robert Spitzer (1981) – the originator of the modern symptom-based DSM system of diagnosis – led to serious re-consideration of the concept of disorder. Similar issues have arisen in the current neurodiversity movement (Wakefield et al. 2020). A further problem with any antipsychiatric view that denies the reality of mental disorder is that it allows no room for improvement. If there is no truth about what is a mental disorder, then any set of criteria is equally incorrect. Thus, people complained that Foucault’s blanket criticism that transformed diagnosis into the exercise of power left “no place to stand” to mount constructive criticism of psychiatry and suggest improvements in diagnostic criteria.

314

J. C. Wakefield and J. A. Conrad

The Importance of “Disorder” for the Management of Psychiatric Organizations Conceptual clarification is not solely an intellectual exercise. Clarifying category boundaries and distinctions has direct implications for management. Thus, in addition to refuting the antipsychiatric claim that psychiatry utilizes diagnoses as a means of social control, and thereby legitimizing the mental health field, having a coherent account of “disorder” has a tremendous impact on the practical and organizational components of the health field. Firstly, false positives are a serious threat to the validity of scientific research and thus to treatment progress, and so false positives impact the administration and evaluation of research. If one wants to study disorders to establish their etiology and effective treatments, one has to have reasonably homogeneous samples based on more than superficially similar symptoms. Importantly, one does not want the sample to include some disorders and some normal life problems. If due to false positives one’s research sample for testing a treatment in fact consist of mixes of superficially similar disordered and normally distressed individuals – for example, people who are sad because they just lost someone close to them and people who are sad for no reason but because they have a brain dysfunction – the implications of the results for treating the disordered will be uninterpretable. False positives that mistake superficial commonalities with deeper etiological commonalities undermine the scientific, clinical, and social usefulness of the research wing of mental health fields. Secondly, as touched upon above, without a stable conceptual foundation there can be no principled way to adjudicate disagreements about disorder attributions among clinicians, so diagnosticians operating in different parts of the country (or even different parts of the same facility) could not be relied upon to come to the same conclusions about identical cases. At the systems level, this means that the personal and provincial biases of psychiatrists could determine the content of a disorder and affect epidemiological research. This was in fact what happened in the 1840 US census that attempted to develop prevalence statistics on disorder for the Black population. They found far greater percentages of disorder among Northern free Black people than in Southern enslaved Black people, reinforcing the view that civilization had a deleterious effect on mental health and that Black people were not psychologically equipped for freedom. In fact, Southern slaveowners, who were required to attend to the physical and mental health of their charges, were unwilling to identify those they enslaved as disordered, as that would require that they be admitted into treatment facilities which would undercut the financial benefit of slavery (Conrad 2020). Conceptual unclarity around “disorder” can thus yield an “anything goes” approach to diagnosis, resulting in epidemiological chaos and unreliable prevalence rates. Thirdly, without the ability to distinguish normal-range human experiences from disorders, society’s ability to address adverse social conditions that produce negative mental states is sharply diminished. Psychiatry recognizes depression, for example, as a significant cause of welfare dependence, substance use, and poverty and so treatments for these issues often involve addressing the depression first and only then

16

The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder: Implications for the. . .

315

working to overcome these other challenges. However, normal intense sadness is more likely to be the result rather than cause of these social problems. Failing to recognize that would not only misalign treatment goals but provide a barrier to addressing genuine social issues and enacting social reforms to address them. The importance of this is most visible when a natural disaster, war, or masstrauma event occurs and psychological distress predominates in that area. During these times, disorder rates appear to climb precipitously and clinicians are encouraged to travel to help address the psychological needs of the affected communities. However, as in the example above, one must understand whether psychological distress is a normal response to a traumatic event or if it is a disordered response – if the former, then what must be addressed first and foremost is the event which resulted in the distressed state, not the distressed state itself. Conceptual ambiguity can conceal that fact, leading to resource misallocation by prioritizing mental health treatments instead of material provisions (e.g., food, housing, physical medical needs). For these reasons, the conceptual analysis presented above has been influential in leading the World Health Organization to draw various distinctions in its guidelines for the management of resource allocation when responding to natural disasters (WHO 2015). Fourthly, the uncertainty of what qualifies as genuinely disordered behavior affects how one is perceived and treated, which can interfere with the functioning of various institutional operations. Individuals may mistake their own normal-range conditions for disordered states and pursue unnecessary medical interventions, for example, and institutional authorities (e.g., school personnel, psychiatric inpatient staff, prison guards, lawyers, and judges) may identify disruptive behavior as evidence of a disorder demanding psychiatric intervention. In the case of schools, children may be held back or their educational needs may not be addressed because the identified issues are assumed to be endogenous features of the child’s functioning rather than exogenous educational features such as instruction failures or classroom layout; in the case of psychiatric inpatient staff and prison guards, such behavior may cause patients/prisoners to receive more restrictive care than is needed, curtailing their rights and taxing institutional resources; and within the legal system, not only may criminals who offended as a result of some disorder be placed within a nonpsychiatric criminal institution, relegating them to a punitive rather than rehabilitative facility, but nondisordered offenders may spend years within a psychiatric institution in addition to their criminal sentence when no additional institutionalization is warranted. Such lack of clarity around the concept of “disorder,” and the entailing uncertainty around who has a specific disorder, threatens to expend valuable medical resources on nondisordered patients and to drastically circumscribe the range of acceptable human behavior by those being supervised by authorities. Finally, a fifth way that a principled distinction between disordered and nondisordered conditions of distress impacts organizational and systems-level functioning is that it permits effective allocation of resources. As we have seen, failing to discriminate false positives results in epidemiological errors, social stigmatization, personal (nonprofessional) diagnosis, and the potentially erroneous prioritization of

316

J. C. Wakefield and J. A. Conrad

mental health needs over the physical health needs that cause them. Each of these errors threatens to use various institutions’ limited resources to treat issues that could be better addressed in other ways. Research shows that whether a condition is considered a disorder influences treatment choice and the actions taken by clinicians and managers. Accuracy in these judgments can preserve scarce resources for those who most need them. Moreover, conceptual confusion can yield such inflated needs estimates that they demoralize funders. In short, without a principled way to distinguish false positives from genuine disorder, the entire enterprise of psychiatry – from its research base to the social effects of that research, to the organizational structures that ensure the delivery of services – will flounder. Although in our analysis here we focus on issues relevant to the management of psychiatric and welfare services in deciding what is the optimal response to various problem presentations, the logic of this analysis is relevant to management and organization sciences more generally. Without a stable conceptual grounding distinguishing target entities from false positives, research will not be able to get off the ground, as those features of study relevant to the field may be linked to the superficially similar, muddying the analysis and confusing intervention protocols. Moreover, as with psychiatry, a lack of conceptual clarity around core features of the field threatens to replace veridical analysis with perspectival opinion.

Szasz’s Attack on the Concept of Mental Disorder and Why It Failed The psychiatrist Thomas Szasz (1974), perhaps the foremost antipsychiatrist, argued that physical disorder is a legitimate scientific concept because it refers directly to an anatomical lesion, understood as any anatomical or physiological bodily statistical deviation. Because such lesions are not known to exist in purported mental disorders, Szasz claimed that the notion of “mental” disorder was merely metaphorical. However, Szasz’s lesion account of physical disorder is problematic on several grounds (Wakefield 1992a). Most anatomical or physiological deviations – of which there are thousands within each individual – are considered oddities but not medical disorders unless they impair proper functioning and are harmful. This points the way to more valid criteria, explored below. Further, physicians recognized physical disorders long before their specific causes were identified, and the causes of many clear physical disorders remain unknown today, so actually identifying a lesion cannot be a requirement for legitimate disorder attribution. Moreover, despite the common assertion that all mental disorders are brain disorders, the fact that all mental states occur in brain tissue does not imply that when something goes wrong at the level of mental functioning there must be an anatomical or physiological brain abnormality underlying the disorder. Analogously, all computer software runs in computer hardware, but something can go wrong at the software level without there being anything wrong with the underlying hardware (Wakefield 2019). Szasz’s critique of psychiatry thus fails because his “lesion” analysis of medical disorder fails. He also confuses epistemology (what we know about a category) with

16

The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder: Implications for the. . .

317

ontology (what kind of thing is picked out by the concept defining the category). Nonetheless, Szasz’s analysis offered a valuable lesson: the central problem in deciding whether there are genuine mental disorders in the medical sense is to define “medical disorder” in general. Only then can one decide whether psychological conditions can fall under that concept.

Conceptual Analysis and the Essentialist Nature of Concepts In order to defend psychiatry as a bona fide branch of medicine and protect against false positive diagnoses in the face of antipsychiatric doubts, a conceptual analysis was needed that established the legitimacy of mental disorder as a medical concept. Conceptual analysis is a technique developed by analytic philosophers in the AngloAmerican tradition. Just as linguists examine the statements made by individuals in a linguistic community that they consider well-formed to identify the underlying grammatical rules of language, so philosophers use examples of classificatory judgments made by individuals in a linguistic community and consider the reasons they offer for those judgments to identify how the shared concept underlying a term’s application is represented in the minds of the speakers. Terms can have many different meanings, so a conceptual analysis presupposes some initial assumptions about the intended domain of application one has in mind and the general community one is exploring. In the case of mental disorder, the target linguistic community is the community of lay and professional individuals who accept the legitimacy of psychiatry as a medical discipline, the literal existence of mental disorders, and the distinction between disorder and social deviance. The impetus for an analysis of what specific concept might satisfy these criteria is the need to respond to the antipsychiatry movement’s critique. The question is whether the psychiatric and lay communities have a concept of disorder behind their judgments that warrants these central beliefs. A major source of the evidence for a conceptual analysis consists of consensual judgments in the target community that reveal the reasons why people judge as they do. Despite a frequent focus on disagreements, there is ample consensus to serve as evidence of a shared concept, as Robert Spitzer has emphasized: What is remarkable – and is in keeping with Wakefield’s analysis of the problem – is the great degree of consensus that exists about whether particular psychological or physical conditions are or are not disordered in the absence of a definition of disorder in general. Neither physician, psychologist, nor the public have any problem in agreeing that childbirth (painful), being in love (overevaluation of the loved object), and normal grief (marked distress) are not disorders and that unprovoked panic attacks (dysfunction of the anxiety system), severe depression (dysfunction of mood regulation), and schizophrenia (dysfunction of reality testing and motivation) are disorders. (1999, p. 430)

However, the evidence for a conceptual analysis can go beyond consensual judgments to consider the nature of disagreements, especially the reasons community members give for their different positions. In this way, conceptual analyses are

318

J. C. Wakefield and J. A. Conrad

primarily descriptive but they also contain an element of what philosophers call “explication,” a rational reconstruction that simplifies and gets at the core of what is most useful in the concept while staying as close as possible to the facts of classificatory judgments. A successful analysis is also in a different sense prescriptive, because it implies that if one wants to use a shared meaning, one ought to use the analyzed meaning. Traditional empiricist approaches held that a concept is defined by a set of necessary and sufficient observable properties by which one can recognize a member of a category. Thus, for example, “water” might mean “clear, thirst-quenching liquid,” “lemon” might mean “small yellow spheroid sour-tasting fruit,” and “tiger” might mean “large striped feline.” However, philosophers Hilary Putnam (1975) and Saul Kripke (1980) and psychologists Medin and Ortony (1989) persuasively argued that such sets of observable properties are inadequate for explaining how people determine category membership. The sciences regularly find that observable properties can be misleading. Things that do not have the standard observable properties are still in a category (e.g., the sun is a star; baby albino stripeless tigers are still tigers; and certain molecules floating in space in the Horsehead Nebula are water). Conversely, things that have the standard observable properties may not actually be in the category (e.g., dry ice is not ice, round red carrots are not tomatoes, and fool’s gold is not gold). The HDA builds on Putnam and Kripke’s insights, taking what is known in philosophy as an “essentialist” or, more specifically, a “black-box essentialist” (Wakefield 1999b) approach to the meaning of scientific concepts. According to black-box essentialism, many concepts are defined by a shared underlying causal property that explains superficial properties. A concept is defined by first identifying an initial “base set” of items that share observable properties and are known or inferred to share an underlying theoretical property, or essence, that explains the observable properties. The concept itself is defined not in terms of the superficial properties of the base set but by the underlying essence that is shared by the base set, so the concept can be generalized via the inferred essence to things that do not have the base set’s observable properties. Thus, for example, the concept “water” was formed by identifying clear base-set cases (e.g., the liquid in the lakes and rivers), the essence of which was unknown but inferred to exist, and expanded to include cases inferred to share the base set’s as yet unknown essence (e.g., rain, ice, steam). This explains how people living 2000 years ago, who had no knowledge of the molecular structure of water, could nevertheless understand the concept and reliably pick out instances of “water.” It further explains how now, knowing the molecular structure of water, we identify as water H2O molecules floating in the Horsehead Nebula that have no superficial resemblance to standard liquid water. The essentialist understanding of scientific concepts explains why our concept of disorder is not reducible to manifest symptoms: “disorder” refers to whatever has a certain kind of underlying property – namely, as we shall shortly see, a certain kind of dysfunction. Before proceeding to the analysis of “mental disorder,” some conceptual-analytic caveats may be helpful. Firstly, the primary challenge is to analyze “medical disorder” and show it can apply to psychological conditions. Thus, examples used

16

The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder: Implications for the. . .

319

in the analysis can come from all of medicine, including physical as well as mental conditions. Secondly, the focus is on explaining what makes a psychological condition a disorder, not what makes it a mental (vs. physical) disorder, which often involves jockeying over professional domain (Wakefield 2006). Thirdly, the concept of disorder is not the same as a theory of disorder; various theories attempt to explain the causes of mental disorder, whereas the concept “disorder” more abstractly characterizes the shared target domain that these theories are trying to explain. Defining that domain independently of any particular theory provides a level playing field for rival theories to compete in proving their conceptions of etiology and treatment. By using the theory-neutral concept of disorder in guiding formulation of diagnostic criteria, DSM is able to provide criteria acceptable to all theoretical persuasions (Spitzer and Williams 1988). Fourthly, the concept of mental disorder is assumed to be shared by professionals and laypeople, given that they regularly engage in disputes over, for example, whether what psychiatry labels attentiondeficit hyperactivity or autism is really a disorder – although, of course, professionals have much more factual knowledge about disorders. Fifthly, DSM’s symptom-based diagnostic criteria may seem empiricist, but they are selected to imply the presence of an underlying dysfunction (First and Wakefield 2013), and so are essentialist. When this fails, one gets false positives (Horwitz and Wakefield 2007, 2012). Categories are reassembled when symptom criteria are discovered to encompass heterogeneous etiologies; thus, categories of disorder such as schizophrenia and major depression are commonly said to be several disorders, although we do not yet know the various etiologies so no separation has yet occurred.

Value Versus Scientific Views of Disorder Accounts of mental disorder have traditionally fallen into two camps: value-based and fact-based accounts. As Kendell (1986) aptly puts it, [t]he most fundamental issue, and also the most contentious one, is whether disease and illness are normative concepts based on value judgments, or whether they are value-free scientific terms; in other words, whether they are biomedical terms or sociopolitical ones. (p. 25)

It is important to understand the weaknesses and strengths of the pure value and factual views, as a prelude to constructing the HDA “hybrid” view. Traditional value accounts claim that a condition is a mental disorder if it is an internally generated condition that is considered harmful by the patient’s society. Disorders are indeed harmful, and medicine is mandated to alleviate certain kinds of harms recognized by society. Even when something “goes wrong” with the organism internally, it is not a disorder unless it causes harm. For example, the fact that mild caffeine addiction is not considered a disorder in most Western countries reflects certain cultural value commitments such as the importance of productivity and the permissibility of low-level dependence on a readily available substance. Or consider

320

J. C. Wakefield and J. A. Conrad

dyslexia: assuming the theory that dyslexia is caused by a lesion in the corpus callosum interfering with communication between the two brain hemispheres resulting in the inability to learn to read but having no other negative effects, this dysfunction is harmful in literate societies, but would not be harmful, and surely would not be considered a disorder, in preliterate societies 10,000 years ago. Benign angiomas, to take another example, are small blood vessels that terminate at the skin rather than connecting to another blood vessel, leaving a small red dot. Although something has “gone wrong” in the growth of the blood vessel, benign angiomas are not harmful and so not considered disorders. Value-based approaches thus appropriately distinguish between genuine medical concerns and benign medical anomalies. The value-based view of disorder may seem similar to the antipsychiatric position that “mental disorder” is just an imposition of medical control over socially disvalued conditions. However, it is different in that it accepts that there are genuine mental disorders in the strict medical sense. It does this by claiming that “medical disorder” itself is also a sheer value concept, so mental disorders are literally medical disorders. Values-view proponent Peter Sedgwick (1982) explains: Quite correctly, the anti-psychiatrists have pointed out that psychopathological categories refer to value-judgments and that mental illness is deviancy. On the other hand, the antipsychiatric critics themselves are wrong when they imagine physical medicine to be essentially different in its logic from psychiatry. A diagnosis of diabetes, or paresis, includes the recognition of norms or values. (p. 38)

Sedgwick (1982) offered some vivid examples of how there is nothing objective or scientific distinguishing disorders from other natural processes, leaving the value element as the sole identifying characteristic: There are no illnesses or diseases in nature. . ..The fracture of a septuagenarian’s femur has, within the world of nature, no more significance than the snapping of an autumn leaf from its twig;. . ..Out of his anthropocentric self-interest, man has chosen to consider as “illnesses” or “diseases”. . .the failure to function according to certain values. (p. 30)

However, there is a relevant factual difference between the cracking of a femur and the snapping off of an autumn leaf: the leaf is biologically designed to fall off at a certain stage of the tree’s life cycle and is not required for the tree’s continued functioning, whereas human beings are evolved to function with an intact femur. The most basic objection to the pure value position is that there are an enormous number of undesirable internally generated physical and mental conditions that are not classified as disorders. Lack of skill or talent, low intelligence, illiteracy, low confidence, criminality, weakness of will, bad manners, and cowardice are all clearly disvalued conditions in our society but are not considered disorders. Moreover, people with shared value judgments about a condition (e.g., the problematic school behaviors associated with ADHD) can disagree about whether it is a disorder or normal-range functioning, suggesting that undesirability is not sufficient for disorder. This distinction, between disvalued conditions that are and are not disorders, protects against false positives that exploit psychiatry for social control, yet the value

16

The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder: Implications for the. . .

321

account fails to explain how people make this distinction. Note that Sedgwick’s assertion that a “diagnosis of diabetes...includes the recognition of norms or values” technically only asserts that a value judgment is necessary for disorder, not that it is sufficient. This, we will see, is a more promising approach. In opposition to the view that disorder is a pure value concept, pure fact-based accounts, often held by those who are reluctant to allow value-based cultural relativity into diagnostic notions, claim that “disorder” is value-neutral and reflects only that something has objectively gone wrong in the organism. What it means for something to “go wrong” in the organism then becomes a matter of dispute. The most prominent advocate of this “naturalized” view of disorder within philosophy is Christopher Boorse (1997; c.f. Wakefield 2014), who argues that “disorder” is a value-free concept that indicates the statistically subnormal biological functioning of a mechanism within the organism. Many others in philosophy have adopted Boorse’s position (e.g., Muckler and Taylor 2020; c.f. Wakefield and Conrad 2020). The purely factual position has the strength that, if the factual basis for disorder attribution can be identified, it might solve the puzzle, left unaddressed by the value view, of why most socially disvalued conditions are not considered medical disorders. As we saw, there is a large consensus among laypersons and professionals alike about the difference between merely negative mental conditions (e.g., illiteracy, cowardice, grief) and superficially similar genuine disorders (e.g., dyslexia, panic disorder, depressive disorder). A factual criterion can explain the principle used in this distinction among disvalued conditions, and thus illuminate the limits of disorder. As noted, the distinction must go beyond the fact that the condition is internally generated, because both kinds of conditions are internally generated. However, our earlier discussion also implies that the relevant facts are unlikely to be sufficient to justify disorder attribution. This is because the very same facts can be disorders or nondisorders, depending on the cultural context. The same kind of internal failure of biologically designed functioning involved in, for example, benign angiomas or harmless cellular damage due to sun exposure or corpus collosum dysfunction in preliterate cultures, and thus not a disorder in those instances, can be a disorder if the failure of designed functioning occurs in such a way as to cause harm to the individual. The recent history of virology has provided one of the most elegant test cases for pure-fact accounts. Prior to recent developments in gene sequencing technology, viruses were regularly viewed as inevitable sources of disease because, by their nature, they must take over cellular regulatory mechanisms to reproduce and generally require the cell’s death to propagate. Only recently have researchers begun to discover “commensal” viruses that are otherwise identical to disease-causing viruses but exist without harming the organism, and researchers represent individuals with these viruses as healthy and nondisordered (e.g., these viral infections are “a ‘normal viral flora’ in generally healthy, asymptomatic individuals” [Wylie et al. 2014, p. 8], “are not associated with any disease at all” [Virgin et al. 2009, p. 31], and “often reside in tissues of healthy individuals” [Moore and Chang 2017, p. 5]). Pure-fact accounts of “disorder” are disconfirmed by such test cases in which something has clearly gone wrong inside the organism but there is no disorder.

322

J. C. Wakefield and J. A. Conrad

The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis The harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA) of medical, including mental, disorder (Wakefield 1992a, b, 1999a, 2007) posits that both values and facts are essential to the concept of disorder, and that both components must be present to justify disorder attribution. First, to be a disorder, a condition must be a “dysfunction,” a factual concept indicating that some biological feature of the organism is failing to perform a natural function – that is, a function for which it was biologically designed. Second, the dysfunction must harm the individual, as judged by social values. The HDA has become the most cited concept of disorder among mental health clinicians and researchers in debates over the diagnostic status of various conditions, from sexual paraphilias (Rind and Yuill 2012) to psychopathy (Krupp et al. 2012). The HDA defines the value and factual components of “disorder” in ways that address issues unresolved by the pure value and factual accounts. Regarding value, the HDA requires, first, that a dysfunction causes direct harm to the individual. Simple albinism, for example, is not considered a disorder because it does not cause direct harm to the individual, though it may be subject to harmful stigmatizing attitudes. Additionally, the required harm is any pro tanto significant harm rather than “on balance” harm when all the dysfunction’s effects are taken into account. For example, cowpox causes harmful symptoms but also inoculates one against smallpox: so, in some circumstances it can overall be desirable but it is still a disorder. Similarly, even if an insurance payout makes breaking one’s arm on balance a good thing, it is still a disorder due to the direct pro tanto harm. Finally, harm is judged by social values. For example, infertility in a person of childbearing age is considered a disorder even if the individual does not want to have children and is not treated, because it deprives the individual of a capacity generally valued in the community. This requirement also protects against idiosyncratic diagnostic judgments by the physician, for example based on the physician’s religious beliefs. The medical literature commonly refers to disorders as involving dysfunctions. However, “dysfunction” is used in many ways, so the challenge is to identify what “dysfunction” means. The HDA conceptualizes the scientific component of “disorder” as dysfunction in the sense of a failure of some internal mechanism to perform its natural, biologically designed function. This is an intuitive idea that goes back to ancient times, but since Darwin we know that biological design and natural functions exist due to evolution, and specifically natural selection. Thus, the HDA construes dysfunction as failure of a mechanism to perform a naturally selected function. A mechanism’s function provides an intuitive explanation of the existence, structure, and persistence of the mechanism itself. In this way, the heart’s function of pumping blood, for example, can legitimately be a part of the answer to questions such as “why do we have hearts?”. Especially in the psychological domain, where we are still ignorant of underlying mechanisms, natural functions are frequently attributed to mental mechanisms by inference, though the specific mechanisms remain to be identified. For example, one natural function of the perceptual apparatus is to convey relatively accurate information about the environment, and so, gross hallucinations of the sort implicated in schizophrenia indicate a dysfunction. Similarly, some

16

The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder: Implications for the. . .

323

cognitive mechanisms function to provide the capacity for deductive, inductive, and means-end reasoning, and so a dysfunction is implicated when the capacity for such rational thought breaks down, as in severe psychotic states. So, “dysfunction” indicates that something has gone wrong with the organism, in the sense that an internal mechanism is unable to perform one of its natural functions. The HDA’s interpretation of dysfunction is highly contested in the philosophical literature. Firstly, there are those who argue that “dysfunction” itself is a value-laden term and thus the HDA does not in fact incorporate a strictly factual criterion that can be scientifically studied. It is true that “dysfunction” is often used colloquially as an evaluative term, as in “Congress is dysfunctional” or “I’m in a dysfunctional marriage.” This is not the sense intended by the HDA. Evolutionary science is a factual discipline. It is a fact, not a value statement, that the heart’s function is to pump the blood (i.e., that this is why hearts were naturally selected to exist and have the structure they do), so the notion of a function and thus of a dysfunction is definable in purely factual terms (e.g., it is a dysfunction if the heart fails to be capable of pumping the blood). Such failures of biological design often do have value implications, but not always (Wakefield 1995, 1999a). Secondly, there are vigorous disputes among philosophers of biology as to the meaning of “biological (or natural) function” and “dysfunction.” One approach (Cummins 1975) proposes that a function is any of a mechanism’s effects on the organism that are of interest to an investigator. The problem with causal role functions (and by extension, causal role dysfunctions) is that it is “interest dependent” – that is, it depends on the researcher’s interests to identify the domain of study in order to determine the feature’s relevant causal roles that are its functions. If one’s interest is in a disease-causing process, then, in a given investigation, producing the disease could be a function and failing to produce it a dysfunction. This view does not capture the objective sense of function and dysfunction relevant to judgments of disorder (Wakefield 2001). Christopher Boorse (1997, 2002) argues that a biological function is a mechanism’s species-typical effects on reproduction and survival, and that a dysfunction is a statistically below average contribution to these goals. This statistical deviance approach to dysfunction allows the bottom half of the population evaluated relative to the efficiency of each internal mechanism to be classified as disordered, an approach that invites antipsychiatric critique rather than providing an effective response to it. In addition, using species typical contribution to survival and reproduction as the criterion for function confuses accidental effects with naturally selected effects that are part of human nature and for which there is, therefore, a sensible judgment of proper as well as “something gone wrong” functioning. The relevant use of “normal” or “typical” in the medical community refers to normality in functioning and not to statistical normality. For example, roughly 80 percent of all people worldwide have dental caries and/or periodontal disease, therefore gum disease is statistically normal – but, of course, functionally abnormal. Similarly, statistically normal humans – about 95 percent worldwide – are infected with the Epstein-Barr virus, whereas functionally normal cells are not so infected. Statistical atypicality may indicate a functional abnormality, and thus dysfunction, but it is

324

J. C. Wakefield and J. A. Conrad

defeasible and a fallible indicator of the target property of functional normality. “Dysfunction” thus cannot be determined by such statistical means. The failures of both the statistical deviance and causal role approaches to function and dysfunction leave the HDA’s evolutionary interpretation of biological function and dysfunction as the only one that is adequate for understanding “disorder.” This view finds wide support in the philosophical literature (e.g., Kitcher 1993; Milliken 1989; Neander 1991; Wakefield 2016a; Wright 1973). The evolutionary account of function provides a scientific, objective basis from which false-positives can be identified which does not rely on statistical abnormality or the interests of an investigator. If one examines the arguments used to support claims about disorder and nondisorder, the evolutionary factual component reflecting what is normal human biological functioning is often found to be implicit, and only sometimes explicit. For example, Allen Frances critiqued DSM-5’s (American Psychiatric Association 2013) overinclusiveness (relative to biologically designed human nature) in defining behavioral addictions by citing evolutionary considerations as the ultimate arbiter: The fundamental problem is that repetitive (even if costly) pleasure seeking is a ubiquitous part of human nature. . .. The evolution of our brains was strongly influenced by the fact that, until recently, most people did not get to live very long. Our hard brain wiring was built for short term survival and propagating DNA- not for the longer term planning that would be desirable now that we have much lengthened lifespans. . .. This type of hard wiring was clearly a winner in the evolutionary struggle when life was “nasty, brutish, and short”. But it gets us into constant trouble in a world where pleasure temptations are everywhere and their long term negative consequences should count for more than our brains are wired to appreciate. (Frances 2010)

On the opposite side of the DSM-5 debate, Kenneth Kendler et al. (2010) implicitly appealed to the same biological-design criterion to argue that a fear response to legitimate danger is not a disorder: “An individual experiencing a panic attack after just barely escaping a fatal climbing accident would not be considered psychiatrically disordered because the mechanism for panic attacks probably evolved to prepare us for such situations of real danger” (p. 771). Because “dysfunction” is a purely factual concept, it provides a potentially consensual factual basis for setting the boundaries of valid diagnosis of disorder and thereby protects disorder attributions from tendentious ascriptions based solely on societal disapproval, at least in principle. The HDA explains why abusive diagnoses, such as the “sluggish schizophrenia,” “drapetomania,” and “clitoral orgasmic dysfunction” diagnoses mentioned earlier are in fact false-positive misdiagnoses, and why it would be an error to diagnose grief, illiteracy, and realistic anxiety as disorders. The HDA also explains why, even when we do not understand why a problematic feature exists or what its functions may be, if we believe it is biologically designed then we do not classify it as a disorder. For example, very little is known about the functions of sleep or the mechanisms underlying it, but circumstantial evidence is persuasive that sleep is a biologically designed phenomenon, so we do not consider sleep a disorder despite its being a harmful condition that

16

The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder: Implications for the. . .

325

incapacitates us in a vulnerable, semi-paralyzed, periodically hallucinatory state for roughly one-third of our lives. Similarly, taste preferences for salty, sweet, and highfat foods is not considered a disorder even though such preferences can be harmful in our current food-rich environment, because they are believed to be biologically designed to help us obtain needed calories in earlier food-scarce environments; and sexual desire for individuals other than one’s partner is negatively valued in our monogamous culture but is considered human nature and thus not a disorder. It is not surface desirability but our inference about the nature of the underlying causes that determines such judgments. Discovering what is in fact a natural function, and therefore what is a dysfunction, is often difficult and subject to scientific controversy, given our ignorance of mental mechanisms – so, despite improved clarity about the concept of disorder, ample scope for controversy remains. The harm that warrants a disorder attribution does not itself have to be in any way related to evolutionary considerations but can be purely social in origin as long as it is a direct effect of the dysfunction and not just a matter of social disapproval. For example, reading is a social invention for which we were not biologically designed but which opens many opportunities to the individual in our society. Whereas illiteracy due to lack of education is not a disorder, dyslexia – where it is inferred from the symptoms and history that the inability to learn to read is due to some unknown neurological dysfunction – is considered a disorder. The inferred dysfunction criterion is thus an essential aspect in distinguishing disorder from disvalued functionality. When we distinguish normal grief from clinical depression, criminality from antisocial personality disorder, difficulty adapting to new circumstances from adjustment disorder, or illiteracy from reading disorder, we are implicitly referring to something having gone wrong in the organism. The HDA thus allows mental health professions to respond to antipsychiatric criticism that it is not a legitimate branch of medicine by providing an in-principle conceptual distinction between disorders and general problems of living. It also provides psychiatrists and researchers a conceptual place to stand in confirming or refuting the legitimacy of a particular disorder or disorder class, or in proposing improved diagnostic criteria.

The HDA and the Social Sciences It is widely recognized – and acknowledged in DSM-5’s definition of mental disorder in its introduction, which requires that a disorder’s symptoms must be due to a known or inferred organismic dysfunction (First and Wakefield 2010) – that the prevention of false positive diagnoses depends on identifying symptom syndromes that imply there is an internal dysfunction generating the surface symptoms. The general essentialist approach, in which a category is defined in terms of inferred underlying mechanisms rather than observable features, has broad application to the social sciences. Additionally, the notion of design comes in many forms, including artifact functions, personal intentions, social functions, and socialization as social construction of aspects of the self. Each type of function in the design sense can be

326

J. C. Wakefield and J. A. Conrad

the basis for a theory of dysfunction and can be the basis for attributions of proper or improper functioning. The idea of an organized designed mechanism that can go wrong has long been applied to the functioning of societies themselves. There is a long history of social science research that understands society as an entity whose continued existence is maintained by various features such as its institutions. In turn, it can be said that these features exist precisely due to the role they play in the maintenance of society. In a classic example, it has been theorized that certain rituals such as rain dances and religious membership function to ensure social cohesion and thus maintenance of the social group. If the ritual itself becomes a matter of harmful contention rather than cohesion, one might argue that a social dysfunction has occurred. Another domain of design is the social construction of individual selves in accordance with social values, in the process of socialization. People’s minds are shaped and altered by psychological structures shaped by social interactions that allow the individual to function effectively in the society. These are artifactual rather than biologically designed mental processes, created for the purpose of fitting the individual to social needs and values. Because this domain of functions is not biologically designed, failure of socialization is not in itself a medical issue but a social deviance issue. The distinction between social deviance and medical disorder often lies in the nature of the design process that has failed and yielded whatever is harmfully problematic in an individual. Some theories of personality have focused on empirically observable behaviors, such as Buss and Craik’s (1983) act frequency theory of personality traits. Yet, the concept of a personality trait, like the concept of disorder, concerns regularities that are generated by intrinsic aspects of a person’s nature or essence and not what they happen to do. For example, the fact that someone is frequently talking does not necessarily indicate that they have a personality trait of talkativeness; they could simply have a job at the information booth at Grand Central Station. Or, the fact that someone works long hours may not indicate ambition but may simply be due to fear of being fired (Wakefield 1989). We sometimes protect our idealized beliefs by essentialist theorizing, as when a partner is highly irritable over a prolonged period of time but we theorize that the irritability is due not to an intrinsic trait but to stressful circumstances, and so we can retain our image of the partner’s benign nature. Sometimes an essentialist understanding of people can be clinically problematic. In couples therapy, a common occurrence is that the therapist assigns a home exercise to address a complaint by one partner – for example, a wife may complain that her husband never wants to talk about her thoughts or feelings, and the therapist might assign an hour devoted to such discussion – and the homework is successfully completed, yet when the therapist asks about its impact the wife may say something like, “He did discuss my thoughts and feelings, but I knew that underneath he didn’t want to do it.” The therapeutic impact of the novel behavior is undermined by a theory about the deeper beliefs and desires generating the behavior. Indeed, sometimes, such essentialist theorizing about a partner, if mistaken, can be dangerous or even fatal; a common reason given by women who stay with a physically abusive

16

The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder: Implications for the. . .

327

partner is that they believe that, underneath the abusive behavior, he is a good person. At the social level, despite the dominance of stereotype theories holding that prejudice is driven by negative traits attributed to members of a group, it appears that such processes as racial, gender, ethnic, and sexual-orientation prejudice appear to be, to some degree, driven by essentializing beliefs about the underlying nature of a group (Haslam et al. 2002; Pettigrew 1979). Even groups that have interacted intimately for many years and know that stereotypes do not characterize everyone in the other group can quickly fall into prejudiced positions of group hatred, due to latent beliefs about the underlying essential difference or inferiority of the outgroup. This has been illustrated by events such as the Bosnian wars, or the Holocaust as an attempt to eliminate “Jewish blood.” This essentialist attribution that goes beyond stereotypical observable properties is revealed by the reactions of racists who continue to feel prejudice even when the target individual has none of the stereotypical traits that supposedly justify the prejudice. We find a classic artistic illustration of this in the movie “Look Who’s Coming to Dinner,” where a brilliant and successful Black professor, who has none of the stereotypic traits prejudicially applied to Black people and instead has all of the standard virtues, is nonetheless resisted as a potential spouse for a white liberal couple’s daughter.

Implications for the Management of Organizations These conceptual approaches can also be helpful to those who study management principles and the behavior of organizations that try to improve society (i.e., social enterprises). Such organizations are designed to monitor and maintain socially valued standards, and are themselves social artifacts that have a function, just as other organizations and professions are social artifacts designed to pursue specific social values (e.g., law pursues legal justice, teaching pursues education, and medicine pursues health). Alejandro Agafonow (2018; Agafonow and Perez 2020) has argued that using an essentialist framework, wherein the manifest effects of an organization are considered epiphenomenal, reflecting deeper internal causal mechanisms, may prevent inaccurate judgments about social enterprise organizations. Analogous to examples suggested above, about normal sadness versus depressive disorder, normal rambunctiousness versus ADHD, normal-range delinquency versus conduct disorder, and illiteracy versus dyslexia, Agafonow argues that superficially similar social outcomes of complex organizations do not necessarily indicate how the organization should be evaluated or classified, because that depends on the internal organizational mechanisms that generate the superficial effects and what they are designed to do. For example, Agafonow points to the fact that both Volkswagen and Amazon have pursued revenue maximization rather than profit maximization, which has provoked criticism from some financial interests because it can result in diseconomies of scale in which net profits are lost while market share expands. Agafonow argues that, although both companies exhibit the same superficial phenomenon, the

328

J. C. Wakefield and J. A. Conrad

internal mechanisms that generate these effects are importantly different. For Amazon, outside shareholders without membership on the board have majority voting power, and CEO Jeff Bezos has exerted control over the company to expand its market share in order to expose a larger number of customers to Amazon’s services. He then focused on profit only once an optimal market share has been achieved, thereby benefiting shareholders. In contrast, Volkswagen’s board voting power does not favor shareholders, so stakeholders (e.g., employees, local government) have been able to direct the company toward market-share maximization in order to boost employment, which benefits stakeholders such as employees over shareholders. Agafonow’s point is that focusing on revenue maximization rather than on each company’s different internal mechanisms threatens to mislead commentators and researchers: “Despite Volkswagen sharing with Amazon the same outermost mechanism’s stage, i.e., the companies competing to gain market share thus maximizing revenues, such a stage is a sort of symptom produced by different causal mechanisms” (2018, pp. 51–52). Thus, an organization’s manifest “symptoms” do not equal the organization’s social relevance. This is particularly so for social enterprises that seek to enhance health and well-being in a given society. That is, just as evolutionary theory has provided the best available account of natural function (so that the failure of a feature to fulfill such a natural function allows medicine to distinguish between dysfunction and normal problems of living), philosophy of management and social science researchers must discover a principled way of identifying etiological mechanisms that distinguish genuine social enterprises from organizations more broadly: “unless one is able to identify specific social enterprise mechanisms different from other kinds of organizations, the perceived impact of social enterprise-led activities is likely to be a false positive, which tells nothing special” (Agafonow 2018, p. 52). Such distinctions are critical because, if social enterprise is to be understood as a subset of organizations designed to deliver health policy related outcomes or other socially beneficial effects, then they may be deserving of public resources to fulfill these goals. The ability to accurately and reliably identify social enterprises and distinguish them from other organizations thus takes on importance analogous to the need to distinguish, in the medical sector, general problems of living from genuine health problems anchored in an objective domain of function and dysfunction. Agafonow reaches a parallel conclusion that essentialistic theorizing analogous to the HDA can illuminate our thinking in social sciences, urging that “we are in need of a beneficial function account of social enterprises, where the relevance of social enterprises” results from “the designed functions of social enterprise mechanisms in conjunction with a value judgment that such mechanisms have specific benefits” (2018 p. 54).

Conclusion In philosophy of psychiatry we have learned that there are many different uses of the word “disorder” and in all cases they are value-laden. However, in order to have a psychiatric discipline that is not merely a clash of values, value judgments must be

16

The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder: Implications for the. . .

329

related to – or go along with – some objective criterion that can provide a way of anchoring disputes in science. The HDA provides a carefully argued middle ground between value and factual accounts of “disorder,” which acknowledges the role of value judgments in assessing harm but attaches the harm causally to an objective judgment about internal failure of a designed function. This gives the concept of disorder the scientific empirical anchoring it requires. Thus, the HDA provides a ground or position from which to critique and improve diagnostic criteria, and a criterion for distinguishing superficially undesirable but normal states from those that are truly disordered – thus preventing problematic false positives. In this way, psychiatry has worked to wrest itself from conceptual indeterminacy and, in the process, strengthened its research apparatus and provided clinicians and philosophers with a benchmark against which disagreements can be measured. Choosing the right concepts in science is important because it allows the formation of useful and elegant laws. By selecting a concept of disorder that discriminates true dysfunctions from other problematic reactions, psychiatry can determine which types of responses are optimal for two problems that may look the same on the surface but are essentially different. This helps optimize the use of resources and increase benefits to stakeholders. The efficient and humane management of the burgeoning health and welfare sector depends on such conceptual refinements. More generally, as we have shown, the same challenge of discriminating true cases from superficially similar but false cases afflicts other areas of management. The philosophically inspired strategies suggested here can provide, by analogy, important lessons for other areas of the social sciences, including organizational research and philosophy of management. We used the socially and legally important distinction between social and commercial enterprises to illustrate how a management area also faces the issue of false positives and how an HDA-like approach might help. When examining social enterprises, for example, where public resources are used to support organizations whose mission is to improve society, the inability to distinguish these organizations from others that only superficially resemble them may result in wasteful spending, under-resourced social initiatives, and a widening gap between the affluent and those in need. The same may hold true for other areas in management and organizational science. Hence, without a stable concept of the object of study, the field will not be able to progress.

Cross-References ▶ Complexity and Management: Epistemic Insights from the Life Sciences ▶ Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics

References Agafonow A (2018) Setting the bar of social enterprise research high. Learning from medical science. Soc Sci Med 214:49–56

330

J. C. Wakefield and J. A. Conrad

Agafonow A, Perez M (2020) Entrepreneurship and contextual definitions of mental disorders: why psychiatry abandoned the latter and entrepreneurship scholars may want to follow suit. Acad Manag Perspect 34(2):1–6 American Psychiatric Association (2013) Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-5, 5th edn. Author, Washington DC Boorse C (1997) A rebuttal on health. In: Humber JM, Almeder RF (eds) What is disease? Humana Press, Totowa, pp 1–134 Boorse C (2002) A rebuttal on functions. In: Ariew A, Cummins R, Perlman M (eds) Functions: new essays in the philosophy of psychology and biology. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 63–112 Buss DM, Craik KH (1983) The act frequency approach to personality. Psychol Rev 90:105–126 Conrad JA (2020) A black and white history of psychiatry in the United States. J Med Humanit. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-020-09650-6 Cummins R (1975) Functional analysis. J Philos 72:741–765 First MB, Wakefield JC (2010) Defining ‘mental disorder’ in DSM-V. Psychol Med 40:1779–1782 First MB, Wakefield JC (2013) Diagnostic criteria as dysfunction indicators: bridging the chasm between the definition of mental disorder and diagnostic criteria for specific disorders. Can J Psychiatr 58:663–669 Foucault M (1965) Madness and civilization: a history of insanity in the age of reason. Pantheon, New York Frances A (2010) DSM5 suggests opening the door to behavioral addictions: behavioral addictions are a slippery slope. Psychology Today. Available at https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/ blog/dsm5-in-distress/201003/dsm5-suggests-opening-the-door-behavioral-addictions. Retrieved December 22, 2019 Frances A (2012) DSM-5 is a guide, not a bible: simply ignore its 10 worst changes. HuffPost Science Blog. Available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allen-frances/dsm-5_b_2227626. html. Accessed 23 Nov 2013 Haslam N, Rothschild L, Ernst D (2002) Are essentialist beliefs associated with prejudice? Br J Soc Psychol 41:87–100 Horwitz AV, Wakefield JC (2007) The loss of sadness: how psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into depressive disorder. Oxford University Press, New York Horwitz AV, Wakefield JC (2012) All we have to fear: psychiatry’s transformation of natural anxieties into mental disorders. Oxford University Press, New York Kendell RE (1986) What are mental disorders? In: Freedman AM, Brotman R, Silverman I, Hutson D (eds) Issues in psychiatric classification: science, practice and social policy. Human Sciences Press, New York, pp 23–45 Kendler KS, Myer J, Halberstadt LJ (2010) Should the diagnosis of major depression be made independent of or dependent upon the psychosocial context? Psychol Med 40:771–780 Kitcher P (1993) Function and design. Midwest Stud Philos 18:379–397 Kripke S (1980) Naming and necessity. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Krupp DB, Sewall LA, Lalumière ML, Sheriff C, Harris GT (2012) Nepotistic patterns of violent psychopathy: evidence for adaption? Front Psychol 3:1–8 Laing RD (1967) The politics of experience. Penguin Books, London Medin D, Ortony A (1989) Psychological essentialism. In: Vosniadou S, Ortony A (eds) Similarity and analogical reasoning. Cambridge University Press, New York, pp 179–195 Millikan R (1989) In defense of proper functions. Philos Sci 56:288–302 Moore PS, Chang Y (2017) Common commensal cancer viruses. PLoS Pathog 13:e1006078 Muckler D, Taylor J (2020) The irrelevance of harm for a theory of disease. J Med Philos 45(3): 332–349 Neander K (1991) Functions as selected effects: the conceptual analyst’s defense. Philos Sci 58: 168–184 Pettigrew TF (1979) The ultimate attribution error: extending Allport’s cognitive analysis of prejudice. Pers Soc Psychol 5:461–476

16

The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder: Implications for the. . .

331

Putnam H (1975) The meaning of meaning. In: Putnam H (ed) Mind, language, and reality. philosophical papers, vol 2. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, pp 215–271 Rind B, Yuill R (2012) Hebephilia as mental disorder? A historical, cross-cultural, sociological, cross-species, non-clinical empirical, and evolutionary review. Arch of Sex Behav 41(4):797–829 Scheff TJ (1966) Being mentally ill: a sociological theory. Aldine, Chicago Sedgwick P (1982) Psycho politics. Harper & Row, New York Spitzer RL (1981) The diagnostic status of homosexuality in DSM-III: a reformulation of the issues. Am J Psychiatry 138:210–215 Spitzer RL (1999) Harmful dysfunction and the DSM definition of mental disorder. J Abnorm Psychol 108:430–432 Spitzer RL, Williams JBW (1988) Basic principles in the development of DSM-III. In: Mezzich JE, Cranach MV (eds) International classification in psychiatry: unity and diversity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp 81–86 Szasz TS (1974) The myth of mental illness: foundations of a theory of personal conduct, Rev edn. Harper & Row, New York Virgin HW, Wherry EJ, Ahmed R (2009) Redefining chronic viral infection. Cell 138:30–50 Wakefield JC (1989) Levels of explanation in personality theory. In: Buss D, Cantor N (eds) Personality psychology: recent trends and emerging directions. Springer, New York, pp 333–346 Wakefield JC (1992a) The concept of mental disorder: on the boundary between biological facts and social values. Am Psychol 47:373–388 Wakefield JC (1992b) Disorder as harmful dysfunction: a conceptual critique of DSM-III-R’s definition of mental disorder. Psychol Rev 99:232–247 Wakefield JC (1995) Dysfunction as a value-free concept: a reply to Sadler and Agich. Philos Psychiatry Psychol 2:233–246 Wakefield JC (1999a) Evolutionary versus prototype analyses of the concept of disorder. J Abnorm Psychol 108:374–399 Wakefield JC (1999b) Mental disorder as a black box essentialist concept. J Abnorm Psychol 108: 465–472 Wakefield JC (2001) Evolutionary history versus current causal role in the definition of disorder: reply to McNally. Behav Res Ther 39:347–366 Wakefield JC (2006) What makes a mental disorder mental? Philos Psychiatry Psychol 13:123–131 Wakefield JC (2007) The concept of mental disorder: diagnostic implications of the harmful dysfunction analysis. World Psychiatry 6:149–156 Wakefield JC (2013) DSM-5 grief scorecard: assessment and outcomes of proposals to pathologize grief. World Psychiatry 12(2):171–173 Wakefield JC (2014) The biostatistical theory versus the harmful dysfunction analysis, part 1: is part-dysfunction a sufficient condition for medical disorder? J Med Philos 39:648–682 Wakefield JC (2015) DSM-5, psychiatric epidemiology and the false positives problem. Epidemiol Psychiatr Sci 24(3):188–196 Wakefield JC (2016a) The concepts of biological function and dysfunction: toward a conceptual foundation for evolutionary psychopathology. In: Buss D (ed) Handbook of evolutionary psychology, 2nd edn. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 988–1006 Wakefield JC (2016b) Diagnostic issues and controversies in DSM-5: return of the false positives problem. Annu Rev Clin Psychol 12:105–132 Wakefield JC (2019) The harmful dysfunction analysis of addiction: normal brains and abnormal states of mind. In: Pickard H, Ahmed SH (eds) The Routledge handbook of philosophy and science of addiction. Routledge, New York, pp 90–101 Wakefield JC, Conrad JA (2020) Harm as a necessary component of the concept of medical disorder: reply to Muckler and Taylor. J Med Philos 45:350–370 Wakefield JC, Wasserman D, Conrad JA (2020) Neurodiversity, autism, and psychiatric disability: the harmful dysfunction perspective. In: Cureton A, Wasserman D (eds) Oxford handbook of philosophy and disability. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 501–521

332

J. C. Wakefield and J. A. Conrad

World Health Organization (2015) mhGAP humanitarian intervention guide (mhGAP-HIG): clinical management of mental, neurological and substance use conditions in humanitarian emergencies. WHO, Geneva Wright L (1973) Functions. Philos Rev 82:139–168 Wylie KM, Mihindukulasuriya KA, Zhou Y, Sodergren E, Storch GA, Weinstock GM (2014) Metagenomic analysis of double-stranded DNA viruses in healthy adults. BMC Biol 12:1–10 Zubin J, Gurland BJ (1977) The United States – United Kingdom project on diagnosis of the mental disorders. Ann N Y Acad Sci 285:676–686

Complexity and Management: Epistemic Insights from the Life Sciences

17

Marta Bertolaso

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Convergences in Management Theory and Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paradigm Fragmentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Understanding Complexity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . On the Dynamic Stability of Living Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dependencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Integrated Dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Explananda and Explanantia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beyond Dichotomies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Systems and Parthood Relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Recomposing Theory and Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions: Management at Crossroads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

334 335 336 338 340 341 342 345 345 346 348 351 351 352

Abstract

Starting from a perspective of philosophy of scientific practice, this chapter addresses some epistemological issues that emerge when we deal with organized complexities and their dynamics. After analyzing a convergence in the discussion about complexity and its explanatory accounts in organization sciences and management, similarities with life sciences are explored by looking at (i) the biology of cancer as a paradigmatic case, and (ii) scientific and philosophical discussions around the systemic organization and development of organisms. This analysis identifies, in a concept of management embedded in control theory and organization, components seen as rational agents modeled on or standardized with the self-interest paradigm – an equivalent of reductionist approaches in life M. Bertolaso (*) Faculty of Science and Technology for Humans and the Environment, University Campus Bio-Medico of Rome, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_47

333

334

M. Bertolaso

sciences. Reasons are then offered for inquiring differently about how the components/individuals are conceptualized, even when we think of reasoning in systemic terms. A heterogeneity of the components – considered through the lens of a relational epistemology – comes to be the most relevant feature of living and adaptive systems, and common to organizations. Keywords

Complexity · Cancer · Multi-unity · Management · Relational epistemology · Organization · Systemic

Introduction Bridging different fields of knowledge and scientific practice is always a challenge that involves diverse, dangerous turning points. At the same time, there is an increasing request for experience in different fields, in order to explore new areas or derive new insights from other disciplines. Such a need is not merely related to interdisciplinary requests but increasingly emerges from evidence, convergent questions, and concerns among different fields. This chapter does not take the stance of assuming that scientific objects that fall within different domains can be studied through the same methodology. Nor will it expand the philosophical reflection to encompass convergences or differences in heuristics or analogical terms among different fields, although this is often useful when organizing knowledge for a deeper understanding of reality. Instead, it will advance from a theoretical assumption that the abovementioned requests to find and evaluate scientific experiences from different fields through a philosophical lens rely upon the fact that human beings legitimately look for a unity of knowledge that escapes and resists the (apparent) fragmentation of models and theories, while at the same time avoiding the search for a unified theory of everything within or across different fields. This position remits to philosophical discussions (such as realism, empiricism, positivism, and constructivism) that are beyond the aim of this chapter but that nevertheless should be taken into account. This is to avoid naïve answers to common problems in science and to instead help us better understand the relevance of the questions we are asking and the effort we are making in developing frameworks and new models for improved studies of phenomena and for useful knowledge-building in various fields. Let us progress from a perspective of philosophy of scientific practice. When we are interested in exploring the assumptions and methods underlying the sciences, we need to explore both the theories and results produced by scientists and the processes by which they came to their conclusions. Examining the goals and concepts underlying the activities associated with science also forces us to focus not only on epistemological considerations but also on the values, norms, and ideals inherent in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, it encourages us to question the metaphysical and ontological assumptions underlying these practices rather than take them for granted.

17

Complexity and Management: Epistemic Insights from the Life Sciences

335

From a methodological point of view, the aim here is to organize information and arguments in a way that can generate and confirm, for management, epistemic insights and perspectives from the life sciences. Accordingly, the first section analyzes key issues of management theory and practice learned from consultations with CEOs and Human Resources managers in enterprises, and from the management and organization sciences literature. Tensions and dichotomies that emerge from this first analysis show a shared position toward reductionist concerns regarding the most adequate models and theories to be adopted to account for complexity – which will be the focus of the following sections. This convergence facilitates the sharing of information from life sciences related to how we have been dealing with the complexity of developmental processes and their pathological aspects such as cancer (as presented in the second section) so that it is meaningful in the context of management. As we will see, this means exploring some aspects of the physiology of living beings that lead to a deeper understanding of their intrinsic complexity, and searching for an epistemology that is able to account for emergent properties, causal dependencies, and the multi-unity character of biological organizations in a wider sense than what traditional ontological and epistemological reductionism can provide. The third section expands on an epistemic issue that arises in the study of the physiology of living beings but can make a contribution to management. It elaborates on a relational epistemology needed to make sense of (i) limits of a homogeneous view of the systems’ components; and (ii) possible integrated solutions beyond parts-whole dichotomies. In the last section, some implications from the previous sections will be discussed, indicating how these can be taken into account for future developments in organization science and for understanding the complex character of human organizations. The difficulties and possibilities of representing and explaining the behavioral features and adaptive development of organizations are examined here.

Convergences in Management Theory and Practice As indicated in the Introduction to this handbook, management research and education suffer from a paradigm fragmentation that seems to limit the possibilities of managers, scientists, and consultants to navigate among the plurality of models proposed to improve organization development, innovation, and management strategies in changeable environments. Both researchers and practitioners need to find harmony in the practical multiplicity of possibilities and theoretical tensions that such paradigm fragmentation generates. This calls for a philosophical contribution to disentangling complex issues, as well as for suitable meta-frameworks that move beyond tensions and dichotomies. At the crossroads of these practical and theoretical discussions we typically encounter the term “complexity” (Ghoshal 2005; King et al. 2010; Bushe and Marshak 2015). Looking retrospectively at this literature, we find that the concept of complexity, where not used just as heuristics, has been adopted either as the explanans (i.e., what performs the explanatory role in a model) or – more recently

336

M. Bertolaso

and less frequently – as the explananda (i.e., what we actually have to explain). In the former case, questions concern difficulties in managing change because, for example, many factors are involved in crucial transitions. In the latter, questions mainly deal with the relevance of contextual factors or how to manage emergent properties of organizations and how to generate them. The analysis in the following subsections will disentangle some aspects that should be considered crucial for understanding the knowledge and practice possibilities that current challenges are offering us.

Paradigm Fragmentation From an initial analysis of the debates in organization sciences it emerges that (i) biased assumptions of a philosophical and ethical nature do not allow for adequate causal explanations and practical models for management (McKelvey 1978; Ghoshal 2005); (ii) research in theory development and knowledge building has not been able to offer a unified account of organized system behaviors and the multiplicity of models (Solari 2020), because of its “uniqueness” value-driven perspective (Mone and McKinley 1993) – this value prescribes that uniqueness is desirable and, therefore, unique (not plural or integrated) models and contributions should be made in the field of organizational sciences; and (iii) the study of emergent properties and dynamics requires a new understanding of organized complexities (Weaver 1948; Simon 1962, 1991; Anderson 1999; Mitchell and Streeck 2009). Hence, as Anderson reports in the very first article ever published on Organization Science, it seems “inappropriate for organization studies to settle prematurely into a normal science mind-set, because organizations are enormously complex” (Daft and Lewin 1990 quoted in Anderson 1999). What follows for the scientific practice of management is that, if it is true that nothing is as dangerous as a bad theory and that “bad management theories are, at present, destroying good management practices” (Ghoshal 2005, p. 86), it should also be true that, in the scientific practice of management as well, “nothing is as practical as a good theory” (Kurt Lewin 1945, p. 129; Solari 2020; Bushe and Marshak 2015). More interestingly, in these discussions there is a common reference to some “special properties” of organizations that cannot be adequately grasped by reductive and mechanistic standpoints, indicating a convergence toward systemic perspectives and an awareness that theoretical and philosophical backgrounds shape practitioners’ and researchers’ agendas in fundamental ways. Therefore, instead of exploring the multiplicity of social sciences’ models used in management and organization development to justify the perception of knowledge and practice fragmentation, the strategy adopted in the following discussion is to explore the roots of this fragmentation. Such analysis emphasizes the need for a revision of the theoretical assumptions of the adopted models to argue in favor of, or against, their usefulness for contemporary challenges, or to improve practices in the organization. Focus on the kind of complexity identified in the theoretical and cultural references that are criticized in management sciences leads us to two important realizations. Firstly,

17

Complexity and Management: Epistemic Insights from the Life Sciences

337

the notion of complexity identified in this literature and the kind of question it poses still have their source in systems theories and debates between Herbert Simon (1985, 1991, 1996) and others in the 1980s–1990s, although concepts and theories about complexity have advanced considerably since then. Secondly, the notion of management assumed in this literature is also out of date, as it is embedded in control paradigms born in industrial-age thinking about the strategic management of work. This chapter focuses first on paradigms of the management concept, and then elaborates on the concept of complexity. Under the capitalist assumption of a society where respect for one’s own interests is paramount, and under the generalization of the employment contract between parties that have in common only the impossibility of doing without one another, management seemed the perfect tool to deal with emerging social and industrial dynamics (Negri 1981, p. 115). While Taylor had already translated his philosophy of management into the terms of pragmatic industrial organization, it was real-life industrial practices such as those developed by Henry Ford (1863–1947) that delivered the most coherent industrial process of scientific management. Applied to mass production, this approach to management has constantly aimed at simplifying and standardizing jobs, reducing the hierarchy of qualifications, and, at the same time, reducing the wage scale (Negri 1981). As Negri and other more recent authors (e.g., Bushe and Marshak 2015) claim, organizations are still suffering from the biases entrenched by scientific management – whereby the alienation and homogenization of individuals integrated into the organization and systems of work exclude reflection on the possibilities, advantages and responsibility of considering the intentions, desires, emotions, and values embedded in the organizational system. We have been left with what Ghoshal calls the “negative problem” of containing the costs of human imperfections and with theories based on the assumption of homogeneous human behavior driven by selfinterest (Ghoshal 2005, p. 77). Such negative problem has led to our pessimism becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Its ideological roots can be found in radical individualist ideas articulated by Enlightenment philosophers such as Hume, Bentham, and Locke (Berlin 2002), among others. As observed recently (Solari 2020), the inadequacy of current organization theories and models can be sourced in a view of reality that privileges the institutionalization of practices and processes in organizations based exclusively on how they fulfill control objectives. Beyond the control paradigms that entertain a hierarchical view of organizations, an examination of this literature reveals a double hermeneutics – one generated by the control of the “negative problem,” the other by “the hubris of physics envy” (Clegg and Ross-Smith 2003 as in Ghoshal 2005, p. 86) – resulting in the use of a narrow version of positivism together with relatively unsophisticated scientific methods to develop causal and testable theories when dealing with complexities and organizations (The term “organization” is used here to provide clarity to the overall argument, and to ensure consistency with other used in this chapter. However, a discussion of the relationship between the notions of organization, company or institution, the notion of management as profession deserves more attention. This discussion, however, is beyond the scope of this

338

M. Bertolaso

chapter). Both share a strong propensity to reduce the heterogeneity of individual behaviors to common activities and standardized performance evaluations. The price paid for this reductionism is high, as it brings about a standardization of personal and collective behavior that barely meets the requirements expected from an organization that has to live, and adapt or evolve, in an uncertain and complex world (see also Bushe and Marshak 2015). Consistent with Simon’s notion of organizations as communities capable of making decisions (Guetzkow and Simon 1955 as cited in Simon 1991), there is a need to disentangle from organizational design a different paradigm that should emphasize the relevance of individuals’ behavior within an organization for emergent and adaptive dynamics. As Solari (2020) argues in relation to structuring, the basic element of the organizational design is the belief that we can anticipate what will happen and plan our organization to choose the course of action that is the best possible alternative. Structuring is precisely this, that is the preparation in advance of tools, procedures and behaviors such that, when an event occurs, the organization is able to respond in a semi-automatic or automatic way, following the same sequence of actions each time. (Solari 2020, ch. 3, p. 29, author’s traduction)

The question, however, is: what theory can be developed for such “automatic” dynamics? Action theories see organizations as collective decision makers able to effectively intervene with recurring decisions and predefined actions. Such theories have generated concerns similar to those found in life sciences and adaptive systems studies (Juarrero 2002; Wimsatt 2007; Thompson 2012) when these try to combine nonhomogeneous agencies with self-centered ones. It appears that, in behaviors which reflect differences among different players (from cells to people in a given society), the average tendency is to pursue mere profit or survival goals for such components of a given living system. Under a first approximation, both life and management sciences seem to agree that extant theory and practice mutually reinforce their inability to apprehend self-organizing processes without conceding too much to an individualistic or atomistic view of these components. Hence, studies of adaptive systems show (see also Hooker 2011) that, in a changeable environment, traditional reductionist views are not able to account for such processes, therefore a profoundly different paradigm and interpretation of these dynamics is required.

Understanding Complexity As stated in the previous subsection, the limits and tensions that theories and models of current organization development strategies suffer are due to a homogeneous and self-centered perspective on the behaviors of complex organizations and their components. The main epistemological challenge here is to identify possibilities for a systemic understanding of such organizations and their developmental dynamics – so that their adaptive processes, emergent properties, contextual dependencies, and feedback loops can be accounted for. However, it is important to note that such a systemic approach does not require a wholesale revision of how components of

17

Complexity and Management: Epistemic Insights from the Life Sciences

339

organizations are conceptualized. As shown in the last sections of this chapter, a most fundamental epistemological shift to derive new insights, and a more consistent theoretical framework, will be possible only by revising their basic assumptions. Something very similar happens in life sciences, as illustrated in the next section. According to O’Malley and Dupré (2005, p. 1270), “[t]he issues that are most fundamental are how the systems that are the focus of systems biology are defined, and how those definitions affect the research agendas that arise from earlier scientific legacies.” Fruitful attempts to elaborate new models of management and organization evolution and innovation for the complex sciences should be integrated with this theoretical reflection which contains very practical implications, such as allowing a real integration of knowledge through pluralistic accounts of complex dynamics. Evolutionary and adaptive language reflects the trend and attempts to learn from the life and complexity sciences. At the same time, its still merely heuristic use in some passages of recent literature (Solari 2020; Bushe and Marshak 2015) suggests that there are some unsolved conceptual and explanatory tensions and aspects of complexity, which need to be grasped differently. This is evidence by the fact that the literature pays little attention to what a systemic approach amounts to in practical terms and what variables would be better analyzed in order to develop new models for organization development and transformational change. The principles and dynamics of transformational change merit clarification, in order to better appreciate the challenges that management sciences are confronted with. The common background literature in organization and life sciences, when it deals with systems theories and complexity, usually frames its models based on different kinds of complex dynamics that also ask for different methodological tools. Different conceptual and methodological tools are necessary when dealing with (i) problems with simplicity, resulting in nonlinear and collective dynamics, (ii) problems with disorganized complexity – which deals with many variables that prevent us from understanding living entities “as a whole that merely possesses certain orderly and analyzable average properties” (Weaver 1948, p. 538), and (iii) problems with organized complexity – which aims to provide a more comprehensive understanding of a systemic perspective to account for the typical dynamics of living systems (Bertolaso 2020, in press; see also Weaver 1948 as a foundational paper on the topic). Dealing simultaneously with a “sizable number of factors which are interrelated in an organic whole” asks for a focus on relationships in a “complicated, but nevertheless not in helter-skelter, fashion” as typically seen in cancer, finance, problems of tactics, and strategies (Weaver 1948, p. 541). This focus often drives research in organization development and management sciences. Work done by Gorban et al. (2010) and Huang (2003) has been developed in epistemic and methodological terms (Waddington 1977; Giuliani et al. 2014; Bertolaso 2015; Bertolaso et al. 2018; Bizzarri et al. 2019). This work shows that, when we understand the complexity under inquiry, we can elaborate models in various fields by adapting models from other domains (see also Felin et al. 2014; King et al. 2010). That is, there are dynamics and interrelations that are the same in different kinds of organized complexities. The main idea is that, when we deal with

340

M. Bertolaso

complex-organized systems, if we have the wrong model in mind, practices will be irrelevant (and perhaps even dangerous). This is clear in the life sciences, where adopting a solid and coherent paradigm becomes crucial in treating pathologies. However, how concerns for complexity and self-organization processes in organizations’ transformational change relate to the abovementioned reductionist selfinterest paradigm still needs to be clarified. As cybernetics shows, in the complex sciences, planning and structuring practices and control theories can be considered unrelated aspects of systems theories. But in management sciences such dimensions might reflect unsolved tensions that demand a paradigm transition. As in the life sciences, the tensions we perceive among theories and practices is related to a reductionist and mechanistic understanding of complexity. This viewpoint (which is a working hypothesis in this chapter) can help us disentangle tensions and dichotomies that are simply related to different explananda and can be overcome by reframing the scientific question. We are aware that the fragmentation of practices mainly occurs in management and organization sciences when experts (i) study or model the dynamics that link local and global, individual and collective behaviors in an evolving and adaptive organization, (ii) explore the impact that environmental factors have on the organizational system, or (iii) examine the kind of information that the organization itself is able to impose in its environment and the causal consequences such a process has on organizational constraints. It follows that the background reductionist notions of the system’s components, for example, in the inherited management organization concept discussed above, contrast with the relevant complexity at stake, which better emerges when the (causal) dependencies are examined. Addressing the question about such contextual causal dependencies leads to a different understanding of emergence in organized systems and a different modeling of its dynamics and sustainable development.

On the Dynamic Stability of Living Organizations This section looks at the philosophy of cancer biology, and more specifically the dynamics that have been driving current cancer research paradigm shifts, as a means for adjusting our understanding of what is going on in social and organization sciences. Parallelisms among these different fields can be found in the language used to talk about cancer cells or carcinogenesis (i.e., processes involved in the origin of cancer). To begin with, cancer has been described as a problem of “selfish-genes,” or in terms of the “society of cells.” Sometimes this language expresses a metaphorical or heuristic view, yet other times it drives a conceptual and theoretical framework. Different frameworks determine different explanatory accounts of cancer, which in turn lead to different therapeutic approaches (Huang 2003; Strauss et al. 2020). Secondly, cancer research has undergone conceptual and explanatory transitions related to a progressive understanding of cancer complexity that mirrors, to some extent, what is happening in social and organization sciences. Complex sciences are still a fundamental tool providing new insights and methodologies for managing the

17

Complexity and Management: Epistemic Insights from the Life Sciences

341

organized complexity of normal cells, tissue dynamics and functional behaviors, and for combining different levels of intervention. Thirdly, paradigm transitions have been discussed and developed in complex and life sciences that contrast the importance of theories for experimental models and setups with the relevance of emergent properties in explaining carcinogenesis and tissue-cells functional stability. A similar dichotomy seems to operate in the organization sciences literature as well. These debates and scientific-philosophical discussions will be reviewed in the following subsections, with a focus on common conceptual and explanatory terms, and on convergences in scientific practice.

Dependencies Cancer is still quite often understood as a problem in cell proliferation due to mutations in the DNA that act in almost independent ways from their context, creating masses we treat through surgery, chemo or radio therapies in order to remove and destroy them. This view of cancer is typically accompanied by active verbs applied to the component parts: “cells act so that. . .,” “genes mutate so that. . .,” etc. This reflects reductionist and mechanistic accounts in the life and biomedical sciences. Genetic and cell-centered accounts that provide an explanation for an outcome typically also provide information about causes (cfr. Woodward 2010). Such accounts always refer to genes and cells as the main active responsible agents of the origin of cancer. Evolutionary explanations have also been used to consolidate the narrative, suggesting that DNA mutations and the deterministic selective advantages of single cells can account for carcinogenesis. However, since the 1970s and 1980s, the intrinsic complexity of the neoplastic process (i.e., the process of cancer origin) has become clearer. Specifically, evidence has emerged about the causal role, in this process, of factors related to cellcell communication and microenvironmental factors (hormones, tissue architecture, etc.) that mediate the spatiotemporal functional organization of cells in normal tissues. Currently, a completely different paradigm and framework for explaining cancer is contrasting and challenging previous reductionist accounts. Departing from the perspective of a cellular problem or a disease related to activating mutations in genes, the emerging systemic paradigm looks at cancer as a problem of tissue organization – namely, the overall disintegration of functional tissue organization. This mainly means that tissue and cell behavior should be understood in relational terms, that is, in terms of mutual interaction and contribution to emergent properties. In this way: (i) cells are no longer seen as the elementary and fundamental unit of action in body and tissue development; (ii) inter-actions among cells are more important than the activity of genes and molecules in setting and maintaining the overall normal function and generative properties of tissues, so that (iii) relations become more fundamental, in explanatory terms, than specific activities of molecular components (e.g., genes); and (iv) emergent properties (e.g., production of a hormone in a tissue, tissue stiffness), once constituted, become more relevant in

342

M. Bertolaso

maintaining the overall tissue organization, function, and evolvable plasticity than the cellular or molecular components that integrate and generate them. This transition toward a relational and systemic framework requires a completely different mindset that distances itself from reductionist assumptions. Typically, reductionist approaches (i) search for fundamental and elementary levels of explanation which usually means searching for biological components that can play the explanatory role in virtue of their intrinsic properties; (ii) relies upon efficient notions of causation (simplifying, one-to-one relationships) that allow for a deterministic and necessary outcome of a causal interaction; and (iii) adopt negative strategies to control cancer, which means targeting molecules and cells that have to be destroyed because of their intrinsic selfish and bad behavior, in order to (re)constitute a normal and evolvable tissue organization. Organizational accounts of cancer look at things quite differently. Cancer is mainly understood in processual terms (as a “process” not a “thing”). Thus, understanding cell-cell interactions (relationships) and microenvironmental factors have become the main target of studies and explanatory models. In scientific practice, this takes the form of models that focus on coupled processes rather than on specific molecular activity. Even more important for our purpose here, these new models have been progressively focusing on the coupling of physiological processes that maintain the normal structure of a tissue organization and are compromised in cancer: cellular proliferation and differentiation, and migration. The perspective is somehow inverted (Bertolaso 2016): cell behavior is constrained by relational and (micro)environmental factors and is dependent on genealogical, functional, contextual factors. The genealogical dimension refers to the common origin of all cells in a common progenitor cell, due to which they maintain the same genetic information. The functional dimension refers to the different tasks that cells perform in a tissue and are fundamental for its emergent activity as a structured organization. The contextual dimension refers to topological, infrastructural features of the tissue, which are usually mediated by the architecture of the organ they belong to, through components that are not even, strictly speaking, biological (extracellular matrix, collagens, etc.), or by the diffusion of substances that in turn mediate communication among cells. These three dimensions are reciprocally dependent, so that it is possible, for example, for contextual factors to become more relevant than cellular ones in maintaining and allowing new organizational dynamics in the overall bodily structure.

Integrated Dynamics Scientific research and clinical evidence have shown that the behavior of complex physiological processes cannot be understood simply by knowing how the parts work in isolation, for when we consider causal dependencies of the stability of the parts, paradoxes and dichotomies emerge that derive from the systemic dynamics, for example, microenvironmental or topological factors (Bertolaso 2020). Approaches that focus on the system’s dynamics have emphasized the involvement

17

Complexity and Management: Epistemic Insights from the Life Sciences

343

of the whole organ and organism, foreseeing a unified theory of cell differentiation, aging, and cancer. Increasing awareness about the heterogeneity of a tumor’s cell population is challenging the view of tumors as simple clonal expansions of transformed “crazy” cells. Tumors are being increasingly considered as abnormal tissue with a complex three-dimensional structure in which cells become functionally heterogeneous as a consequence of differentiation. Cancer complexity thus results from its nature as a dynamic process, and from its inter-level dysregulation due to the uncoupling of normal developmental processes (i.e., differentiation, proliferation, or migration). There is an implicit shift in the background and theoretical assumptions here. In reductionist views, since cells are supposed to be quiescent and only under specific and pathological conditions become (pro)active, the overall goal is to control such behaviors by eradicating and killing the tumor cells. In organizational views, instead, cells are seen as acting and proliferating normally, developing and adapting to different environments, and reciprocally constrained within tissue organization in order to perform an emergent functionality. From this viewpoint, interventions aim to recover or improve cell-cell interactions and communication in order to explore novel functional states or recover previous ones. Instead of a homogeneous collectivity of cells (as in the reductionist view of tissues and biological organization), biological organizations are viewed and evaluated for their intrinsic functional heterogeneity and plasticity, which constitute the most fundamental features for their maintenance and evolvability. Problems emerge when such heterogeneity is no longer, or not adequately, constrained. Within these emerging systemic scenarios, the notion of “functional fields” acquires a predominant explanatory role in the study of biological processes, in both normal organic development and cancer. In scientific terms, this concept refers to the spatiotemporal organization of cells in tissues and organs. Morphogenetic fields are present throughout the developmental process of the organism and emerge any time a new function is structured. Morphogenetic fields are thus groups of cells from which specific morphological structures develop, mainly through epigenetic changes (i.e., changes that do not affect the DNA itself but its contingent functional states, and thus are to some extent reversible). At the epistemological level, this notion of field implies functional definitions of parts and their stability as well – so that, as already mentioned above, the terms used to define cells and organizational components in biological organizations become important. For example, a reference to the generic notion of cell is useless if we are unable to identify its specific function in the organizational structure, as in the operational concept of “stem cell.” Stem cells perform their stemness only in specific environments, that is, under specific spatiotemporal conditions, while they lose their stemness when, for example, they are cultivated in a neutral/in vitro/homogeneous environment. In order to operate properly, they need the biological infrastructure. At the ontological level, this notion of field also assumes that cells are dependent on their previous and contextual functional states. That is, a cell undergoes a progressive disintegration of its own biological stability and genetic setup if exposed to stress and functional disintegration from its biological (micro)environment and

344

M. Bertolaso

moves toward apoptosis (cellular death) or cancer (crazy behavior and proliferative state). Long-range interactions and topological factors are fundamental in their role of stabilizing the structural and functional properties of molecular parts. “Fundamentality” arguments (i.e., about what is fundamental in explanatory terms) clearly shift, in this case, from components to relationships. Recognition of the causal relevance of the (micro)environment and the context dependence of the tumor cells’ phenotype has forced a consideration of the relevance of some established dynamics that take over the control of the tumor cells’ behavior. It has become clear that the reconstruction of the functional context of the tissue microenvironment provides a key condition for causal specificity to be studied (Bertolaso 2016; Bertolaso and Dupré 2018; Strauss et al. 2020). On this basis, tumors have also been defined as wounds that do not heal. Parallelisms between embryonic development and cancer have suggested the idea that oncology recapitulates ontogeny, making possible a unified theory of development, aging, and cancer (as reviewed in Bertolaso 2016). This is why the idea has been emerging that cancer should be more properly seen as the disease of a natural history – that is, the disruption of the ongoing processes of coupling that structure biological development and growth. This view can have significant theoretical implications for our understanding of leadership in organizations. Furthermore, there is biological and computational evidence that increasingly shows how the specific form-space-time organizations in living systems rely very much upon the presence of rhythms and pacemakers. As Longo (2021, in press) states, “today’s eco-systemic changes bring to the limelight some disruptions of the evolutionary fine-tuning of biological rhythms and physical clocks that may be better understood by highlighting their theoretical differences as well as their environmental interactions” (in press). What we can learn from this is that organic or biological time has its own specific place and epistemological status that cannot be ignored in the study and management of living and complex systems. Methodological implications follow, as argued also by Licata (2015): “Now it is necessary to introduce a further distinction between dynamics and history. Dynamical systems are described by trajectories in a suitable phase space, but dynamics by themselves do not include a distinction between the before, after and irreversible changing of the system. As in the case of a gas in a bottle, an observer watching a reverse-motion film of each molecule would see nothing unusual, no ‘before’ and no ‘after’. The time arrow, the history and improbability of events of the reverse-motion film come into play only when the boundary conditions are taken into consideration. The dynamic approach merely associates a clock to the degrees of freedom of a system, but it is insufficient for measuring its global structural changes. To obtain these requires observing the constraints’ stratification/modification, which is the history of the system” (Licata 2015, p. 47). Therefore, the life sciences can only be understood from an evolutionary and organismal temporal perspective, and the proper irreversibility and crucial role of time in living systems will need to be considered much more.

17

Complexity and Management: Epistemic Insights from the Life Sciences

345

Explananda and Explanantia Following the evolution of definitions of cancer, we have seen that different levels of analysis of the biological organization are required for an adequate explanation of cancer. We have also seen how cancer research advances by sometimes changing the explananda, making them more and more “adequate” in relation to the empirical evidence and questions about the origin of cancer. There is, in fact, a complex circular relation in scientific explanations between explanandum (what has to be explained) and explanans (what has the role of explaining), so that advancements in the life sciences cannot be trivially seen as an improvement of the explanandumexplanans fit. Sometimes, explanations lose the explanandum along the way and the explanans can undertake important epistemological refinements. At a certain level, changes in definitions used in scientific practice are common: operationalization (where the research question is changed according to what is experimentally feasible and to what is testable) and reduction (Schaffner 2006; Bertolaso and Ghilardi 2014) are ways in which the phenomenon is modified during the process. But cancer resists any attempt at reduction to the definition of its molecular features: there are no common genes or molecular targets identified as causally relevant or descriptive of neoplastic cells. We are witnessing a growing multiplicity of explanatory models in cancer research, as well as of factors and mechanisms involved in explaining carcinogenesis. But once the original and persistent explanandum is brought back into scientific practice (like carcinogenesis in our case), the initial explanantia (molecules) can be deprived of explanatory relevance. Therefore, looking for explanantia can eventually undermine the explananda and require a revision of them. This is what has been happening in cancer research as the definition of cancer has been shifting due to the failure of certain kinds of mechanistic reductionist explanations.

Beyond Dichotomies Based on the previous discussion, we can now say that, in both management and life sciences literature, important practical and theoretical questions emerge (i) about the link between organization strategies and worldviews, (ii) about the fact that theories do matter when developing new models to manage complex systems, and (iii) about the evidence that a new form of organization usually requires a new cognitive mindset. This chapter has also shown that (iv) to make sense of the causal relevance of relationships and contextual factors in modeling complex dynamics and accounting for their stability and evolution, we need to move toward systemic perspectives that reconsider how the components of the systems are conceptualized and understood. We have thus also said (v) that (causal) dependencies among local-global dynamics eventually are a privileged (i.e., relevant in explanatory terms) viewpoint for better understanding and managing organized complexities.

346

M. Bertolaso

Table 1 Dichotomies

Focus and assumptions

Theoretical and practical implications

Looking at components (diagnostic OD) Agency of components Things Local interactions Focus on components’ selfishness Homogeneous feature of the system’s components Focus on what is “expected” (main hub leadership) Change management Control strategies Focus on “problems” of system’s components FRAGMENTATION: Representational theory of knowledge, Epistemological and Ontological Reductionism

Looking at system (dialogic OD) Self-organization of system Events and processes Global patterns Focus on components’ relational properties and capabilities Heterogeneity of the system’s components Attention to what is “unexpected” (importance of the periphery and decentralized dynamics) Constraints management Managing complexities Focus on “possibilities” of system components’ interactions INTEGRATION: Structuralism (“truth” is historically and contextually contingent), Critical Realism, Integrative Pluralism, Perspectivism

What follows expands on the advantages that a relational epistemology and its related integral systemic framework can offer (in both theoretical and practical terms). Table 1 summarizes the main differences between two worldviews that reflect the main tensions that radical individualism presents in management sciences (see also diagnostic vs dialogic organizational development (OD), in Bushe and Marshak 2015) and that radical empiricism or materialism presents in life sciences.

Systems and Parthood Relationships Reductionism has the tendency to look at things from the whole to the parts, and to work through analysis to explain the behavior of a whole (combination) as a result of the properties and behavior of the parts. Systemic approaches, on the other hand, typically do just the opposite. They look at things from the parts to the whole, proceeding by synthesis to consider, within the system, the properties and behavior of the parts as due in part to the effect of the properties and behavior of the whole. The mechanistic reductionist approach looks at the components and focuses its attention on the individual macromolecules, while the systemic approach looks at the system as a whole, focusing on the functions that emerge when multiple molecules interact simultaneously. A systemic approach is used in Herbert Simon’s milestone work on hierarchy (Simon 1962). He maintained that the character of the structure is critical to understanding a system’s behavior, and therefore hierarchical laws have

17

Complexity and Management: Epistemic Insights from the Life Sciences

347

epistemological priority over laws of the system’s parts. In this sense, as Anderson (1999) noted, since the systems view of organizations began to spread in the 1960s, “complexity has been a central construct in the vocabulary of organization scientists. Open systems are open because they exchange resources with the environment, and they are systems because they consist of interconnected components that work together.” Although a systemic viewpoint is required in order to see the whole beyond the parts, in Huang’s (2003) discussion about localist and globalist viewpoints in networks analysis, systemic approaches consider both parts and wholes in their narratives, models, and theories. One of the first lessons we can derive from the anti-reductionist dimension of systemic viewpoints is that systems theory “has a clear ‘categorial’ (normative and even axiological in many cases) character, in the sense that it has introduced into science a new way of looking at things, rather than new fields of inquiry” (Agazzi 1978, p. 354; see also Wimsatt 2007; Mitchell 2009; Agazzi 2014). It is not that a new object sector has been defined, but that the sector needs a new, more in-depth, conceptual way of looking at the object. Once we accept this, encouraged also by Huang’s discussion (2003 of what the notion of networks is supposed to tell us in Systems Biology (the specific disciplines in life sciences that deals with networks and interactions of complex systems), we can acknowledge that “[s]ome see in networks simply the comprehensive, detailed description of all cellular pathways, others seek in networks simple, higher-order qualities that emerge from the collective action of the individual pathways” (Huang 2003). That is, when we take systemic approaches seriously, we realize that we obtain is not an abstract schematization of the phenomena that interests us but rather an interpreted structure, capable of mapping precisely the formal properties of the relations we can establish inside our system. As Agazzi (1978) highlights, the problem is not related to the specificity of the methodological approach in systems theories – but to an open mind. The epistemological merits of systemic theory consist in offering tools for the scientific treatment of concepts – such as those of global properties or entities – that cannot be broken down except at the cost of losing their specificity as a whole. Attempts to combine reductionist and systemic worldviews to account for causal dependencies in organized complexities (historically and interdisciplinarily) have in common the posing of questions about the nature of order or change that corresponds to the phenomenology that characterizes organized complexities. However, we have seen in the previous sections, they pre-date a focus on causal dependencies and integrated dynamics in scientific practice. This is why the main challenge, especially in the life sciences, is to converge the dynamic stability of the organism with its lifetime processes. As seen above, from a scientific point of view this implies providing an explanation for robust global structural changes. Therefore, the order that interests us is dynamic and better captures the nature of constraints – as not merely background conditions that halo the system’s dynamic stability. From a philosophical point of view, this means understanding how robustness (often referred to as “resilience” in the social sciences) emerges as a new property of patterns of interactions and their regulation in living systems. Both the scientific and the philosophical viewpoints require us to distance ourselves from mereological

348

M. Bertolaso

accounts of living systems, while taking seriously the relational nature of their ontology and epistemology. This chapter’s previous discussion about the relational nature of terms in biological sciences and about the limits of reductionist, genetic accounts in explaining temporal dimensions of organismic dynamics and their irreversibility are clear examples of this. Emergence, in this sense, cannot be seen as a mere supervenient property (Bertolaso 2017; Bertolaso 2016) but as an ontological emergence that performs a real top-down causation, that is, from the system level to the intrinsic properties of its parts, as happens for example with cancer cells in a disintegrated functional tissue in which they lack (even genetic) stability. I argue that this shift still constitutes the main challenge to current debates. Given our cultural and philosophical traditions, we are used to a mereological thinking (i.e., in parthood relations, thinking of the relations of part to whole and of the relations of part to part within a whole, so that what is out there, what is “real,” is things and objects considered for their relational quality of being a part). Unfortunately, this tendency limits the possibility for systemic approaches to advance our knowledge and understanding of things because we easily transform a methodology (either systemic or reductive) in an ontology (e.g., we simply substitute mechanisms and molecules with systems), thus failing to develop insights into the epistemic advantages of such systemic approaches and into the richness of organized complexities. What escapes reductionist viewpoints is the kinds of dependencies and causal constraints at work in complex systems that seem to be beyond reductionism’s reductionist capability of describing the systems or their dynamics. In other words, reductionists conceive “explanations” in the usual logically rigorous sense. Then, when they proceed to explain “emergent” facts, they immediately abandon this logical cogency and place all the emphasis on some very improbable accidental happening, which at best can only show a vague and modest (albeit still “logical”) possibility of just “admitting” what should instead be “logically explained” in a thoroughly plausible way (Agazzi 1978).

Recomposing Theory and Practice In order to understand the specific local-global dynamics, specific dependencies and emergent features in organized complexities, the conceptual and explanatory relationships among levels of these organizations have to adopt a relational epistemology. Parts are always defined in relative and functional terms (as previously discussed about stem cells). This implies that the adequate choice of level of analysis (i.e., consistent with the relevant scientific goal and question) is crucial in order to develop a relevant model and explanation of a given emergent phenomenon without reducing the conceptualization, definition, and ontology of the component to its (possible) functional activities or roles. In the sociocultural concerns about science that follow the current oscillation between the hectic search for “the few key factors” that cause emergent properties and discouragement in the face of a seemingly “endless complexity,” there is significant confusion about how an organized complexity should be understood

17

Complexity and Management: Epistemic Insights from the Life Sciences

349

Fig. 1 This figure shows how five different dimensions of cancer biology (Bertolaso 2016; Bertolaso and Strauss 2021) have been important in better understanding cancer research transitions with respect to the fulfillment of scientific and social goals. Details and descriptions of each of them can be found in the following section

and how an adequate science of complexity and of organizations should look like. As shown in Fig. 1, a suitable philosophical notion of scientific advancement in life sciences and in organization sciences can be characterized as a progressive collective orientation that (a) seeks the maximization of “non-trivial determinism” by identifying the adequate level of analysis that takes into account the multi-unity character of organized complexities, (b) pursues a lasting social and epistemic “mandate” to manage emergent properties, and (c) increases the adequacy of scientific practice to fulfill the scientific and epistemological expectations in the domain of study. All this happens through a transformation of the theoretical and epistemological assumptions of scientific work. After the fall of linear, progressive views of science, with and around Kuhn’s work, philosophy of science has generally resorted to smaller scales: shorter time spans, narrower portions of science, concrete objects of inquiry. Some practical consequences follow. Firstly, not all methods of investigation are acceptable, but some are preferable depending on the object of inquiry. The consequent flexibility and pluralism of models do not equate to a relativism. At the epistemological level, such pluralism is allowed by a different (systemic) way of looking at things and relies on the possibility of integrating knowledge – by avoiding to reduce it to a series of interpretations that are often equivalent and all equally irrelevant, both theoretically and practically on the theoretical and practical plane

350

M. Bertolaso

(see Urbani Ulivi 2013). On the other hand, at the ontological level such pluralism reflects “the intrinsic functioning unity of complex biological phenomena and our unified perception of it although at different levels and through different organizational features” (Bertolaso 2013, p. 121). This is thus true in scientific practice, and even more so if we accept that, typically, no theory explains a phenomenon of organized complexity fully, and many different and mutually inconsistent theories explain the same phenomenon, often to very similar extents (Ghoshal 2005). Secondly, social dynamics and their related normative reflections – for example, on corporate social responsibility (CSR) – should be re-thought beyond Herbert Simon’s inheritance. It is important to proceed toward an elaboration and improvement of local-global dynamics, by taking into account the relational nature of an organization’s components, that is, their proactive and participatory nature toward a common goal (Aguirre 2013; Beal and Neesham 2016). Such goals will be more powerful as long as they entail values and axiological dimensions for the proper flourishing of individuals in the process of performing and working for the organization and the institution. Thirdly, as also implied by Simon, the logic of organizations is an open one, which means that it operates without fixed goals; peripheries can correct the goals of the main hub which derive from its concrete but limited connections. In this sense, emphasis of infrastructures (instead of structure and design), understood as “the complex glue that connects the nodes or points of the organization, whether they are people, groups or organizational units” (Solari 2020, pp. 56–95), seems to be particularly promising for coping with current challenges. The fourth point follows on from the third. Simon, who argued that corporations are based on dynamics and values other than profit maximization and liberal individualism, made interesting remarks about Hayek’s “mistakes” (namely that prices predict nothing when there is true uncertainty), and asserted that welfare programs cannot avoid confronting individuals’ proper natures. As it is becoming apparent in social sciences and macroeconomics (Archer 1995; Donati 2009; Aguirre 2013), people maximize relationally. Exploiting this dimension of human beings and their axiological reference points might make a difference in our (systemic) understanding of individuals-teams relationships, leaderships and strategic interventions, especially when combined with the importance of time and the lifehistory of systems. Tensions and contrasts that emerge within a level of organization thus cannot be solved within the same level. Competitive dysfunctions (see Beal and Neesham 2016 in CSR scholarship; Quintarelli 2020 and Corti et al. 2021 in the field of practices) need contextual interventions and a proper management of infrastructures. Finally, macro-ethics and micro-ethics strategies should confront these same features of human collectivities and behaviors, in order to develop relevant models and organizations for the real world as well as well-framed management-leadership training programs.

17

Complexity and Management: Epistemic Insights from the Life Sciences

351

Conclusions: Management at Crossroads As Simon (1985) observed, “[n]othing is more fundamental in setting our research agenda and informing our research methods than our view of the nature of human beings whose behaviours we are studying. It makes a difference to research, but it also makes a difference for the proper design of institutions” (p. 293). Moreover, as commonly acknowledged, if the perspective changes, the interpretation and practices change too. This is the intrinsic driving force of science as human activity, beyond the possibility of machines and artificial intelligence. As stated by Bushe and Marshak (2015), “what helps practitioners succeed is the depth and breadth of the theoretical base they draw on for choosing, using, and mixing different methods” and “the capacity to live in an uncertain, complex world cannot be taught, modeled, or demonstrated, but only emerges in relationships that invite a profound shift in how we experience the world and ourselves” (p. 332). This chapter first identified, in a concept of management embedded in control theory and in organization components seen as rational agents modeled on the self-interest paradigm, an equivalent of reductionist approaches in the life sciences. It then delved deeper into these approaches, identifying a homogeneous and selfish view of its components as the main feature of reductionism in both fields. It proceeded to offer reasons and suggestions for inquiring differently into how the components (the individuals) are conceptualized, even when we think of reasoning in systemic terms, and into how their relationships should be investigated when the question is about the functional integration of local and global dynamics and entities. The heterogeneity of the components of a system, which is the main characteristic of living and adaptive systems, is a crucial feature for living organizations, and differs from the self-assembly that is typical of complex but inorganic entities, for example. This analysis shows that we need an adequate epistemology, able to account for systemic emergent properties and causal dependencies in a wider sense than ontological and epistemological reductionism can. It further shows that such a relational epistemology is needed to make sense of tensions and of the possible integration of solutions, in order to understand the complex character of human organizations and the difficulties we are bound to encounter in representing or explaining their features and development.

Cross-References ▶ Discoveries in the Science of Organizational Economics ▶ Management Research and Practices: Philosophies and Logics ▶ The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of Mental Disorder: Implications for the Social Sciences and Management Practice

352

M. Bertolaso

References Agazzi E (1978) Systems theory and the problem of reductionism. Erkenntnis 12:339–350 Agazzi E (2014) Scientific objectivity and its contexts. Springer, Cham Aguirre MS (2013) An Integral Approach to an Economic Perspective: Consequences for Measuring Impact. Journal of Market and Morality 16:1:53–67 Anderson P (1999) Complexity theory and organization science. Organ Sci 10(3, Special Issue: Application of Complexity Theory to Organization Science):216–232 Archer M (1995) Realist social theory. The morphogenetic approach. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Beal BD, Neesham C (2016) Systemic corporate social responsibility: micro-to-macro transitions, collective outcomes and self-regulation. Soc Respon J 12(2):209–227 Bertolaso M (2013) How science works – choosing levels of explanation in biological sciences. Rome: Aracne Bertolaso M (2015) The future of scientific practice: ‘Bio-Techno-Logos’ (ed: Bertolaso M). Pickering and Chatto Publishers, London. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315653693. ISBN: 978-18-489-3562-4 Bertolaso M (2016) Philosophy of cancer – a dynamic and relational view. Springer Series in “History, philosophy and theory of the life sciences” 18. ISBN 978-94-024-0863-8. Springer Netherlands Bertolaso M (2017) Uncoupling mereology and supervenience: a dual framework for emergence and downward causation. In: Agazzi E, Buzzoni M (eds) Causality and explanation in scientific practice, vol 27(6). Axiomathes, pp 705–720. ISSN: 1122-1151 Bertolaso M (in press) Understanding complexity in life sciences. In: Ingenioli V (ed) Environmental alteration leads to human disease. A planetary health approach. Springer Bertolaso M, Dupré J (2018) A processual perspective on cancer. In: Dupré J, Nicholson D (eds) Everything flows: towards a processual philosophy of biology. Oxford Scholarship Online: July 2018, pp 321–336 Bertolaso M, Ghilardi G (2014) Semantic roots of reductionism’s limits. Riv Neo-Scolastica 3:481– 500 Bertolaso M, Strauss B (2021) The search for progress and a new theory framework in cancer research. In: Strauss B, Bertolaso M, Ernberg I, Bissel M (eds) Rethinking cancer. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/rethinking-cancer Bertolaso M, Caianiello S, Serrelli E (eds) (2018) Biological robustness – emerging perspectives from within the life sciences. In: History, philosophy and theory of the life sciences, vol 23. Springer Netherlands Bizzarri M, Giuliani A, Pensotti A, Ratti E, Bertolaso M (2019) Co-emergence and collapse: the mesoscopic approach for conceptualizing and investigating the functional integration of organisms. Front Physiol 10:924 Bushe GR, Marshak RJ (2015) Dialogic organization development. The theory and practice of transformational change. Berret Koehler Publisher, a Berrett-Koehler Business book Corti L, Afferni P, Bertolaso M (2021, in press) Healthcare 4.0 and a human-centric approach. MEDIC – Method Educ Clin Innov 28(2)-29(1):16–24 Donati P (2009) What does subsidiarity mean? The relational perspective. J Mark Moral 12(2):211– 243 Felin T, Kauffman S, Koppl R, Longo G (2014) Economic opportunity and evolution: beyond landscapes and bounded rationality. Strateg Entrep J, Wiley 8:269–282 Ghoshal S (2005) Bad management theories are destroying good management practices. Acad Manag Learn Edu 4(1):75–91 Giuliani A, Filippi S, Bertolaso M (2014) Why network approach can promote a new way of thinking in biology, hosted by Dr(s) Xiaogang Wu, Hans Westerhoff, Pierre De Meyts, Hiroaki Kitano. Front Genet (Syst Biol) 5(83):1–5 Gorban AN, Smirnova EV, Tyukina TA (2010) Correlations, risk and crisis: from physiology to finance. Phys A 389(16):3193–3217

17

Complexity and Management: Epistemic Insights from the Life Sciences

353

Hooker CA (2011) Philosophy of complex systems. In: Handbook of the philosophy of science, vol 10. Great Britain: Elsevier Huang S (2003) Back to the biology in systems biology: what can we learn from biomolecular networks? Brief Funct Genomic Proteomic 2:279–297 Juarrero A (2002) Dynamics in action. Intentional behavior as a complex system. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA King BG, Felin T, Whetten DA (2010) Finding the organization in organizational theory: a metatheory of the organization as a social actor. Organ Sci 21(1):290–305 Lewin K (1945) The research centre for group dynamics at Mas- sachusetts Institute of Technology. Sociometry 8:126–135 Licata I (2015) Incertezza. Un approccio sistemico., In Lucia Urbani ULivi (ed.), Strutture di Mondo 2. Il pensiero sistemico come specchio di una realtà complessa. Il Mulino. pp. 35–71 (2013) Longo G (2021, in press) Confusing biological rhythms and physical clocks. Today’s ecological relevance of Bergson-Einstein debate on time. In: Campo A, Gozzano S (eds) Einstein vs Bergson. An enduring quarrel of time. De Gruyter, Berlin McKelvey B (1978) Organizational systematics: taxonomy, evolution, classification. Manag Sci 24(13):1428–1440 Mitchell SD (2009) Unsimple truths: science, complexity and policy. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Mitchell SD, Streeck W (2009) Complex, historical, self-reflexive: expect the unexpected! MPIfG working paper 09/15. Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung, Köln Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. ISSN 1864-4341 (Print) ISSN 1864-4333 (Internet) Mone MA, McKinley W (1993) The uniqueness value and its consequences for organization studies. J Manag Inq 2(3):284–296 Negri A (1981) Filosofia del lavoro – Novecento: ambiti problematici collaterali o affini, vol VII. Marzorati editore, Milano O’Malley MA, Dupré J (2005) Fundamental issues in systems biology. Bio- Essays 27(12):1270– 1276 Quintarelli E (2020). http://www.socialenterprise.it/index.php/2020/04/09/the-human-organiza tion-explained/. Accessed 29 Oct 2020 Schaffner KF (2006) Reduction: the Cheshire cat problem and a return to roots. Synthese 151:377– 402 Simon HA (1962) The architecture of complexity. Proc Am Philos Soc 106:467–482 Simon H (1985) Human nature in politics: the dialogue of psychology with political science. Am Polit Sci Rev 79:293–304 Simon HA (1991) Organizations and markets. J Econ Perspect 5(2, Spring):25–44 Simon HA (1996) The sciences of the artificial, 3rd edn. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Solari L (2020) Freedom management. Organizzazioni centrate sulla libertà dell’individuo. Franco Angeli (it. Version of Solari L (2016) Freedom management: how leaders can stay afloat in the sea of social connections. Milano: Routledge Strauss B, Bertolaso M, Ernberg I, Bissel M (eds) (2020, forthcoming) Rethinking cancer. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/rethinking-cancer Thompson M (2012) Life and action. Elementary structures of practice and practical thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Urbani Ulivi L (ed) (2013) Strutture di Mondo, vol II. Il Mulino Waddington CH (1977) Tools for thought. Jonathan Cape Thirty Bedford Square, London Weaver W (1948 [2004]) Science and complexity. Sci Complex 6(3):65–74 Wimsatt WC (2007) Re-engineering philosophy for limited beings: piecewise approximations to reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Woodward J (2010) Causation in biology: stability, specificity, and the choice of levels of explanation. Biol Philos 25:287–318

Part III Aesthetics of Management

Aesthetics of Management: An Introduction

18

Wim Vandekerckhove

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Brief . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Itineraries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In Order of Appearance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

357 358 360 362 366 366 367

Abstract

This chapter introduces the section on Aesthetics of Management. First, the chapter delineates aesthetics of management as a field of enquiry. Second, three sequences are suggested to read the chapters: historical, tour-de-champs, and pedagogical. Finally, a brief summary is given of the ten chapters in this section of the Handbook. Keywords

Aesthetics · Art · History · Pedagogy · Sensory experience

Introduction Aesthetics of management is the philosophical enquiry into sensory experiences of management. In a strict sense, this involves the question of what the sound, smell, taste, look, and feel of management is. The ten chapters in this section revolve around W. Vandekerckhove (*) University of Greenwich, London, UK EDHEC Business School, Lille, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_39

357

358

W. Vandekerckhove

that strand of enquiry. As an introduction, this chapter is set to guide the reader into the how and why of the section. It is supposed to offer a map and an itinerary, and “let you in” on why each chapter is here and how the whole section is structured. This chapter first explains what the brief was to each of the authors. After that, some possible itineraries for readers are briefly sketched. The chapter ends by briefly summarizing each of the other chapters in this section.

The Brief Although the question of what is beautiful can be traced back to Plato, who considered the beauty, the true, and the good as the three prime archetypes (Strati 1992), aesthetics as a discipline has its foundation in the work of earlyEnlightenment philosophers Vico, Baumgarten, and Kant (Bathurst 2009). Vico (1668–1744), as the father of aesthetics, argued that we can know the cultures we created through the analysis of myths and fables; the age of heroes and symbolic language are artifacts that reveal the essence of human identity. Baumgarten (1714–1762), as the first to use the term “aesthetic,” regarded sensation as the ground of knowledge. Such knowledge underlies “that which is immediately available to the intellect through logical reasoning” (Bathurst 2009: 68). Art connects the visible with the ineffable and, as such, augments cognition. Kant (1724–1804) wrote of the aesthetic experience as involving interactions between imagination and understanding, thus rendering phenomena meaningful. For these authors, aesthetic enquiry was relevant to understanding everyday human experience. Nevertheless, it is perhaps not a coincidence that the foundations of aesthetics as a discipline are situated in an era in which the quest for truth started to shift in favor of the rational representation of reality and the scientific method emerged as the way to test the truthfulness of ideas as representations of reality. This shift affirmed aesthetics as a separate field of study that concerns itself with the artfulness of art rather than having a bearing on other spheres of life. Towards the end of the twentieth century, it became clear how this scientific cleanness-through-division-and-expulsion had impoverished our ability to understand reality. With regard to management scholarship, Strati (1999: 3) writes: In fact, most of the research and analysis published in the area of organization theories and management studies describes the following, somewhat bizarre phenomenon: as soon as a human person crosses the virtual or physical threshold of an organization, s/he is purged of corporeality, so that only his or her mind remains. Once a person has crossed this threshold, therefore, s/he is stripped of both clothing and body and consists of pure thought, which the organization equips with work instruments and thus reclothes. When the person leaves the organization, the mind sheds these work instruments and resumes its corporeality, and with it the perceptive faculties and aesthetic judgement that yield aesthetic understanding of reality, but only in the society lying outside the physical or virtual walls of the organization.

Against this backdrop, enquiry into the aesthetics of management is a way to reflect on truth claims found in management studies (Strati 1999). Rorty (1990) writes that

18

Aesthetics of Management: An Introduction

359

art and aesthetics can help us to re-conceptualize truth where debates in science revolve around whether truth is something that can be found or rather is something that is made. If management involves coordinated action by at least two human beings, then it sounds absurd to suppose an analysis is valid when it has its basis in what is beyond human conduct and relationships. In this respect, the contribution from an aesthetics of management as articulated by Strati (1999: 7) is to “grasp the lived experience of people as they act in organizations,” in order to at the same time gain knowledge of an elaborated truth about management and to raise “theoretical and methodological issues concerning the entire corpus of knowledge produced by organization studies” (p. 7). Such a re-contextualization of truth in organization studies has occurred since the last decades of the twentieth century. Bathurst (2009) refers to a paper by Mintzberg and Westly (1985) on strategy and imagination, in which they postulate strategy as an experience. Strati (1999) posits that the debate between the modern and the postmodern – with the latter entailing an aestheticization of everyday life – provided a boost for the study of aesthetics in organizations. The initial work in this field, however, is from the 1970s with the work of Steele (1973) and later Becker (1981) who examined the physical nature of organizations, refusing to accept pure mental knowledge as representing the truth about organizational life. Strati (1999) sketches the “coming about” of organizational aesthetics triggered by Steele and Becker, and further including studies of corporate image, examining creativity of people who work in various organizations, studies of managing people through engaging in art related activities, and examining managerial practices by analogy with artistic styles and genres. More recently, we have also seen published research into the management of aesthetic production, that is, studies of management in theatre companies, music groups, carnivals, etc. This work provides interesting insights into how in the creative industries management takes forms that do not expunge creativity and play. Although we can read these studies as work that is critical of mainstream management approaches, we could also see this work as pointing the way for how to manage “the creative” into other organizations (such as IT, car manufacturing, real estate). This body of work seems to urge us to become artists, as if we are not already. It somehow seems to miss the complementarity that can be found in the seminal work by Brewis and Linstead (2000) Sex, Work, and Sex Work. The book consists of two parts. The first explores sexuality in organizational life, while the second part looks into the management performed by sex workers. The title of the introduction to the book is “reading sex into organization, reading organization into sex.” The point is that there currently appears to be a lot of work similar to what Brewis and Linstead did in part two of their book, while not enough that undertakes the work similar to part one. What seems to be missing is the exploration of theatre, visual arts, dance, and soundscapes in everyday management situations and what attracts or repels us in everyday management situations. Perhaps Holm and Beyes (2022) is an exception, given how they liken entrepreneurship as social change with artful engagement beyond the codified artistic practices, namely, as experimenting with new ways of belonging and inhabiting. Yet still, there is a need for more

360

W. Vandekerckhove

scholarly effort to use art theory or philosophy of the aesthetic to explain or articulate an elaborated understanding of what happens in management, rather than trying to use management theory (albeit negatively) to explain the management of the creative. Management is the governance of the division of labor. The rational analysis of management that Strati (1999) refers to as bizarre supposes not only that such a division of labor is possible but also that there is a best way to do this. Aesthetics of management then starts from the impossibility of a division of labor despite attempts to govern such divisions. Hence, aesthetics of management is the exploration of lived experiences of dissonance within regimes of division of labor. These are explorations of management as a fluid and continuous unfolding. Management is performed. The performance is situated in time and space and always remains ambivalent (Cairns 2002). It is performed by more than one person and involves artifacts. As such, the roles of manager, managed and (anticipated) spectator can become blurred. Management as performance is driven by disruption or dissonance (Antal et al. 2015). Its success implies divisions (mandates, specialisms, prescribed and exclusive decision indicators, dress codes, gestures, work from life or home at work, etc.) that are contested, subverted, ridiculed, destroyed, corrupted, abandoned, or energized, socially enforced, enjoyed, cynically exploited, etc. The disruption alters the performance but also urges it to carry on. Management is necessary but impossible.

Itineraries At least three itineraries can be taken through these chapters. It is, of course, possible readers see other connections and interactions – for the sake of scholarship, one would hope so – but at least there are these three: (1) a historical itinerary, (2) a tourde-champs that takes you from the sensory, over the beautiful, to art, and (3) an educational itinerary, taking you back from art to the sensory. The historical itinerary starts with Vickery’s chapter, which not only gives an overview of schools of thought but also explains how these came to be what they are. Vickery also comments on how different disciplines impact research agendas for aesthetics of management. After Vickery’s chapter, the reader can take up Küpers’s first chapter. It complements that of Vickery in the way it positions not just philosophical authors but also (and perhaps mainly) different and differing mindsets. Then go to Cunningham’s chapter and that by Bathurst and Chen. Both chapters draw on a particular and historically important author to make a point about current management scholarship. Cunningham draws on Aquinas to integrate organization theories and thus bring integrity, proportion, and clarity for beautiful business. Bathurst and Chen draw on Confucius to argue the importance of aesthetical awareness for leadership. More precisely, Bathurst and Chen give attention in leadership to the importance of sensing harmony. End the “historic tour” with the chapter by Guillet de Monthoux, who takes us on a tour of the Stockholm School of Economics, sketching the institution’s historical

18

Aesthetics of Management: An Introduction

361

interactions with art and artists. A historical overview through an account of situated history. The second itinerary offered here is the longest. If all the “delineating of” and “distinguishing between” schools of thought sound a bit too much like post hoc constructs, then this itinerary will give you a taste of the whole spectrum. The suggestion is to start with the chapter by Cairns, who offers a very concrete starting point: spatial design. Cairns clarifies how such a functional and well-delineated task requires a collaborative approach involving aesthetic knowledge, which is unarguable because it is not cognitive. Thus, the profession turns out to be more about attitude than qualification. Then read Bathurst and Chen. Their chapter discusses how observing ceremony (Li) and music performance (Yue) are pivotal concepts for understanding management and leadership in a Chinese context. These concepts stand for social relationships and for joyful emotional arousal. Hence, for Cairns as well as for Bathurst and Chen, aesthetic awareness dissolves the mutual exclusion of individual and collective attitudes. Instead, an attitude is nurtured that is at the same time individual and collective. The same can be said of what Ladkin argues in her chapter. She connects bodily responses to sensory stimuli with ethical judgments. Becoming aware of the sensory dimensions of ethical evaluations makes the individual immediately also collective. In this tour-de-champs itinerary, Ladkin’s chapter is also the pivot from the chapters emphasizing sensory experience to the chapters discussing beauty and art. Cunningham discusses the relevance of Aquinas’s criteria of beauty for the notion of beautiful business. Küpers – his second chapter in here – puts forward a technique to reflect critically on the artful and artistry in business. The chapter by Vandekerckhove and Emmanuel turns to Rancière and art to find other ways of seeing and sense. Although we are now firmly talking about engaging with works of art, the point is still that we somehow manage better if we spend some effort to see and sense. There is a common ground in Vandekerckhove and Emmanuel’s insistence on confusing our given cognitive plan by reconfiguring what can be shown and said, and Cairns’ point that we need to make an effort to give voice to stakeholders’ aesthetic knowledge, if we do not want to miss the obvious (but crucial). That common ground extends to what Byrne and Bereson and also what Guillet de Monthoux do in their respective chapters. These chapters nicely round off our tour-de-champs itinerary. If we find art so important for proper management, what about the proper management of art? – A question Byrne and Bereson help us to answer. Guillet de Monthoux’s chapter then provides us a very intriguing account of how a business school – where managers and leaders are trained – interacts with artists. The third itinerary is that of education and pedagogy. If you take this tour, start with Guillet de Monthoux. Read how different paradigms entail corresponding positionings between business school, art, and artists. Involving works of art in a critical enquiry of business corroborates with an antagonist relation between artist and (Dean of a) business school. Fascinating, however, Guillet de Monthoux’s account of how fundamentally different that relationship becomes in an experience economy.

362

W. Vandekerckhove

Then move to Byrne and Bereson, perhaps to compare a Nordic view with a South Asian one – and see how these resonate. Continue with Küpers’s take on scholARTistry, to slow down a bit and “venture the borderland,” out of the aestheticization of management and the managerialization of aesthetics. It is a good pivot chapter to that of Ladkin, who argues that business ethics education needs an aesthetic element. Ethical judgment stems from bodily responses to sensory triggers, and being aware of this avoids the cynicism we often hear from students when they are confronted with different ethical theories and different ethical positions. End the education itinerary with Bathurst and Chen. They turn to Confucius’s teachings to teach how leadership training involves learning to appreciate sensory harmony and accomplish social harmony.

In Order of Appearance The chapter by George Cairns involves aesthetics as a kind of knowledge, as an intellectual virtue close to Aristotle’s phronesis, to develop a framework for collaborative inquiry. This aesthetic knowledge allows valuing difference, divergent thinking. Cairns describes a framework of collaborative inquiry and realization that can be used to manage a decision process for problem resolution. However, a false “will to unity” is avoided – power is taken into account. So what is this aesthetic knowledge? Is it cognitive knowledge? Cairns argues it is not. Derived from sensory experience, it is not arguable and is personal yet collective. The aesthetic knowledge is an understanding of space – knowing home – and in the chapter Cairns gives examples of architectural design practice. Cairns writes that this understanding and acknowledgment of end users’ aesthetic understanding is important because too often collaborative design remains cognitively bounded by disciplinary attitudes and hierarchical relations. Cairns demonstrates a notion of design as an attitude rather than a linear process or a profession. The chapter by Jonathan Vickery provides us with a historical overview of aesthetics of management as an aesthetics of space. More precisely, Vickery reviews conceptual histories of aesthetics and of space and traces management in these. It is Vickery’s assertation that aesthetics of management oscillates between aesthetics (manager as subject) and awesthetics (environment in which the subject acts). Thus, the chapter discusses space and management in terms of the spatial as ontology, as epistemology of management, and as an interpretative framework for management scholarship. Vickery discusses aesthetics as human sensory experience, perception, and cognitive content of perception – that is, meaning – as it pertains to management. Philosophical aesthetics did not engage very much with organizational scholarship, and the OS field growth gave aesthetics sociological reference points for understanding arts’ functions: linguistics, semiotics. In the 1990s, entrepreneurial activity vogue was another challenge for philosophical aesthetics. However, since the 2000s, critical studies have given philosophical approaches renewed attention. The main focus, however, has been on the interrelation of management and worker, Vickery argues, and the relation between manager and (populated) spatial

18

Aesthetics of Management: An Introduction

363

environment is less theorized. Vickery shows that the specific role of the “aesthetic” within this spectrum of research is not obvious. Few scholars attempt to distinguish the aesthetic from other environmental, phenomenal, or affective factors. In order to delimit an actual orbit for the aesthetic, psychology and sociology must be connected on historical grounds. Aesthetics has always indicated the intertwining of human agency with its environment. We are inclined to aesthetic enquiry where the subject and object of knowledge cannot be categorically separated or where such categorization creates epistemological confusion. Kant’s theory of judgment and later phenomenology do exactly that. The chapter by Ralph Bathurst and Michelle Chen revolves around the sensory experience of harmony through music. Bathurst and Chen argue the importance of such aesthetical awareness for leadership. They do so from a Confucian lens. China, and more broadly Sinitic cultures, is heavily influenced by Confucius’ teachings. Confucius was interested in the cultivation of well-rounded persons, in becoming “exemplary.” Bathurst and Chen look to Confucius for the aesthetics of leadership. The quality of personhood, or degree of character formation for Confucius, required training in arts, in particular observing ceremony, performing music, proficiency in archery, charioteering, writing, and calculation. Bathurst and Chen focus first on Li and Yue, respectively, observing ritual propriety and music performance. These are pivotal concepts for understanding management and leadership in a Chinese context. Li is what meaningfully underpins social relations. Yue suggests that the joy and emotional arousal that comes with music can guide us to social harmony. For Bathurst and Chen, aesthetic awareness is undeniable, a social rather than individual experience. They argue further that Shi and Ren, two other fundamental leadership concepts, revolve around an aesthetic awareness. Shi makes leadership a matter of discovering potential. Ren, which stands for an exemplary person, is a social concept: One can only be an exemplary person in harmony with other persons. Donna Ladkin explores the connection of the sensory, bodily responses, beauty, and ethics. She asks, “how does a manager make a good ethical decision and take action accordingly?” Is it by working through the correct decision tree? No, argues Ladkin. In addition to rationally based deliberation grounded in an “objective” stance, bodily responses should also be included in ethical deliberation. These enable us to feel empathy for those whose lives will be affected by our decisions because the body is the means through which ethical perception occurs in the first place. Embodied reactions should not be used in an unfettered way, however. Aesthetic judgment is a technique we need to master. Emotional reactions and sense perception can offer wisdom, but we need to bring some distance to subjective feelings in order to examine that wisdom. Ladkin argues that arriving at sound ethical decisions occurs through undertaking a “deliberate dance between subjective reactions and attention to the external world.” Philosophically, the chapter’s argument is underpinned by four thinkers: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his modern-day interpreter Maurice Hamington, Mary Midgley, and Immanuel Kant.

364

W. Vandekerckhove

Ladkin starts from Merleau-Ponty to write about the role of the body in ethical engagement. She argues that empathy has a bodily base and works with Kant to link aesthetic judgment with ethical evaluation. The “dance” stems from how one’s own frames of reference affect the way of seeing a situation. In that way, ethical engagement involves understanding both the ethical situation as well as how you yourself are interpreting it. This latter dimension, Ladkin calls ethical habits. Noticing them can be difficult. By dwelling with bodily reactions rather than quickly dismissing them, we can reconsider what is going on from a habitual perspective and make more conscious choices about the extent to which a habit is the best response to a particular situation. The chapter by Wim Vandekerckhove and Myrtle Emmanuel suggests that Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of politics can be applied as a method for questioning our understanding of management. Perhaps a method for critical inquiry allows imagining what else management could be. Rancière understood aesthetics as a political experience, that is, a rupture of what can be seen and said. Art entails such a rupture because it carries alternative voices and visions. But to see and hear, one needs to adopt the artist’s gaze – Rancière did not have it for critical art. Vandekerckhove and Emmanuel attempt to get into the gaze of the video artist Francis Alÿs, in order to imagine organization in a decentered way, that is, to think organization from elsewhere, haphazardly, to see it “in the corner of one’s eye” rather than to look straight at it. In his chapter, Tom Cunningham sets out to explore Aquinas’s canons of perfect beauty in order to consider the possible modalities and norms for the beautiful business. Cunningham asserts that organizational studies have seen a fractured evolution of the theoretical landscape: from the overly mechanistic and structural approach of the formal classical theories of Taylor, Weber, and Fayol to the complexities of the humanistic neoclassical approaches of Mayo and from the socio-technical school to the modern approaches of situationalist relativism of the contingency theorists. Cunningham notes that for each of these theories, good equals beauty – that is, for Taylor, efficiency is beauty, for Ford it is scale, etc. Even the distinctions here in the handbook chapters of strands of aesthetics of management (e.g., ▶ Chaps. 23, “A Rancièrian Method of Exploring Notions of Management and Organization Through the Artistic Gaze,” by Vandekerckhove and Emmanuel, or ▶ 20, “Aesthetics, Management, and the Organization of Space,” by Vickery) make a fundamental category mistake: “these approaches focus on instances in, potential for, analysis and examples of aesthetics within the organization but not the aesthetic of the organization per se” (Cunningham, ▶ Chap. 24, “The Aesthetics of St Thomas Aquinas and the Art of the Beautiful Business,” in this volume). Cunningham engages with Aquina’s criteria of beauty to develop the notion of the “beautiful organization.” The chapter co-opts the Thomist constructs that describe beauty – namely, proportion, integrity, and clarity – into a formal integrated model that can incorporate classic organizational theories. For this is Cunningham’s project: to describe, detail, and actualize the beautiful business, satisfying both the empirical and the aesthetic in management research. The first chapter by Wendelin Küpers sketches a state of the art on aesthetics and leadership, art and aesthetics, and art and leadership; playfulness, creativity, and how

18

Aesthetics of Management: An Introduction

365

its importance has been understood. Küpers sees two tendencies emerging: on the one hand, an appropriating managerialization of art and aesthetics and on the other hand an aestheticization or aestheticized reality of everyday life objects, spaces, and experiences (also in management and leadership). Küpers wants to warn us for a backlash – we risk exploiting the aesthetic in a way that renders our endeavors un-aesthetic. What does Küpers mean by that? Küpers equates aesthetic management with beautiful management and with responsive, responsible, and wise leadership. Two avenues are provided: First, Küpers points to aesthetics as an inquiry into the “situated sayings, doings, and relating” and second, Küpers suggests leadership as an art form in itself. A second chapter by Wendelin Küpers discusses three ways in which art and aesthetics are related to leadership experiences and events in organizations. Firstly critical, imaginative-utopian, and pragmatic roles, qualities, and dimensions of art and aesthetics for leadership practice are outlined. Then, the dark side and limitations of aesthetic leadership and its connection to ethics and practical wisdom are discussed. Finally, some practical and theoretical implications for leadership development and arts-based research on leadership are offered. Küpers leans on phronesis to outline a mode of inquiry that is sensing and making sense while thinking from and with lived bodies and processual embodiment – Küpers calls this ScholARTistry. Küpers writes that “with their focus on freedom and openness of purpose, in some ways, art and aesthetics represent the other of functional and utility-oriented economic and managerial ways of purpose-driven and rationally organized operation.” ScholARTistry, then, is venturing into this borderland. In their chapter, Caitlin Byrne and Ruth Bereson argue that the discussion of organizational leadership relevant to arts bodies and institutions is insufficient to meet the demands being placed on the arts and cultural sectors in a global policy context. The general view persists, particularly from those outside the sector that the role of the arts practitioners is simply to attract and enthuse audiences. Little, if any, attention is paid to the leadership role or capacity of those practitioners – the artists, arts managers, producers, curators, and critics – who direct the sector. As an instance of that global problem, Byrne and Bereson focus on Southeast Asia’s regional institution, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which has placed significant emphasis on the role of arts and culture as a mechanism for regional order and integration. Byrne and Bereson provide us with a narrative inquiry of the “storying experience” of participants in a tour of arts bodies. Indeed, an experiential learning field trip about the multiframe leadership of arts practitioners. With an empirical ethnographic emphasis, Byrne and Bereson provide philosophical input on themes such as voice, impact, and tradition. Finally, the chapter by Pierre Guillet de Monthoux takes us on a tour of the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), in a showcase of how “art today is curated into management philosophy and how it came to be like that.” Guillet de Monthoux argues that aesthetics matters to business and commerce more than ever before. Not “more” in a quantitative way, but rather in how art takes a place in the SSE curriculum.

366

W. Vandekerckhove

The “tour of SSE” shows us ekphrasis – describing a work of art using words – and its relevance for business education. We are used to doing business education through text and reflecting on text. Ekphrasis in business education reflects on image rather than text. We also meet historical examples of how economists came to develop their work through art or doodling. These are examples of a pedagogy that sees the function of art as critical, as making an intervention. However, there are other dimensions to the SSE pedagogy. Guillet de Monthoux explains how SSE’s arts-based curriculum offers a business education that is in tune with managing in an experience economy. Such a Deweyan takes on the relation between management and aesthetics became more pronounced at SSE after 2000. The chapter by Guillet de Monthoux describes SSE’s history of art and business education. He distinguishes different phases within two epochs – before and after 2000. In the first epoch, business education approached art in an instrumental way for critical purposes. Guillet de Monthoux argues that this relationship between the business school and artists was mutually instrumental. Or at least it started off like that. Four phases are distinguished here: invective art 1980s, ironic art 1990s, imitation art 2000, and intervention art 2005. The second epoch comes about after 2000, and Guillet de Monthoux calls it “intentional art.” SSE starts to curate art as a philosophizing. What’s more, curating becomes what SSE does. For what is a business school? Do we still believe a business school merely produces capitalists? Or is it curating, that is, is it stimulating thinking? It is the latter, and at SSE this is done by starting from experience: “The encounter with an object of art is an opportunity to make an experience.” That is a teachable moment in which art opens to philosophizing, that is, by starting from the experience rather than concepts or theories. Business education thus becomes “curating as approaching knowledge you cannot Google.”

Concluding Remarks Aesthetics of management is an emerging approach to philosophy of management, and the chapters in this section can demonstrate that. It is not straightforward what it is we are supposed to look at and listen for when we “do” aesthetics of management. This section illustrates refreshing management scholarship: If philosophy begins in wonder, then aesthetics of management is perhaps the deepest wonder of all philosophy.

Cross-References ▶ A Rancièrian Method of Exploring Notions of Management and Organization Through the Artistic Gaze ▶ A Smile and a Sigh: Leadership Insights from the East ▶ Aesthetics and Leadership

18

Aesthetics of Management: An Introduction

367

▶ Aesthetic Knowing, “Designerly” Thinking and Scenario Analysis ▶ Aesthetics, Management, and the Organization of Space ▶ Curating Management Philosophy: Art and Aesthetics for Business Education ▶ Regionally Speaking: Cultural Leadership and Capacity Building in the Asia Pacific Region ▶ State of the Art on Aesthetics and Leadership ▶ The Aesthetics of St Thomas Aquinas and the Art of the Beautiful Business ▶ The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action

References Antal AB, Hutter M, Stark D (eds) (2015) Moments of valuation. Exploring sites of dissonance. Oxford University Press, Oxford Bathurst RJ (2009) Enlivening management practice through aesthetic engagement: Vico, Baumgarten and Kant. Philosophy of Management 7(2):61–76 Becker FD (1981) Workspace: creating environments in organizations. Praeger, Westport Brewis J, Linstead S (2000) Sex, work and sex work. Routledge, London/New York Cairns G (2002) Aesthetics, morality and power: design as espoused freedom and implicit control. Hum Relat 55(7):799–820 Holm DV, Beyes T (2022) How art becomes organization: reimagining aesthetics, sites and politics of entrepreneurship. Organ Stud 43(2):227–245 Mintzberg H, Westly F (1985) Spinning on symbolism: imagining strategy. J Manag 11(2):63–64 Rorty R (1990) Objectivity, relativism, and truth: philosophical papers. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Steele FI (1973) Physical setting and organization development. Addison-Wesley Longman, Reading Strati A (1992) Aesthetic understanding of organizational life. Acad Manag Rev 17(3):568–581 Strati A (1999) Organization and aesthetics. Sage, London

Aesthetic Knowing, “Designerly” Thinking and Scenario Analysis

19

A Framework of Inquiry for Social Innovation George Cairns

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Building Understanding from Aesthetic Knowing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Personal Narratives of Aesthetic Knowing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aesthetic Learning from Hong Kong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aesthetic Knowing of “Home” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Multiple Realities of Aesthetic Knowing in the Workplace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Where to with Aesthetic Knowing? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Design – Contested Views of a Complex Domain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Design and Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Design for Social Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Design as “Attitude” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Designing with Users Through Collaborative Realization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scenario Thinking – Exploring Contexts for Social Innovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Engaging Critical Scenario Method (CSM) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beyond the Basic Method – “Branching” Scenarios and Scenario Improvisation . . . . . . . . . Designing for Social Innovation Through Collaborative Realization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An Overview of Scenario Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Scenario Method for Social Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Meaning of Design, and Design of Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Collaboration for Social Innovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

370 371 371 372 372 373 374 374 375 376 376 377 378 379 380 380 381 382 383 384 384 385 386

Note: This chapter is based upon a paper presented at the International Social Innovation Research Conference, Glasgow, 2016, and awarded Best Paper. G. Cairns (*) QUT Business School, Brisbane, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_1

369

370

G. Cairns

Abstract

In this chapter, I outline a framework for collaborative inquiry to address complex and ambiguous problems with broad social, economic, and ecological impacts. This draws upon principles of aesthetic knowing, “designerly” thinking, and the application of scenario analysis. The philosophical foundation that underpins the framework is grounded in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, specifically his “intellectual virtue” of phronēsis, or “practical wisdom” – thinking to inform action for the “good of man” (sic), with specific concern for issues of power. It is acknowledged that application will likely lead into initial divergent rather than convergent thinking. However, there is a deliberate intent to maintain and value difference in search of the most appropriate option for resolution of the problem. Keywords

Aesthetic knowing
“Designerly” thinking
Scenario analysis
Phronēsis
Social innovation

Introduction In this chapter, I outline a framework for collaborative inquiry that is designed to address complex, ambiguous, and often contested issues with social, economic, and ecological impacts. These impacts will often be felt across multiple cultural, geographic, and organizational contexts. The framework integrates principles of aesthetic knowing (cf. Carr and Hancock 2003; Ewenstein and Whyte 2007; Strati 1992, 1999, 2003), design-based thinking (cf. Cairns 2002; Manzini 2015; Verganti 2008, 2009), and scenario analysis (cf. Cairns et al. 2010, 2016; Wright and Cairns 2011). The philosophical foundations of the framework are grounded in Aristotle’s (1953/2004) Nicomachean Ethics, specifically his “intellectual virtue” of phronēsis, or “practical wisdom” – thinking to inform action for the “good of man” (sic). The contemporary relevance of phronēsis is expanded by reference to interpretation in the field of social science where, in taking account of the “broad” range of stakeholders (Freeman 1994), there is specific concern for issues of power (cf. Cairns and Śliwa 2008; Flyvbjerg 2001, 2003), and on who are “winners” and who are “losers” as a result of action. The phronetic approach is expanded through application of scenario analysis, in particular, “critical scenario method” (CSM) (Cairns et al. 2010; Wright and Cairns 2011). With the intent of encouraging the broadest range of explorations of complex and often contested issues, it is acknowledged and accepted that initial activity will most likely lead to divergent rather than convergent thinking. There is a deliberate intent to maintain and value difference in search of the most appropriate option for resolution of the problem, rather than seeking to reduce complexity through a false “will to unity” (Cairns 2002) and a focus on finding the “right” answer. However,

19

Aesthetic Knowing, “Designerly” Thinking and Scenario Analysis

371

selection among options is not based upon some form of moral relativism, in which all views are considered of equal value. Rather, it involves often difficult choices between competing values, beliefs, and priorities. The overall framework of inquiry is one that engages all involved and affected stakeholders in a process of “collaborative realization” (Cairns and Matthews 2015) for problem resolution. Adopting what I outline as “designerly” thinking, it draws upon the full range of relevant knowledge sets, from the contextual expertise of the problem “owners” to professional expertise of relevant design professionals, seeing all as valuable but also as bounded in their rationality. As such, it challenges all involved parties both to contribute to the full and, also, to recognize their limitations and the value of alternative world views.

Building Understanding from Aesthetic Knowing While twentieth-century explanations of knowledge and understanding within organizations tended to be dominated by notions of a universal logic and rationale, around the transition to the new millennium there was a growing recognition that human understanding involves not only rational cognition but also aesthetic knowing (e.g., Strati 1992, 1999, 2003). Such aesthetic understandings are derived of sensory perceptions: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. Strati (2003) argues that aesthetic knowing is both individual and collective, being influenced and informed by collective aesthetic norms, but not constrained by them and possibly in contradiction to them. Strati (2003, p. 55) further states that individual aesthetic interpretations may “be unarguable, given that further reason-based negotiation on the matter is impossible.” He goes on to highlight (Strati 1999) how our aesthetic understanding of an object such as a simple chair is influenced by the power dynamics of those multiple organizations that are involved in its design, production, delivery, and marketing and by the social conventions and the physical contexts that bound its presentation and use. Hence, aesthetic understanding is a crucial prompt to processes of human cognition, and such cognition is not a purely rational process but is one that is informed by human rationality and social construction. Applying Strati’s thinking in the context of the overall framework of inquiry leads us to consider several key dichotomies, namely: (i) subjective/interpretive against objective/rational models of analysis, (ii) the individual against the collective nature of understanding, and (iii) the notion of intent against that of interpretation.

Personal Narratives of Aesthetic Knowing As outlined above, Strati (2003) argues that aesthetic understanding is personal, yet collective, and is unarguable. If we are to develop an authentic framework for collaborative inquiry to address complex societal issues, engagement with such individual and collective aesthetic understandings of the environment – cultural, physical, and organizational – is crucial. Here, I would illustrate the importance of

372

G. Cairns

seemingly simple individual aesthetic understandings in the broader social context, based upon personal experience.

Aesthetic Learning from Hong Kong From my first visit, in the mid-1990s, I developed an immediate love for Hong Kong – the sights, the noise, the crowds, etc. but not particularly the smells. You will see immediately that these are all sensory experiences, aesthetic understandings. On that visit, I described my experience of traveling on the Hong Kong MTR (underground/ metro) to a group of peers one evening. I told them how I had not felt crowded, as I would in London, even at rush hour when the place was teeming. One of the group, a long-term resident, responded immediately. He pointed out that my experience of space was determined by my height, where I could see over the heads of the vast majority of fellow travelers, both male and female. As such, I saw the whole length of the train, while most got to see only the immediate crowd. That such a simple failure of visual understanding had slipped past me then had a direct impact on my work as an architect and space planner for multinational organizations. Several years later, reviewing the furniture installation in a new open-plan office, I realized that discussion of how the desk screens provided privacy when sitting, but opened up communication and views when standing was bounded. This spatial understanding arose from a common aesthetic interpretation among a group of tall, male designers. However, it was not shared by the largely female workforce, for whom there was no difference between sitting and standing – both provided an enveloping maze of identical workstations. Again on this first visit to Hong Kong, in mid-summer, I was late for a midday meeting in the CBD and had to run from the MTR station down a small street I had identified from the map, to my meeting venue in a shiny multistorey office building. Not until I entered the street, with no “shady” side despite its narrowness, did I realize that it was the setting for a local fish market, with fresh produce alive and available in buckets and bins all along and across its expanse. As a British/Australian vegetarian, the aesthetic memory of this experience is one of disgust that remains with me and that has tainted my views of Hong Kong from an olfactory perspective. However, it has again left me with a stronger personal appreciation and ability to understand how individuals respond to different spaces and activities, with pleasure or disgust but not necessarily with agreement even among close colleagues.

Aesthetic Knowing of “Home” Working as an architectural researcher to explore effective briefing/programming for social housing development in the east of Glasgow with prospective tenants, I interviewed one woman in her existing home. This was in a dilapidated block with severe damp issues and long-since devoid of maintenance by the owning authority. When I asked her what she might miss about her current apartment when she moved

19

Aesthetic Knowing, “Designerly” Thinking and Scenario Analysis

373

to a brand-new home, she thought I was being sarcastic and she became quite angry. However, when I asked her how she would feel if her current house was fully renovated, but a new block of the same height was built across the road, she immediately commented that her view would be destroyed. Without any prompt from me, she proceeded to describe how, first thing in the morning, she would come through to the kitchen and enjoy sunrise or early morning views across central Scotland from her window. On this occasion, having gained experience and knowledge of aesthetic understandings and their importance to the individual, I was able to scan the environment around the home to identify potentially important elements that might be lost in any new offering, here the pleasure of seeing.

Multiple Realities of Aesthetic Knowing in the Workplace In earlier work (Cairns 2002), I discussed a case study of intended collaborative design for a UK government agency. The agency’s building was designed in the 1970s in accordance with German bürolandschaft principles, with expansive open floors, free-flowing desk and circulation layouts, and plants dotted throughout. Over time, in a culture of paper-based, routinized, and bureaucratic work, the layout had been bastardized and corrupted. Some sections had grown, others had contracted. At the time, I described the division between sections as “Berlin walls” of filing cabinets, defining territories of which some were crammed like urban slums while others offered space to allow a game of football. As the agency moved from paper- to IT-based working and sought greater selfautonomy for individuals and groups, management commissioned a complete redesign of both the spatial layouts and the space use strategy. With colleagues, my task was to complete the strategic design, provide operational design parameters, and to offer one functional space planning layout. Committed to a policy of staff involvement and self-motivation, the CEO stated that while this layout would be implemented, it would be open to user adaptation after occupancy. Having moved from architectural practice to academe, I returned to the building several years later to discuss its operation with the users. I found that one specific group saw no relationship between the designers’ layout and their own optimal solution, even though these were identical. Through iterative changes to the functional design, the notion of this being set within a higher-level strategic framework was lost, with some seeing the designers’ input as irrelevant. Rather, they saw “their” design as providing the correct solution to meet their own operational needs, where the delivered version had been suboptimal. Discussion with the group surfaced their perceptions of the space over its various changes, expressed primarily in terms of aesthetic understandings. While the manager who showed me round thought that, as a designer, I would be upset to see “my layout” disrupted, I argued (Cairns 2002) that, without the input of professional design expertise to propose new possibilities and options beyond the users’ own knowledge and experience, it is highly unlikely that the users would have reached this optimal solution.

374

G. Cairns

Where to with Aesthetic Knowing? Every reader will have anecdotes and narratives of similar personal aesthetic understandings and of the contradictory views of others within the multiple realities of human existence. The key questions that arise for me from such experiences and that are applicable across every field of human interaction to resolve some critical issue are: 1. Do we really take time to understand and appreciate how others experience this situation, from their individual and community cultural, values, and aesthetic perspectives? 2. Do we, as “experts” or “professionals,” commit to placing value on such perspectives, equal to the value we place on our own, let alone fully embed them in our design processes? 3. Can we really expect to design and deliver meaningful and effective social innovation unless we do both? While the answers to these questions are context- and person-dependent, I strongly suspect that the answers to the first two will be “no” in many if not most situations. My aim in this chapter is to provide some general direction towards answering “yes” to both. At the same time, my personal view of the third question is that the answer must be “no.” In seeking to develop the direction I refer to here, I now move to discuss a design-led approach to research.

Design – Contested Views of a Complex Domain The notion of “design” has become popular across many fields in recent decades, particularly the term “design thinking” (e.g., Brown 2008, 2015). However, it is important first to understand that the word has many faces even within the professional design community, let alone broader communities of clients, users, and funders. Across different literature sets, design is viewed in terms of dichotomies of it being either: (i) functional or strategic in its focus (cf. Helsinki Design Lab undated), (ii) a professional domain or one that engages “everybody” (cf. Manzini 2015), and (iii) a user-centered or organizational vision-driven activity (cf. Verganti 2008). For some professionals, design is primarily a functional process directed at generation of some tangible output, while for others it is a creative process aimed merely at generating new ideas about and understanding of an ill-defined problem. The now-defunct Helsinki Design Lab (undated) succinctly summarized the two notions of design as either functional or strategic. The first is a structured and rational process directed at seeking the right solution to a clearly defined problem. The second is a creative process focused on questioning current understandings of complex, ambiguous, “wicked” problems. Here, design challenges and potentially reframes the very nature of the problem, seeking innovative options to address the

19

Aesthetic Knowing, “Designerly” Thinking and Scenario Analysis

375

“right” problem rather than finding the functional response to the “wrong” one. The distinction between strategic and functional design approaches is of relevance where social innovation is the goal, rather than mere rearrangement of extant social structures. As the Helsinki Design Lab presented two contrasting notions of what design is, the term has also been debated in terms of whether it is an activity conducted by “designers” – those professionally trained in a design discipline – or is an activity for, “when everybody designs” (Manzini 2015). Having trained as an architect, I was acculturated to the idea that I was an expert designer, trained over 7 years to be able to analyze and define the design problem and to determine and deliver the best solution to the client – usually the “paying client” rather than the end user client. However, I later became convinced that the second approach is the path to follow as I questioned the power of design expertise where, in extreme cases, engagement with the client – whether paying or user – appeared to be based upon an approach best summarized as, “Here is the answer, now what was the question?” However, while supporting Manzini’s – and others’ – manifesto for collaborative design, I have concerns that much of what is termed as collaboration remains bounded by traditional disciplinary attitudes, by hierarchical relations these bring with them, and devoid of consideration of issues of power. While the approach here acknowledges the strengths and the weaknesses of each side of the various dichotomies of design, it is focused on the user, or stakeholdercentered approach, rather than the organization’s vision. In doing this, it requires that ways of aesthetic knowing (cf. Strati 1999) about social and environmental issues and their contexts must be given as much weight as other forms of knowledge. While addressing design as a contested term, in the broader field of organizational decision making, the aesthetic – and other more subjective understandings – must be viewed against the dominance of rational thought. Here, there is the need for a mindset that accepts the “postdichotomous realities” (Beech and Cairns 2001) of human existence. Engagement with these multiple realities of understanding enables collaborative building of alternative future scenarios (Wright and Cairns 2011) within which new social innovations can be envisaged, prototyped, tested, and evaluated against multiple criteria of social, ecological, and economic value by all stakeholders.

Design and Management Over the past decade, design has become a subject of intense interest and discussion in the field of business and management, from which client and funder groups involved in promoting social innovation might draw their understanding. Here, the term “design thinking” has been of particular interest and has been widely discussed in both academic and practice arenas, with proclamations of the potential of designled approaches for business advancement (cf. Gruber et al. 2015). I would first question whether this business school-driven focus on design (e.g., Dodd 2014; Stanford d.school 2014; UTS 2011) represents a trend or a mere fad. JohanssonSköldberg et al. (2013, p. 121) discuss how the management discourse has tended to

376

G. Cairns

be “more superficial and popular” than academically rigorous, with some seeing design thinking as the panacea for inertia in management thinking and organizational creativity. Here, there is little overt recognition or discussion of how the term “design” remains contested, or that the key tenets of true “designerly” thinking are of collaborative, cumulative, and innovative knowledge construction. If it is to be of value in fostering true social innovation, I would posit that application of such designerly thinking requires a careful rethinking of what management and organization studies and practices prioritize, moving away from a dominant short-term/ economic/shareholder value paradigm to embrace a long-term/societal/stakeholder value set.

Design for Social Inquiry As stated in the introduction, the approach to inquiry for social innovation is one that leads initially to divergent thinking rather than to convergence. As such, the direction is not one along some linear path towards “the answer.” Rather, it is the meandering start of a journey to who knows where – with only a rough idea of where we might wish to be at the conclusion. However, if we are to adopt an approach to design for true social innovation, we must rise to the challenge – to the multiple challenges – thrown up by the various dichotomies identified here, seeing them not as polarities that define either/or choices but as invitations to embrace a both/and approach. But, how then do we avoid relapse into some moral relativism that places equal value on all perspectives? We must find a way of addressing complex, ambiguous, and conflicted problems that enables us to engage the “multiple realities” (Beech and Cairns 2001) of individual and collective knowledges and understandings in order to explore and contextualize the problem, thereafter, to engage collectively to surface the full range of options for its resolution, then to assess each of these options against an agreed set of value-rational criteria that will lead us to the optimal choice for the benefit of the community of stakeholders who have most to lose relative to other groups if another option is selected. In the outlined approach, I advocate engagement with a form of designerly thinking that is collaborative, innovative, challenging, and devoid of mechanisms of power that are overlaid by notions of expert knowledge – professional, financial, etc. – being of greater value to decision making than the experiential and aesthetic knowledge of the end user.

Design as “Attitude” Discussing the idea that design is more than mere process, Chick and Micklethwaite (2011, p. 24) raise the idea that “design is an attitude not a profession.” They also argue that design as an activity is not the sole property of designers. Drawing on thinking from Germany’s influential Bauhaus (Moholy-Nagy 1947/1961, p. 42), they posit that design “has to be transformed from the notion of a specialist function

19

Aesthetic Knowing, “Designerly” Thinking and Scenario Analysis

377

into a generally valid attitude of resourcefulness and inventiveness.” Seeking to advance such a practice of design in search of effective and sustainable social innovation, here I develop an approach that is based on principles of “collaborative realization” (Cairns and Matthews 2015), involving the broad constituency of involved and affected stakeholders (Freeman 1994) as equal partners in terms of rights to participate. However, this is not a process dominated by moral relativism, whereby all values and ideas are held to be of equal value. Rather, it is one where equal partners must face up to issues of relative benefit for the greater good of the affected community, for true social innovation. This requires commitment to procedures that are to a degree informal and improvised but are also structured and informed by theory and practice. These are based primarily on a humanistic mindset rather than a professional knowledge set, and they draw upon contextual and valuerational understandings of both problem and context.

Designing with Users Through Collaborative Realization In discussing various forms of designer/client/user engagement, Sanders and Stappers (2008) first consider “user-centered design,” an approach that they outline as one where the user is viewed more as a subject than as a partner. Here, the focus is on researching user response to presented design solutions rather than on engaging the user in the process of design. Verganti (2009) outlines models of such an approach to user engagement from industry, citing examples like Alessi, Apple, and Nintendo, organizations that focus on building competitive advantage by using design as a way of creating new meaning for their customers. Sanders and Stappers (2008) then consider alternative design approaches where the user is partner in what they term “participatory design.” Tracing its origins to the early 1970s, they outline two strands of participatory design, either research- or design-led processes. While the research-led approach is again one that is more concerned with how users react to design, the design-led approach is one in which the user is fully engaged in the creative design process, rather than merely being a provider of data and information to inform it. However, as Sanders and Stappers (2008, p. 9) point out, the notion that all people are creative “is not a commonly held belief, particularly amongst those in the business community.” They point out that such participatory design approaches in which the user is considered a full and active partner, “fl(y) in the face of the ‘expert’ mindset.” Many expert minds see that, “(c)o-designing threatens the existing power structures by requiring that control be relinquished and given to potential customers, consumers or end-users (2008, p. 9).” In recent years, the user-centered approach designated “human centered design” (HCD) has been promoted widely through literature and application (cf. Abras et al. 2004). Originally conceived as an approach to involving end users in product design, along the lines of co-creation, HCD has expanded its influence and been brought to bear in addressing broad societal challenges (cf. Brown and Wyatt 2010). However, in the same way that Sanders and Stappers (2008) argue that user-centered design frequently views the user as a subject of design rather than an active participant in the

378

G. Cairns

Realisation Collaborative realisation by project team

User feedback on completed design

Design Engagement

User data input to design brief/ program

User involvement in design briefing/ programing

Conceptualisation Concept Consultation User Engagement

Service Collaboration

Fig. 1 Design and user engagement for “collaborative realization” (Cairns and Matthews 2015)

process, some applications of HCD appear to be focused on designing “for” rather than “with” user groups, such as where designers engage in third-party, “(p)artnering with nonprofits, social enterprises, and foundations” (Acumen 2015). Summarizing the various ways in which users might be engaged in the design process, from providers of only inputs at the concept stage to full partners in the process of actualization, Cairns and Matthews (2015) developed a taxonomy of user/ design engagement relationships (Fig. 1). While this taxonomy provides a graphic illustration of the different forms of engagement that might take place between designers and users, there remains the question of how a true collaborative realization is to be achieved. Central to this must lie a truly inclusive and democratic set of interrelationships for generating, sharing, and applying knowledge and understanding about the problem to hand. While expert understandings may be underpinned by notions of scientific rationality and general “truths,” an inclusive and collaborative knowledge base will also to a large extent be grounded in directly involved and affected parties’ aesthetic knowing about their own situation of being.

Scenario Thinking – Exploring Contexts for Social Innovation To undertake such an approach to problem exploration and reframing with reference to possible future outcomes, I propose the use of scenario method to explore the limits of possibility and plausibility as to how the problem at hand might unfold. The use of scenario methods has become widespread in recent years but, like design, scenarios are a contested domain. In the design field, Manzini (2015, p. 129) promotes the value of scenarios, advocating that, “there should always be more than one scenario all of which are possible and acceptable, at least in principle and for some.”

19

Aesthetic Knowing, “Designerly” Thinking and Scenario Analysis

379

However, as with design, scenario thinking has developed in various forms over time (cf. Wright et al. 2013), but approaches generally consider a wider range of possible and plausible futures than the two suggested by Manzini, and include consideration of the “unacceptable.” As catalysts for action, scenario narratives must explore the “limits of possibility and plausibility” for the future – both “best” case to be aspired to, and “worst” case to be understood and avoided if possible or, if unavoidable, to prompt action to build resilience (e.g., Cairns et al. 2010, 2016; Wright and Cairns 2011). The most common forms of scenario analysis – based on what Wright and Cairns (2011) refer to as the “basic method” – are constructed around, in simplistic terms, “best” and “worst” case futures and are designed to prompt organizational thinking about the robustness of existing or proposed strategies within each scenario. Beyond the basic approach, the framework of “critical scenario method” (CSM) (Cairns et al. 2010) offers one augmented scenario approach that is grounded in Aristotle’s (1953/2004) philosophy and his “intellectual virtue” of phronēsis, or “practical wisdom” – thinking to inform action for the “good of man” (sic). In CSM, the understanding of phronēsis is expanded beyond Aristotle’s writing by reference to contemporary interpretation in the field of social science, where there is specific concern for issues of power (cf. Cairns and Śliwa 2008; Flyvbjerg 2001), and for who are “winners” and who are “losers” within different potential futures (Cairns et al. 2010). For this, CSM draws upon stakeholder theory (Freeman 1994) to consider the implications within each scenario for all involved and affected parties.

Engaging Critical Scenario Method (CSM) As outlined above, CSM (Cairns et al. 2010) requires consideration of the potential impact of all scenario futures upon the full range of stakeholders, specifically directing thinking to those that may be remote and excluded from decision making. CSM embeds Flyvbjerg’s (2001, p. 60) set of four seemingly simple value-rational questions that are grounded in Aristotelian phronetic thinking. These are: • • • •

Where are we going? Is this development desirable? What, if anything, should we do about it? Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power?

Application of each of these questions to each scenario, and asked from the perspective of every stakeholder, will elicit a range of diverse and often conflicting answers, in particular on who gains and who loses. In line with Aristotle’s philosophy, the question on what, if anything, we should do is intended to prompt thinking to inform intended action for the good of humanity in general, and in the specific context of affected stakeholders’ existence. This is not a value-neutral activity and one based on moral relativism. Rather, it involves difficult choices between

380

G. Cairns

competing priorities and rationalities, but is intended to challenge dominant and frequently unstated assumptions, such as shareholder value and profit maximization.

Beyond the Basic Method – “Branching” Scenarios and Scenario Improvisation While the logic of the basic scenario method that is carried into CSM as published (Cairns et al. 2010) directs development of four scenarios that describe different possible futures, it also excludes consideration of local agency to bring about change within the scenarios. An alternative augmented approach has been developed (Cairns et al. 2017) in which two macro-level scenario narratives – in simple terms, “best” and “worst” case global/national/regional futures – are each branched at the local level. Here, the approach directs thinking to the ways in which involved actors’ agency can mediate the localized impacts of higher-level, global/national/regional scenarios. For example, the benefits of a best-case future might be squandered, or the impacts of a worst-case future might be mitigated. Again, four scenarios are created, but they combine to illustrate how a best-case macro-scenario might lead local actors either (i) to make the most of shared opportunities to build a sustainable community, or (ii) to squander these through individual selfishness and short-termism. Similarly, a worstcase higher-level scenario is branched to show local agency applied, or absent, either (iii) to mitigate and make the best of worst case circumstances, or (iv) to bring about collapse into a state of resignation and “learned helplessness” (cf. Mikulincer 2013). While scenario methods are generally codified and structured to prompt a rigorous examination of complexity and ambiguity, Cairns et al. (2016) posit that the method selected should be tailored to suit the context and nature of the problem. They outline a process of “scenario improvisation,” in which scenario generation is molded around the strategic conversation of involved stakeholders and their requirements. I do not have space to discuss the benefits and limitations of the various scenario approaches within the confines of this chapter, but summarize below how scenario methods sit within an overall framework of inquiry that is grounded in Aristotle’s virtue of phronēsis to inform designerly thinking for social innovation.

Designing for Social Innovation Through Collaborative Realization The approach outlined here for design for social innovation acknowledges, first, that it is one of dealing with the complexities, ambiguities, contradictions, and conflicts of human existence and is directed at resolving so-called wicked problems. As such, it is not one that is open to linear, rational, logical, and convergent thinking, or debate on the “right” answer to the problem at hand. Rather, it must be one of divergent exploration of all underlying beliefs, values, rationalities, and understandings of the full context in which the problem lies, and also of engagement with of all involved

19

Aesthetic Knowing, “Designerly” Thinking and Scenario Analysis

381

and affected stakeholders. This requires some form of structured analysis of the “mess” of information, data, ideas, anecdotes – and misinformation – that now lies before us. The topic of misinformation has become one of concern in recent times, with the emergence of terms such as “post-truth” (cf. The Economist 2016) and “alternative facts” (cf. Swaine 2017). While inquiry must engage with each and every idea that is presented as relevant to the problem at hand, as pointed out earlier, this is not on the basis of moral relativism with all ideas given equal value. Alternative narratives must be considered both in terms of their merit in relation to Aristotelian phronetic values and in terms of the structures and mechanisms of power through which they have emerged. While there is no codified method for undertaking this process, it is essential if a truly inclusive approach is to be carried through, and only once such broad-ranging and inclusive initial explorations have been completed can any real attempt be made at determining viable options for resolution of the core issue. This analysis must be undertaken in full collaborative partnership with the problem “owners” who have to live with the ultimate resolution form. Again, these may be several or many in number and may hold a variety of belief and values sets that must be taken account of, and between which difficult decisions may have to be made. The analytic process should offer direction towards identifying the most appropriate course of action for the “greater good.” To undertake structured exploration of the seeming chaos that may have been generated by this initial inquiry, I offer the following set of models of inquiry. First, I would restate the notion that Aristotelian philosophy and contemporary interpretation through phronetic inquiry provides a strong moral/ethical foundation to build on. Here, we might usefully set Flyvbjerg’s (2001, p. 60) set of four questions as an ongoing reference framework, namely: Where are we going? Is this development desirable? What, if anything, should we do about it? Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? I would immediately say that the answer to the first question cannot be found in some singular and exclusive statement. Rather, it will elicit a broad range of responses dependent upon the status, interests, beliefs, and values of the individual to whom it is directed. Projection of the answers into the future will lead to development of a range of scenarios.

An Overview of Scenario Methods Scenario methods generally involve a structured analysis of the political, economic, social, technological, ecological, and legal (PESTEL) factors that will drive the future, with a focus on specific “driving forces” within each category that will be influential on the problem to hand. The PESTEL analysis is expanded to require consideration of the breadth of extreme outcomes that might arise from each identified factor. While, in simplistic terms, these might be described as “best” and “worst” case outcomes, it is quite possible for them to lie towards the same polar extreme of one axis – “quite bad” or “extremely severe.” However, it is also possible for them to lie at the extremes of some completely different metrics. For example,

382

G. Cairns

some economic factors related to levels of, or lack of, investment might lead, at one extreme, to improved physical environmental conditions and, at the other, to deteriorating human health. From the identification of extreme outcomes, four scenarios are constructed, through a structured process of exploration of causal relationships and inferential bonds between factors and chronological linkages between possible outcomes. Here, it must be appreciated that, while the future is unpredictable, it is not completely unknowable. There are identifiable trends, ranging from population demographics to climate change that can be explored along trajectories of reasonable possibility, where these possibilities then have causal links to other factor outcomes. There are also events programed into history that can be explored in terms of possible outcomes. We can postulate, but not predict, outcomes of elections that, in many countries, are set within fixed timeframes. For the United States, dates of Presidential elections are set for November every fourth year and the maximum number of terms of office is set at two. Hence, as Barrack Obama’s win in 2008 predetermined that he could stand for reelection in 2012 but not in 2016, so Donald Trump’s win in that year determined that he would be eligible for reelection in November 2020, but not in 2024. Unlike nations such as the United Kingdom and Australia, the United States has no history of removing leaders from office mid-term – although we should not forget Richard Nixon’s impeachment. The United Kingdom and Australia also have flexibility as to when their leaders can call elections, but within a maximum time frame. While the subject of causality is open to critical debate, and philosophical questioning, the application of human “intuitive logics” (Jungermann and Thuring 1987) provides strong arguments for implied causal relationships and inferred bonds between potential future events and states. For example, the election of left-leaning governments is reasonably held to imply a greater policy focus on social matters. Similarly, right-leaning governments will generally be viewed as more focused on business concerns. In times of global economic downturn and weak trade, it would be unrealistic to posit scenarios in which a Republican US President or a Conservative UK Prime Minister would see provision of free health care or social housing as priorities. The “art” of scenario development requires a deep understanding of how such linkages can be developed and woven into possible, plausible, and detailed narratives, incorporating local actors and events that will bring life and meaning for the key audiences.

Critical Scenario Method for Social Inquiry To surface the range of possibilities for answers to all four of Flyvbjerg’s questions, I advocate the application of scenario analysis with a focus on the principles of “critical scenario method” (CSM) (Cairns et al. 2010). As outlined above, CSM builds upon the “basic method” (Wright and Cairns 2011) of scenario inquiry, to provide four possible and plausible futures narratives that are intended to describe the “limits of possibility and plausibility” for what might reasonably happen over the

19

Aesthetic Knowing, “Designerly” Thinking and Scenario Analysis

383

next decade or so. Where CSM goes beyond the basic scenario method is that it requires consideration of the full range of involved and affected stakeholders: their roles within each scenario, their power or lack thereof, and their likely responses to Flyvbjerg’s second question. Specifically, CSM requires engagement with what is desirable or undesirable, and to whom, and what then we should do about it from a phronetic viewpoint, from deliberative thinking to inform action for the greater good of those most affected. It recognizes that, within each scenario, there will be winners and losers and that these will be determined by the nature and exercise of mechanisms of power. As stated earlier, this is not a process of moral relativism. Rather, it is one that will often require difficult decisions to be made and it will often negatively impact some parties. While they may not be happy as a result, one can only hope that having been involved throughout a process of engagement and transparency, they will be more likely to be accepting of the selected resolution than if it was determined behind closed doors by others and enforced upon them. As stated, there are limitations to CSM, in that it does not bring in consideration of agency and action by local stakeholders to directly impact the narrative flow. Rather, the scenarios are intended to prompt thinking on what might or should be done in response to them – seeking to increase the likelihood of a positive future and decrease that of a negative one. There are additional augmented scenario methods (Cairns et al. 2015, 2016) that can (i) provoke discussion about the consequences of local agency and action, or lack thereof, or (ii) prompt an improvisational approach to implementation of what seem highly structured methods in response to local conditions. However, the focus, whatever approach is adopted, must be on dealing with contextual knowledges and eliciting contextually relevant ideas. Seeking to prompt necessary thinking, I return to consider the term design and, from that, the notion of designerly thinking.

Meaning of Design, and Design of Meaning As discussed above, design is a multifaceted and sometimes contested term. Its etymological roots lie in the Latin designare, meaning to mark out, or to designate. As such, modern uses that have strayed from this origin are considered metaphorical. Verganti (2009), while avoiding the notion of user-centered design, sees design itself as being about the creation of meaning, largely in relation to new product innovation. Here, bringing users – directly involved and affected stakeholders – into design as equal partners and collaborators, I would say that Verganti’s idea of creating meaning is useful. The intent of the processes I have outlined thus far is to engage in design activities that will offer enabling mechanisms that might lead to successful social innovation, through creating new meanings for users, meanings that are owned by them and developed through their own intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic interpretation and acceptance of the most appropriate option to resolve their problem. As illustrated above, the most appropriate option may be informed by external expertise, bringing awareness of possibilities outside of the users’ own experience. However, even where this external expertise is effective, appropriate,

384

G. Cairns

and becomes embedded in the users’ mindset of explanatory narrative, it may not be recognized as other than the users’ own developed solution.

Collaboration for Social Innovation To maximize the potential of the modes of inquiry outlined thus far, the processes of engagement between external and internal stakeholders, between professional experts and expert users must be ones that are truly collaborative across the full range of activities, from initial research through conceptualization to selection and implementation of the most appropriate of the range of potential options for resolution. This form of full engagement, I term collaborative realization (Cairns and Matthews 2015). It is related to, but very different from, forms of codesign or participatory design in which the end user is only a provider of inputs at the initial briefing stage, at the end feedback stage, or a bit-player in the actual design process, permitted to add peripheral elements but not to impact the core aspects of the design. One example of what I would consider collaborative realization for social innovation is seen in community planning in the “transition towns” movement (Chick and Micklethwaite 2011, pp. 136–137). Here, members of the communities engage with others, including designers as appropriate, to reframe problems related to the move to a non-oil-dependent economy and sustainable living for the future, developing new business models for localization of supply in response. While the idea of collaboration is central to the process advocated here, it must be understood that effective collaboration with meaningful outputs and impacts is no easy task. Where there are multiple organizations involved, with diverse and possibly conflicting priorities, and where decision makers from these come together with their individual personalities, traits and prejudices, issues of power and capability must be overtly addressed. There must be investment in building trust to underpin the collaborative process, and in determining a shared focus that is not subjugated to other priorities within any of the participating bodies (cf. Vangen and Huxham 2003; Vangen et al. 2015). For meaningful social innovation to be sought in any social, economic, or geographic context, I posit that there is a need for full contextual engagement and understanding to address the problems and pitfalls at the outset. However, I would assert that there are some general principles and approaches that might be considered.

Conclusions In this chapter, I have set out some ideas for a framework of collaborative inquiry that is designed to address complex and ambiguous, and often contentious issues in society. To do so, I suggest the application of what I term designerly thinking. To inform the inputs to this designerly process, I call for recognition and understanding of all relevant knowledge sets, including the aesthetic knowing of users about their own context of being. Such aesthetic knowing is both shared and individual, but it is

19

Aesthetic Knowing, “Designerly” Thinking and Scenario Analysis

385

unarguable. It informs human cognition and must be set alongside rational thought to guide understanding of how the individual understands, interprets, makes sense of and values their personal context of being. As aesthetic knowing is both shared and individual, so the term design may be generally understood, yet is not subject to any single understanding, even within the community of professional designers. As used by many, to signify a functional process leading to production of some artifact, it is not directly linked to its etymological roots in Latin. Among the range of meanings that are attached to design, I draw significance here from the Helsinki Design Lab’s notion of strategic design and Roberto Verganti’s interpretation of design as creation of new meaning. From the first of these, I posit the need to rethink the nature of wicked problems in need of social innovation and to explore and understand them in terms relevant to the owners of them – those directly involved and affected stakeholders. From the second, I develop the proposition that such new meanings for these stakeholders must take account of their current understanding of the problem, which has bases in rational, emotional, and aesthetic knowledge sets. I see the idea of aesthetic knowing as being of particular relevance, being both an individual and a collective form of knowledge, and one that is unarguable. As a philosophical basis for engaging with a diverse range of stakeholders across society and interrogating their understandings to inform decisions and actions for broad social good, I draw upon Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of phronēsis and its contemporary interpretation in determining the contextual nature of what this “good” may be. Specifically, these contemporary interpretations acknowledge the lineage of Aristotelian thought, through works of Nietzsche and Foucault, to make explicit the importance of power and its role in determining notions of “good,” “benefit,” and the like. Building on these philosophical foundations, I develop methodological principles for a process of design that I outline in terms of its commitment to egalitarian participation by end users alongside experts and professionals, from initial formulation, through conceptualization to ultimate collaborative realization. Finally, to ensure that consideration of the possibilities for resolution of the core issue extends to its maximum in terms of potential future outcomes and their impact on all parties, I propose the application of critical scenario method (CSM) as a mode of collaborative inquiry, both designerly and phronetic in its nature. I do not assert that adoption of any or all of these approaches will guarantee effective social innovation, but I would posit that through requiring true participation by and collaboration with users, and open acknowledgment of relationships of power in determining what counts as knowledge and reality, they provide a stronger foundation than many others.

Cross-References ▶ Innovation as Ethos ▶ The Social Role of the Virtue of Integrity

386

G. Cairns

References Abras C, Maloney-Krichmar D, Preece J (2004) User-centered design. In: Bainbridge WS (ed) Berkshire encyclopedia of human-computer interaction, vol 2. Berkshire Publishing Group, Great Barrington, pp 763–767 Acumen (2015) Design kit: the course for human-centered design. Retrieved 26 June 2015, from http://plusacumen.org/courses/hcd-for-social-innovation/ Aristotle. (1953/2004) The Nicomachean ethics (trans: Thomson JAK). Penguin, London Beech G, Cairns G (2001) Coping with change: the contribution of postdichotomous ontologies. Hum Relat 54:1303–1324 Brown T (2008) Design thinking. Harv Bus Rev 86(6):84 Brown T (2015) Design thinking: thoughts by Tim Brown. Retrieved 9 July 2015, from http:// designthinking.ideo.com/ Brown T, Wyatt J (2010) Design thinking for social innovation. Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter, pp 31–35 Cairns G (2002) Aesthetics, morality and power: design as espoused freedom and implicit control. Hum Relat 55:799–820 Cairns G, Matthews J (2015) Managing for sustained performance: collaborative realisation by design. Paper presented at the ANZAM conference, Queenstown, December Cairns G, Śliwa M (2008) The implications of Aristotle’s phronēsis for organizational inquiry. In: Barry D, Hansen H (eds) Sage handbook of new approaches in management and organization. SAGE, Thousand Oaks, pp 318–331 Cairns G, Śliwa M, Wright G (2010) Problematizing international business futures through a ‘critical scenario method’. Futures 42:971–979 Cairns G, Wright G, Fairbrother P (2016) Promoting articulated action from diverse stakeholders in response to public policy scenarios: a case study of the use of ‘scenario improvisation’ method. Tech Forecasting Soc Chang 103:97–108 Cairns G, Wright G, Fairbrother P, Phillips R (2017) ‘Branching scenarios’ seeking articulated action for regional regeneration – a case study of limited success. Tech Forecasting Soc Chang 124:189 Carr A, Hancock P (2003) Art and aesthetics at work. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills/ Basingstoke Chick A, Micklethwaite P (2011) Design for sustainable change. AVA Publishing SA, Lausanne Dodd T (2014, Apr 9) Why design thinking is the thing in business schools. Financ Rev. Retrieved 16 June 2015, from http://www.afr.com/it-pro/why-design-thinking-is-the-thing-in-businessschools-20140409-jk01w The Economist (2016, Sept 10) The post-truth world; yes, I’d lie to you. The Economist. Retrieved 24 Jan 2017, from http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21706498-dishonesty-politicsnothing-new-manner-which-some-politicians-now-lie-and Ewenstein B, Whyte J (2007) Beyond words: aesthetic knowledge and knowing in organizations. Organ Stud 28(5):689–708 Flyvbjerg B (2001) Making social science matter: why social inquiry fails and how it can succeed again. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Flyvbjerg B (2003) Making organization research matter: power values and phronesis. In: Czarniawska B, Sevo’n G (eds) The northern lights: organization theory in Scandinavia. Liber Abstrakt–Copenhagen Business School Press, Copenhagen, pp 357–382 Freeman RE (1994) The politics of stakeholder theory: some future directions. Bus Ethics Q 4 (4):409–421 Gruber M, de Leon N, George G, Thompson P (2015) From the editors – managing by design. Acad Manag J 58(1):1–7 Helsinki Design Lab (undated) What is strategic design?. Retrieved 17 Feb 2015, from http://www. helsinkidesignlab.org/pages/what-is-strategic-design

19

Aesthetic Knowing, “Designerly” Thinking and Scenario Analysis

387

Johansson-Sköldberg U, Woodilla J, Çetinkaya M (2013) Design thinking: past, present and possible futures. Creat Innov Manage 22:121–146. https://doi.org/10.1111/caim.12023 Jungermann H, Thuring M (1987) The use of mental models of generating scenarios. In: Wright G, Ayton P (eds) Judgmental forecasting. John Wiley, London Manzini E (2015) Design, when everybody designs (trans: Coad R). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Mikulincer M (2013) Human learned helplessness: a coping perspective. Springer Science & Business Media, New York Moholy-Nagy L (1947/1961) Vision in motion. P. Theobald, Chicago Sanders EB-N, Stappers PJ (2008) Co-creation and the new landscapes of design. CoDesign 4(1):5–18 Stanford d.school (2014) Bootcamp bootleg. Stanford Business School, San Francisco Strati A (1992) Aesthetic understanding in organizational life. Acad Manag Rev 17(3):568–581 Strati A (1999) Organization and aesthetics. SAGE, London Strati A (2003) Knowing in practice: aesthetic understanding and tacit knowledge. In: Nicolini D, Gherardi S, Yanow D (eds) Knowing in organizations: a practice-based approach. Sharpe, Armonk, pp 53–75 Swaine J (2017, Jan 23) Donald Trump’s team defends ‘alternative facts’ after widespread protests. The Guardian. Retrieved 24 Jan 2017, from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/22/ donald-trump-kellyanne-conway-inauguration-alternative-facts UTS (2011) Re-thinking research. UTS Newsroom, 4 July. Retrieved 22 Aug 2016, from http:// newsroom.uts.edu.au/news/2011/07/re-thinking-research Vangen S, Huxham C (2003) Nurturing collaborative relations: building trust in interorganizational collaboration. J Appl Behav Sci 39:5–31 Vangen S, Hayes JP, Cornforth C (2015) Governing cross-sector, inter-organizational collaborations. Public Manag Rev 17:1237–1260 Verganti R (2008) Design, meanings, and radical innovation: a metamodel and a research agenda. J Prod Innov Manag 25:436–456 Verganti R (2009) Design-driven innovation. Harvard Business Press, Boston Wright G, Cairns G (2011) Scenario thinking: practical approaches to the future. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke Wright G, Cairns G, Bradfield R (2013) Scenario methodology: new developments in theory and practice: introduction to the special issue. Tech Forecasting Soc Chang 80:561–565

Aesthetics, Management, and the Organization of Space

20

Jonathan Vickery

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An Aesthetics of Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Spatial as Intersubjective Agency and Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Art, Design, and Spatial Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion: Space, Aesthetics, and the New Model Worker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

390 391 396 402 407 409 410

Abstract

This chapter aims to explore and define a range of ways in which a theoretical interrelation of aesthetics, management, and space is fruitful for contemporary research. It opens with a definitional exploration of aesthetics and similarly with space; then with reference to the historical provenance of each of these terms, the chapter accounts for recent significant advances in management and organization analysis. The chapter questions mainstream critical approaches to the spatial design and the management of the contemporary workplace, and along with examples, it concludes by surveying new approaches to workplace design and the philosophical implications for the integration of aesthetics into corporate life. Keywords

Aesthetics · Art · Space · Workplace · Design · Management · Organization

J. Vickery (*) Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, West Midlands, UK © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_20

389

390

J. Vickery

Introduction The theoretical relation between space, aesthetics, and management is inconclusive and open-ended: in short, there remains many unexplored avenues and theoretical possibilities and all too few invested scholars. This chapter will not serve to summarize all past and present published research relevant to this subject nexus. The conceptual terrain to be surveyed is, in any case, mostly interdisciplinary and not specific to philosophy; and as will become evident, the concept of “space” (more so than “aesthetics”) provides for a wide-ranging application across research fields. This chapter will therefore be limited to defining the terms by which “the spatial” and “aesthetics” are effectively or suggestively aligned and will serve to identify the key concepts, definitional trends, and theoretical ideas that could provide significant questions for the philosophy of management. Attention will be particularly paid to conceptual innovations, to significant shifts in management practice and design of the workplace, and to the normative orientation of new research trajectories – where the theoretical interconnection of space, aesthetics, and management embodies ethical concerns on the conditions of human labor. Research scholarship on space has hitherto been forthcoming more from organization studies (OS) than management research per se (or interdisciplinary “management and organisation studies”). This is predictable perhaps, as organizations are often assumed to be the principal spatial dimension of management. Moreover, space as a concept within the study of management and organization is theoretically hybrid and often used in ways that are not explicit on whether it functions as ontology, epistemology, or just a general interpretative framework appropriate to a given sociological subject matter. Unlike “the aesthetic” (outside of science, properly speaking, such as complex classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, or space science), there is no established theoretical consensus on a definition of space or of “the spatial.” As for aesthetics, we can begin with a succinct definition in terms of the study of human sensory experience, particularly the role of perception and its cognitive content (meaning-laden experience). The aesthetic is, of course, a concept with a broad historical provenance, whose breadth cannot be explored in this chapter. We will not attend to notions of “taste,” “judgment,” the experience of nature, the sublime, and the beautiful, all of which were central to the modern traditions of aesthetics as a branch of philosophy from Hume, Burke, Baumgarten, Kant, and others. But we will indeed have cause to refer to design, creativity, quality, and value, all of which can be found as early as Kant’s pivotal Critique of Judgment of 1790. The approach to management that this chapter advances is not prescriptive but will oscillate between aesthetics as it pertains to the manager as subject and aesthetics as it pertains to the environment in which the subject acts. Our object of inquiry can therefore be phrased in terms of the spatial aesthetics of the workplace. And, of course, an exploration of the workplace will also pertain more generally to the landscape of sensory experience occupied by workers as much as managers, by virtue of their co-embodiment and corporeal presence in the spaces and places that are subject to management. Managers are themselves managed, and as Karen Dale

20

Aesthetics, Management, and the Organization of Space

391

observes, the operations of control exclusively associated with management is more thoroughly comprehended if “the whole of the constitution of a particular space is understood as a combined material and social interaction” (Dale 2005: 651). This chapter will attempt to define how places of work are realms of aesthetic materiality (physical, social, or virtual) and, furthermore, that workplaces can themselves be defined as active media of aesthetic production (Burrell and Dale 2003). By implication, aesthetics pertains to the ever-shifting character of human experience within the organizational formations of the socioeconomic world in which we live. Traditional scientific method (affixing an object of analysis, toward which a systematic, repeatable, and verifiable inquiry is conducted) has not been overly successful with aesthetics, notwithstanding the valuable research that has evolved in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, or visual communication (Smith et al. 2005). This chapter will attend only to research and writing that pertain to management and organization. It will open with a definitional exploration of aesthetics and then similarly with space; it will consider the recent development and practices of workplace design; it will then conclude with a proposal for a new avenue of research.

An Aesthetics of Space A spatial aesthetics of the managed workplace is relevant to some fields of management research more than others. Organizational Aesthetics (OA), Organization Studies (OS), and Organizational Behavior (OB) have become more receptive to this nexus of subjects, which is not to say that one cannot locate cognate topics of interest in older-style industrial Sociology or interdisciplinary Systems Thinking, Human Relations, or areas of Social Psychology. As a generalization, operations management, production management, as well as strategic management all tend to define space unproblematically as a physical facility (the bounded arena of a building’s interior, for instance), a critical issue to which we will return in the third section. The discipline of philosophical aesthetics has not made a significant impact on management and organization studies; it has also not attended a great deal to “space” as a singular or abstract concept, other than in relation to pictorial space (such as perspectival composition and the “tableau” of a drawing or painting; to artistic methods of depiction and representation; or to verisimilitude, illusion, and the ontology of the image). Likewise, philosophical aesthetics has not awarded a significant degree of attention to the spaces of artistic production (i.e., art’s management and organization), at least, outside the traditional art historical concerns with artist patronage and commissions or the division of labor in the artist’s studio. It was American philosopher Arthur Danto who, in an article in The Journal of Philosophy in 1964, first framed artistic production as an object of philosophical inquiry. His premise was “telling artworks from other things is not so simple a matter” (provoked by the emergence of Pop art and its incorporation of everyday consumer objects). But, rather than proceeding with an inquiry into aesthetic ontology, Danto ventured speculation on a subject, normally the preside of sociologists – the “art world”

392

J. Vickery

(Danto 1964). George Dickie, in the American Philosophical Quarterly in 1969, ventured a similar leap, and both Danto and Dickie are now widely recognized as initiating significant philosophical interest into the so-called “institutional” theory of art – how our experience, if not our very concept of art, is constructed in and through a theory-laden sphere of social interaction we call the “art world” (Dickie 1969, 1971). Understanding how a prevailing theoretical cognition of art becomes internal to the institutional formation of art production (and distribution, display, and reception) continues to be a subject of philosophical inquiry into aesthetic experience, meaning, and value. Why this is significant is instantiated by several avenues of fruitful research yet to be fully pursued by philosophical inquiry. With Danto and Dickie as reference points, Howard Becker’s sociological inquiry Art Worlds (1984) and, later, Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio’s The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (1991) still represent seminal and enduring theoretical advances in our conceptualization of art and aesthetic experience and which had been growing since the 1970s (Becker 1974; diMaggio and Powell 1983, 1991). Both art and aesthetic experience are herein defined in terms of a managed succession of organizations and institutions, central to which is linguistic improvisation and new aesthetic terminologies. Indeed, throughout the 1970s a new lexicon of interpretative thought was gradually replacing historical reference points from philosophical aesthetics with a more critical, pragmatic, and sociological comprehension of art’s function in everyday life. In fact, by the 1980s, the “aesthetic” per se was being marginalized in favor of new cultural and literary appropriations of linguistics (primarily structuralist and poststructuralist) and its theorization of “signification” and the “semiotic.” Art was cast as a form of symbolic communication or meaning-construction alongside other media of material culture, and even where the role of the linguistic remained central, the perceived embeddedness of language in political ideology or other discourses of power meant that the philosophical problems of aesthetics (taste, values, quality, and beauty and so on) were thought to obscure, not reveal, the significance of the experience of art. The rapid growth of research on “creativity” during the 1990s presented further challenges. Many of the attributes of the aesthetic (inspiration, visual communication, sensory stimulation, profound ideas, and emotional communication) seemed to be more credibly provided for by new creative industries (fashion, magazines, video games, etc), and post-Pop contemporary art no longer made explicit reference to the history of art but to popular culture, media, and current social issues. Public policy makers began to testify to the economic significance of the new “creative industries,” and international policy models of “creative economy” challenged the singularity of the fine arts and, with that, the autonomy of the aesthetic realm as traditionally conceived. Yet, the spaces of art’s display and experience (principally, museums and art galleries) radically revised their own practice and role in society – with marketing, branding, media celebrity, and controversy inadvertently or not succeeded in situating the experience of art on a continuum of lifestyle choices for the consuming public. Bilton’s Management and Creativity: From Creative Industries to Creative Management (2006) is indicative of this shift and along with Bas Van Heur’s

20

Aesthetics, Management, and the Organization of Space

393

Creative Networks and the City: Towards a Cultural Political Economy of Aesthetic Production (2010) together represent two poles of contemporary research – where the arts exist within a matrix of other forms of creativity and cultural experience, all of which are involved in the production of aesthetic phenomenon. The so-called cultural turn in management research during the 1990s (Küpers et al. 2017) has allowed for a greater openness to these shifts and to the dispersal of the aesthetic across an array of new cultural products. What was once the subject matter of cultural studies or the sociology of culture can now provide occasion to reformulate analytical problems and approaches to interpretation and to writing itself, in management and organization studies. While Frankfurt School critical theory still tends to secure the use of some of the categories of philosophical aesthetics – in critical management studies (e.g., Carr and Hancock’s Art and Aesthetics at Work of 2003) – the use of artistic and literary references in the course of management analysis has provided a means of resistance to what Parker calls “the hegemony of managerialism” (Parker 2002: 158). With Burrell’s innovative Pandemonium: Towards a Retro-Organization Theory (1997), the act of research writing becomes positively “artistic.” The aesthetic values of the historical baroque directly inspired the production of new concepts and modes of cognition of management and organization phenomenon. The first chapter features a symbolic inscription: “Warning: linearity kills” (1997: 8). Both Burrell and Parker are aligned with a critical polemic against “scientific” approaches to management, where they understand scientific method to have shorn research of the aesthetic experience of the researcher as much as the social content of everyday working experience. Burrell’s book (with Karen Dale) The Spaces of Organisation and the Organisation of Space: Power, Identity and Materiality at Work (2008) is a corrective to this, using space as framework for reconnecting management and organization analysis with the social identity, subjectivity, and experience of the worker – in other words, the experiential dimensions of the workplace. An earlier edited book, Clegg and Kornberger’s Space, Organizations and Management Theory (2006a), offered a similarly critical if more catholic overview of potential avenues for new spatial research; and it remains a pioneer publication in this regard and is worthy of further comment (Dale and Burrell 2008; Clegg and Kornberger 2006b; see also de Vaujany and Mitev 2013; Hernes 2004; van Marrewijk and Yanow 2010). Its diversity of content is symptomatic of the evident hybridity of organizational space as a concept – involving the design of buildings, the structure and divisions of facilities, internal hierarchies and priorities in the arrangement of rooms and offices, the operational processes of labor, and the communications (symbolic, verbal, and semiotic) that animate pervasive strategies of power and control. Diversity notwithstanding these approaches all differ radically from recent research on Workplace Ecology, Environmental Auditing, or Workplace Psychology, insofar as they promote a deep skepticism on the socioeconomic constitution of the manager as conduit of corporate authority. They all adhere to a principled opposition to prevailing conceptions of workplace management as the organization of labor and control of production and the assumed moral agency of the manager (as bringer of order, rationality, cooperation, productivity, and so on).

394

J. Vickery

Clegg and Kornberger, along with Burrell and Dale, serve to dissolve the naturalist empirical (sometimes “common sense”) understanding of space as the broad realm in which management (or managed processes) affects change. Space is all too easily assumed to be a container and self-evident physical site and location for workers and their productive activity (a building interior, for instance). However, the interconnection of worker, production, building, or location is not altogether apparent to the human eye or to empirical methods; and it is not reducible to a bounded arena of labor activity, equipment, and artifacts, which is all shaped in productive form by managed strategy. Space, rather, is not self-evident at all: it both provides for and generates latent, often invisible, and ever-changing conditions for experience, identity, values, meaning-production, and action, both in relation to and providing a means of resistance against management authority and an organization’s strategy. In summarizing the range of ideas, observations, and assertions that feature in Clegg and Kornberger’s indicative volume, we may say that the contemporary corporate environments construct many forms of space (along with many ways of comprehending space – the sensory and the cognitive are interrelated). The contemporary corporate environment actively mediates meaning and symbolic communication through the presentation of corporate identity and the deployment of style, color, and lighting. It also uses space to inculcate company values and behavioral norms, as a “discipline” enforcing patterns of productive self-regulation (the discipline and surveillance that creates a cohesive “workforce”). Space may purposively engage in the stimulation of the worker’s senses, using brand design and where a particular “look and feel” is a strategic requirement. Yet even non-branded spaces – the traditional Fordist factory office space, whose visual, design, or ergonomic dimensions are arrayed in predictable linear geometry – can transmit knowledge through experience (of values that signify neglect or an inability to develop or respond to new social conditions or a suppression of new social values). Even the “look and feel” of management neglect can take the form of a visual language of mediated meaning (from values and priorities to anachronistic methods of control or outdated assumptions on the linearity of worker productivity). All built interiors and functioning working environments have been carefully designed and assembled according to a plan that articulates a form of rationality, sense of order and authority, and, more importantly, an analytical representation of the processes of production (and by implication, the role of management in the control and optimization of that spatial interior). Most environments, in fact, contain predesigned and reappropriated objects deployed according to a logic and form of practical rationality – the “useful.” One does not have to be a devotee of actornetwork theory (ANT) to understand how objects (or spaces and objects as a unified entity – like a workshop or fitted office) can possess “agency.” Objects are not inanimate entities whose ontology resides in an orbit exterior to the dynamics of social interaction and communication. Objects are used and are always in motion, even if that motion is the motion of the perception of the managers by whom they are continually deployed. Objects moreover possess an aesthetic power to represent, affect, and define meaningful experience (where meaningfulness can be of a negative

20

Aesthetics, Management, and the Organization of Space

395

variety, affecting the denigration of the worker, the value of their work, or indeed in promoting a sense of alienation from the decision-making orbit of management). Clegg and Kornberger’s introduction to Space, Organizations and Management Theory serves to remind us how prevailing tendencies in management research continue to ascribe an exclusive priority to the thought and actions of individuals (in explicit positions of authority) as abstracted from the immediate environment of the plurality of management (and the collective habitation of the workplace). This may seem obvious and internal to the very definition of management as an object of inquiry; yet, it can also be to the neglect of many other factors in the management process that relate to the material conditions of such individual self-assertion, thought, and action in space. The primacy of the individual manager as fulcrum of research inquiry can all too easily rest on an assumption of “centered” human agency, which is to say, the manager is (for purposes of the inquiry) ontologically autonomous – from workers, from other managers, and from their immediate environment. While the historic “master-slave dialectic” goes some way to conceptualize the symbiotic interrelation of management and worker (Klikauer 2010: 105), the relation between manager and (populated) spatial environment is less theorized. The autonomy of the agency of the individual manager is a common feature of traditional and contemporary scientific management research. It tends to harbor assumptions on the voluntarist or rational independence of the human mind and its epistemological facility for understanding the world, objects, and other people in it. In doing so, it tends to posit a direct and self-evident relationship between strategy (or codified corporate plan), decision-making, communication, control, and impact or effect on production or workers (Harding 2013). Moreover, the manager is cast as the originary source of the principle ideas, cognitive understandings, values, and governing conduct that supposedly define a given workplace. The manager’s mind is supposedly reproduced in the minds and actions of workers or employees, and as a direct result, the operations or production will be affected (whether positively or not). This conception of the manager will determine an understanding of the spatial environment of the workplace: the environment becomes intelligible largely in terms of an exteriorization of the mind of the manager or at least the way they articulate of their practical rationality in relation to the demands of production. The spatial environment of the manager, with its quotidian environmental phenomenon (desk, equipment, light, interpersonal communication, office door, office furnishings, and so on), is easily viewed as self-evident or a matter of simple empirical description. But if human agency is less centered than a product of intersubjective communication or is understood as operating on a continuum of experience and social interaction with both workers and environment, then the spatial organization of the workplace is less epistemologically neutral. And this might even attribute greater significance to the manager’s own behavioral proclivities – what the manager does, decides, experiences, intuits, engages with, enjoys or not, and operates in accordance with written, spoken, and unspoken codes of corporate expectation, refracted, of course, through their own aesthetic experience (Flecker and Hofbauer 1998; Halford 2005).

396

J. Vickery

However, the specific role of the “aesthetic” within this spectrum of research interests (as within Clegg and Kornberger’s stimulating range of papers) is not obvious, and few scholars attempt to delimit an actual orbit for the aesthetic (from other environmental, phenomenal, or affective factors). While it is clear that the aesthetic cannot be safely assigned to exclusive psychological or sociological categories (exclusively to the realm of mental apprehension or to either structure or agency), there is something internal to its history that interconnects both. Aesthetics, traditionally speaking, could be ascribed in a very general way to an environment (such as the expanse of a natural landscape) and equally to the experience of that environment and to the expression of that experience (through, e.g., the act of perception and taste or conveying a capacity for self-awareness and reflection through the creation of a work of art or literature). In this sense, aesthetics has always indicated how human agency is intertwined with its environment and where the subject and object of knowledge cannot be categorically separated, notwithstanding epistemological confusion. Kant’s theory of “judgment” (Kant 1790/1987) was indeed constructed to account for such a subject-object interrelation, and later phenomenological traditions allow for aesthetic experience to become a species of knowledge (Merleau-Ponty’s “carnal knowledge” as exhibited by artists or Pierre Bourdieu’s “habitus” and the education of the senses in ways that can be used in other realms of social life). It remains difficult to disassociate the aesthetic from phenomenological inquiry but therein is its potential. The aesthetic of the workplace can be more fully comprehended through a triangulation of management, worker, and environment and whose criteria of interpretation pertain to the articulation of agency (as the operation of the sense-perceptual apparatus of experience in response to, and in interrelation to, a designed and symbolically encoded workplace environment).

The Spatial as Intersubjective Agency and Environment For Plato, space was a receptacle (kora) of, or containing, matter (hyle), whereas for Aristotle, space was the expanse of, or extent to which, matter was dynamic and in motion. At the outset of the modern era, Descartes, then Leibniz, and Locke and a host of other seventeenth and eighteenth-century thinkers expanded on what would become the foundations of a scientific theory of space (initially, classical mechanics). The mature Immanuel Kant plays a pivotal role in separating a philosophical inquiry from a scientific theory of space. From the time of the Critique of Pure Reason, 1781, Kant defined space not in terms of objects, bodies, or their relations and movements (we do not experience “space” in itself) but in terms of “the subjective condition of sensibility, under which alone outer intuition is possible” (Kant 1781/ 1988: A 26/B 42). That is, space is an a priori cognitive interconnection with the world, presupposed for our experience of the world to be intelligible and open to inquiry. Like time or temporality, space cannot be abstracted from the sensible world but is internal to our relation to it – a perceptual as well as physical relation (hence objective and universal).

20

Aesthetics, Management, and the Organization of Space

397

While the philosophical history of the concept of space is complex, as are Kant’s interrelated ideas, the emergence of space as a major theme in the social sciences in the twentieth century is instructive. Today, the “sociology of space” is a designation for a diversity of inquiry into the constitution and function of space as a social and economic phenomenon (as form, limits, boundaries; as dynamic interaction, networks and orbits; and as a priori of all human cognition, representation, and organized action) (see Baldry 1999; Gieryn 2000, 2002). Georg Simmel’s 1908 book Sociology: Investigations on the Forms of Sociation [Soziologie: Untersuchungen Uber Die Formen Der Vergesellschaftung] sets a precedent. In revising his earlier published papers, Simmel first used the term “sociology of space” and also used the concept of space as a hermeneutic framework with which to explore a range of undefined social phenomena (often for purposes of observation, rather than theory-building). Simmel defined broad thematic areas, which included social organization and institutions, identity and location, social interaction and relationships (insiders and outsiders), authority and the imposition (and breaching) of boundaries, collective association and the form of belonging, symbolic form, money and communications, and other means of intangible space with variable temporalities. When, in his now-famous book The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1989) David Harvey made the observation that many hitherto intractable spatial barriers were actually dissolving with global digital communications and increasing flows of international finance capital – Simmel’s experience of the impact of industrial modernity on social life can be heard. Harvey is one of the many economic and political geographers (and “urbanists”) who employ a sociology of space (Harvey 1989), which is now a considerable resource for research in management and organization. One enduring principle that animates the sociology of space is the Marxist axiom that the material conditions of society (its economic reproduction – labor and social class in relation to the methods of industrial production) determine its broader social and cultural organization and development. To understand organization and development, one therefore needs to understand how human beings and their capacity for labor (embodied intelligence, skill, and perception) are managed in the nexus of the prevailing forces of competing interests (i.e., between social classes and between them and the state). And as with Simmel’s original writings, the sociology of space tends therefore to embody an ethical motivation for social justice in the form of equality, identity recognition, rights, and equitable redistribution of resources in particular places and particular forms of labor (see Cairns 2002; Cairns et al. 2003; Witz et al. 2003) and how these are formed by the management and organization of material conditions. This was evident in Clegg and Kornberger as much as Burrell and Dale. A seminal influence on contemporary research in the spatial organization of labor (and spatial aesthetics) is the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s La production de l’espace of 1974 (published as The Production of Space in 1991). Lefebvre formulated a conception of space through a philosophical inquiry into methods of research on space and the material conditions of space. His now well-known assertions revolve around the way space is socially constructed, multidimensional in our

398

J. Vickery

experience of it, and specific to particular places (both cities and interior spaces and even intimate everyday settings of the kind later explored by Michel de Certeau in his now classic The Practice of Everyday Life of 1980) (de Certeau 1984). Space is formed out of, and through, the social relations of capitalist economic production, which is not a macroeconomic abstraction but always specific and local and contradictory. Space mediates the production of values and meanings as they emerge from social conflict and class relations within the space that is society. The processes of spatial formation, for Lefebvre, also provide the material conditions for intellectual life and for cultural production as well as the aesthetic experience of a place (like a particular city). The “spatialization” of life is replete with the contradictory and ever-changing processes of capital formation, which are never fully complete or static and often dominated by institutionalized and established forms of control. Spatialization takes three forms (are realms of three spatial practices): the perceptual continuum of the physical space of appearances and the concrete world as presented to us and that we negotiate daily (our own “spatial practices”), the conceptual space of planning and the ordered structuring of the spaces we inhabit (whether by urban planners, building or shop floor management, or social codes of behavior; these are “representations of space”), and then there is the lived space of everyday life, where we experience the first two spaces in terms of everyday meaning and values (Lefebvre 1991: 33); this is the realm of “representational spaces” or institutionalized symbolic value, protocol, and hierarchy. This “trialectical” understanding of space has been widely debated. What is clear, however, is that Lefebvre’s (Marxist) aim is to promote spatial praxis, which is the conversion of our research inquiry into space into an active social resistance against the structured (spatialized) social relations that govern (and dominate) our lives (see Watkins 2005). Numerous scholars have extended Lefebvre’s trialectics in various directions, some theoretical and some practical, while others continue to explore these themes without explicit reference to Lefebvre. David Harvey’s “time-space compression,” Edward Soja’s “thirdspace,” and Marc Augé’s “non-place” [or non-lieux] are but three examples that are yet to be exploited for research of the spatial aesthetics of the workplace. Harvey observed that economic globalization has dissolved many of the established spatial coordinates so embedded in our cognition of reality, and this has major implications for how we understand our individual and collective role and position in relation to the production, circulation, and exchange that defines economy and market. Edward Soja has asserted how the changing coordinates of space and time make for new hybrid cultural and urban places, which in turn provide the material conditions for new ways of inhabiting and activating space (Soja 1996). Soja challenged established urban research after Lefebvre, maintaining that traditional empirical categories (separating the social and historical, the subjective and objective, the real and imagined) are still dominant and still enforce a false ontology of space. Rather, the new spatial reality of multicultural postmodern consumer society (particularly in advanced cities) must be understood in a more synthetic, dynamic, and contiguous way; and the researcher, for Soja, must be less philosophically abstract in their spatial inquiry but open to experience, social exploration, and

20

Aesthetics, Management, and the Organization of Space

399

transdisciplinary dialogue. This is particularly the case when looking at subjects that have no stable coordinates or official designation within society (contemporary artistic practices, foreign or marginal people groups, or activist and alternative communities that do not originate, harmonize, or cooperate within the spatial economy of a given place). Marc Augé’s “non-place” was developed around the same time as Soja’s “thirdspace” and can be understood as its very opposite (Augé 1995). Non-place seems to collapse the perceptual and conceptual – it is a space planned and controlled so thoroughly it is evacuated of all historical forms of social life (all social relations, any identifiable expression of the material conditions of society, and any trace of the forces of spatialization). Augé’s examples are the new species of luxury hotel, airports, and shopping malls, whose designs convey an impressive sense of order, uniformity, regularity, and a profound integration of service management and consumption, all enforced by a nonnegotiable regimes of security. The substantive identity, material production, and social or laboring community that was once constitutive of “places” and spatialization itself has been erased in the “non-place.” Research in the aesthetics of “non-places” is slight. Management and organization research tend to take as their object of analysis more open and aesthetically accessible locations, like regular firms or corporations. Nonetheless, two exemplary trajectories can be identified, each notable for their triangulation of management, worker, and environment. In one trajectory, Pierre Guillet de Monthoux attends to art organizations, where the management of art production generates knowledge on the function of aesthetics in the context of organized labor in general. This, in turn, generates critical thinking on how the pragmatics of management and marketing may more beneficially adopt aesthetic approaches. In a second trajectory, Antonio Strati’s body of work emphasizes the way that every organization can be understood as aesthetic – indeed, human beings are fundamentally aesthetic beings. Strati has pioneered the study of aesthetic production as a general organizational phenomenon and, moreover, research on which necessitates the researcher to activate their own aesthetic sensibility. Guillet de Monthoux’s The Art Firm: Aesthetic Management and Metaphysical Marketing (2004) is a strategic synthesis of management, marketing, and organization theory. It features reference to philosophical and art historical literature and uses personal insight as much as individual reflections on aesthetic experience, altogether making for an interdisciplinary exploration that intentionally breaches the boundaries of management research. Ostensibly, the book serves to assess how the making of art is subject to the management and organizational pragmatics of any corporate entity; and moreover, in looking at the management and marketing techniques of modern artists, performers, and their companies (from Wagner to Richard Wilson), the conventional understanding of “management” and “marketing” as distinct areas (one internally focussed on the firm, the other externally focussed) is interrelated in mutually enhancing ways. In this, Guillet de Monthoux’s principle reference points are not actually contemporary management research but Germanic romantic and critical philosophy, from Kant, Schelling to Schopenhauer and German artist Joseph Beuys, along with the unlikely American John Dewey as a seminal protagonist.

400

J. Vickery

“Management, as an American subject of education, operates with the intention of producing strategies for making people work. Thus American management has a pragmatic ring to it, one that is lacking in the strictly utilitarian British business economy, the functionalist French gestion, or the scholastic rationalist kameralism of German Betriebswirtschaftslehre. Robert Wilson, artist, theater director, and designer, as well as an MBA himself, pinpoints what makes American management different in a minimalist Zen utterance: “Americans are interested in effects – Europeans in causes”” (Guillet de Monthoux 2004: 44). The significance of Guillet de Monthoux’s “aesthetics as management philosophy” is most powerful when akin to the work of an artist. Our concept of “artist“ is often skewed by romantic stereotypes of mystic, genius, or cultural prophet and where the value of art is, consequently, embedded in esoteric communication and our personal enlightenment. Whereas the artist, historically, aimed not so much to express themselves with some gnostic meaning but to generate “completely new worlds” (Guillet de Monthoux 2004: 47) of both cognitive and aesthetic character (synthesizing both analytical understanding and sensory experience), the artist’s obsessive and exclusive attention to their object (their self-absorbed interest in the work of art and its materiality) can be misleadingly understood as a pursuit for the mystical – indeed many artists have misunderstood their own profession as such. For Guillet de Monthoux, an historical-critical survey of artistic production in the modern era clearly demonstrates that art is not just an object, performance, or picture that stimulates a desire for mystery. It is a cognitive-imaginative enterprise that makes a significant impact on the space around it. With examples from European theater, opera, and various art movements, from Diaghilev to Kandinsky to Heiner Müller, Guillet de Monthoux shows us how the making of art engages with local material conditions by which new “spaces” of thought and action arise. These new forms of space, in turn, inspire both a pragmatics of managing people and as much as a semantics for new imaginary ideas on social transformation. Art involves making things for audiences and markets but where the audiences and markets become shaped by its own forces of creation. Art is a triangulation of artists (management), production (workers), and audience (environment; market), where this triangulation takes an aesthetic, not instrumental, form. Antonio Strati’s Aesthetics and Organization (2000) was a similarly seminal statement. Aesthetics is defined using classical categories of taste and beauty but where these categories are situated within the spatial and social expanse of workers in the environment of their work (Strati 2000). Aesthetics reveals a topography of experience, where qualitative and quantitative are not exclusive but different means of articulating a continuum of social phenomenon (where, for instance, a sudden growth in the number of workers in a workplace can be both a statistical fact and a radically altered social experience). Strati attends to expression, feelings and emotions, choices, and decisions based on intuition, judgment of quality, memory, narrative, and the artifacts that make up and compose an identity for an organization in relation to workers and visitors, from inside and from without. Accordingly, this

20

Aesthetics, Management, and the Organization of Space

401

hybrid field of phenomenon requires a form of research writing that is part analytical, part anecdotal, part descriptive and interpretative, and part exploratory, and all the while insisting that the classic and once-outdated concepts of historical and philosophical aesthetics (taste, beauty, judgment, form) remain useful for an aesthetic investigation of organizations. Strati’s text is suitably fluid and engaging, at times deliberately invoking a literary sensibility and sensitivity to how the terms of analysis and description are only meaningful to the extent that they invoke a sensible knowledge of phenomena in the reader. With its range of cultural references, Strati’s theorization is not distinct from the genre of “criticism,” once the preside of the art connoisseur or the essayist. The reflexive interrogation of his own experience of cultural events and artworks in turn provides phenomenological reference points for a concerted assessment of organizational spaces; indeed organizations are cast as human creations involving artistic improvisation, a spontaneous apprehension and intuition of events, and sometimes extrasensory awareness of the tacit and concealed. Strati states: “In fact, most of the research and analysis in the area of organisation theories and management studies describes the following, somewhat bizarre phenomenon: as soon as a human person crosses the virtual or physical threshold of an organisation, s/he is purged of corporeality, so that only his or her mind remains. Once a person has crossed this threshold, therefore, s/he is stripped of both clothing and body and consists of pure thought, which the organization equips with work instruments and thus reclothes. When the person leaves the organisation, the mind sheds these work instruments and resumes its corporeality, and with it the perceptive faculties and aesthetic judgement that yield aesthetic understanding of reality, but only in the society lying outside the physical or virtual walls of the organization” (Strati 2000: 3). This quotation is, of course, indicative of a critical polemic (against what was, for Strati, until the 1990s at least, a reigning orthodoxy in management and business schools around the world and still remains so in some places). The paradox of Strati’s position is that higher-level corporations, certainly by the year of the book’s publication, were highly sensitive to aesthetics – if only within product design and packaging and marketing communications (principally, advertising and branding). Moreover, the 1990s saw a huge trend in new office design, which was highly sensitive to the affective and even creative potential of the working environment, whether instrumentally on employee motivation and influence or design-based, on an employee’s sense of identity and strategic aims. Strati’s critical point, however, remains true: there remains an antipathy within management and organization research as much as education (if we consider the major institutions of learning, their courses and products) to aesthetic and creative dimensions of working life and activating the aesthetic sensibility in managers and workers as part of their practical skill set. The functional and measurable dimensions of organizations – those dimensions quantifiable mathematically and integrated with economic paradigms of growth, productivity, labor, and profitability – continue to be most useful and to that extent marginalize the aesthetic.

402

J. Vickery

Art, Design, and Spatial Planning Most managers work within a physical space that is planned and designed according to a technical specification of measured requirements; and this technical specification usually embodies empirical knowledge on the processes, tasks, and scope internal to a given field of production. This is particularly true of the benign “office” as much as the factory or assembly plant. The office, more than any other spatial entity, is a uniquely modern phenomenon and internal to the Industrial Revolution as much as the rise of the bureaucratic state and modern civil service and government through public administration. In terms of industrial production, Frederick Winslow Taylor’s writings are a prime example of the way methods of administration were extrapolated from methods of technical production (specifically, engineering) and in turn converted into practical knowledge on a new species of labor – clerical, bureaucratic, administrative, and management work (see his Shop Management of 1903 and then Principles of Scientific Management of 1911 (Taylor 1911, 1919)). William Leffingwell’s similarly well-known Scientific Office Management (1917) exhibits the same tendency, while propounding a scientific method (as opposed to past customs, guess work, or individual judgment), the scientific method assumes that both production processes and management can be ordered by the same mathematically adjudicated logic. Standardization, specialization, and methodical repetition were assumed to conform to the demands of this logic and thereby the conditions of efficiency, improved performance, and lower costs. Even later more socially minded administrative models – like Henri Fayol’s influential “Administration industrielle” (from 1956) – exhibited a strict subjection of the individual to the set task, set plan, and preconceived system of operations, to which all workers conformed. Efficiency through the compartmentalization of tasks, analytical measurement of process and movement, and the rationalization of resources came to characterize what was later called “Taylorism”in industrial production, rightly remembered for its social, as much as industrial, authoritarianism. Critical research on office space is often characterized by a radical dichotomy between traditional “scientific” (“empirical” and quantitative) approaches to spatial research and interdisciplinary social and aesthetic approaches (Linstead and Höpfl 2000). The “empirical” is less used in its historical-philosophical sense – as perceptual observation followed by inductive reasoning and so on – than as social metaphor for a range of methodological presuppositions on the nature of experience. These presuppositions might, for example, involve the equation of mathematical measurement with analysis or equate descriptive observational data with “reality” or the world “as is” (and thereby assume that an analysis of production, for example, can be analytically distinct from labor itself or the spaces of labor or the social identity and behavior of the worker). More importantly, the intellectual legacy of Frankfurt School critical theory has generated a general consensus among critical researchers that the world “as is” does not, in fact, allow us to understand the real social conditions of production and why production is shaped like it is or is “productive” at all. The empirical (or the world as seen, represented, or quantified by observational measures and experience) is, rather, replete with “instrumental rationality,” whereby

20

Aesthetics, Management, and the Organization of Space

403

what is understood as objective “knowledge” is actually embedded with particular forms of power and interests. While situating “production” on a continuum with the processes of labor and the worker on the one hand and the interests of ownership or authority on the other presents a range of analytical possibilities (and not necessarily Marxist), they will all return to the question of material conditions and the social basis of experience. Adorno’s conviction, now largely discredited, remains a powerful one – the impact of mathematical logic as a model of human social, economic, and cultural organization has marginalized crucial phenomenon of social relations (phenomenon not easily quantifiable), notwithstanding the obvious advances in science because of the mathematical facility for “abstraction” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979). “What appears to be the triumph of subjective rationality, the subjection of all reality to logical formalism, is paid for by the obedient subjection of reason to what is directly given. What is abandoned is the whole claim and approach of knowledge: to comprehend the given as such; not merely to determine the abstract spatiotemporal relations of the facts which allow them just to be grasped... The task of cognition does not consist in mere apprehension, classification, and calculation, but in the determinate negation of each im-mediacy. Mathematical formalism, however, whose medium is number, the most abstract form of the immediate, instead holds thinking to mere immediacy” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: 26–27). For Adorno, the modern subject remains convinced that “reality” itself is what is immediately apparent to our tools of statistical measurement and that reality is primordially ordered according to the same mathematically consistent objective and preformed logic that structures mathematical reason itself. Numerical consistency and repetition is an order to which human life must conform if we are to optimize efficient and productive coexistence. This “means-end” rationality is invested in the value of the means (efficiency, optimized production, profit) and not the end (collective cooperation and belonging, communal prosperity, freedom from want, and so on). The Frankfurt School’s general disdain for philosophical naturalism and its modern variants of scientific positivism and empiricism was that it could only take effect if human subjects suppressed all other forms of life (the body, emotions, social conflict or difference, existing patters of social cooperation) or ignored social phenomenon that did not conform to the ordered systems of production around which a model of society itself was constructed. And this suppression was only possible in a specific (capitalist) economic system. It is in these terms that we can “frame” a significant breadth of research on the modern office, where offices are generally viewed as a form of containment, unnatural order and control, and altogether symptomatic of instrumental rationality. Within the bounded entities of mathematically proportioned offices, the spatial deployment of labor was routinely effected without regard for the value or potential ends of labor itself (as distinct of the products generated by labor). For the Fordist factory, space was a negative property of an absence – in the terms of Euclidian geometry, merely the distance between coordinates and points and whose contemporary equivalent is spatial planning.

404

J. Vickery

Sometimes referred to as production flow planning (and often in coordination with human resource management and facilities management), Spatial Planning has evolved intricate methods for the mathematical calculation of organizational space, particularly in the context of digital technology and new approaches to workplace design (Becker and Steele 1995; Brookes and Kaplan 1972; Kaczmarczyk and Murtough 2002). Methods of mathematical calculation are often internal to spatial design, as it is mediated by computer software for architecture, building design, floor layout, 3D information modelling, and furniture distribution. The management of services, power, lighting, and energy consumption is now optimized in coordination with work flow and production, and while production remains the priority, the now heavily regulated workplace equally demands safety, security, and surveillance. Of late, digital wireless and optical networking systems, lighting design, acoustics management, and air quality control have all become internal to systems of maintenance, which were once purely practical measures but are now interrelated with the increasing need to control energy outputs and environmental impact. For office management strategy, an accurate algorithmic means of measurement and comparative assessment of building performance is routine. Spatial planning is utilized in cost control through space-saving efficiency techniques, promoting space-sharing and multisite solutions, or optimizing current production cycles through compressing spatial flows. Organizational life is defined as a spatial economy of energy, embedded within it is an instrumental conception of space as the designed control over resources. The phrase “instrumental rationality” invariably invokes an image of a machinelike instrument of human domination or a closed system in which human beings are material resource for an indifferent system of production. However, such “images” can homogenize a more complex reality, and indeed, most present-day corporations use Spatial Planning, which is not in itself exhaustive of the many strategic approaches to constructing a workplace, nor actually indicative of the worker’s social agency or aesthetic experience. It is with some irony that one of the achievements of industrial modernity – bureaucratic administration – later became, for philosophers like Adorno, a model of social domination. Max Weber’s classic essay on bureaucracy (Gerth and Mills 1991) echoed Hegel in praising bureaucracy’s rationalization, functional efficiency, efficient exercise of authority, and the decisive segregation of work from the private realm of the worker (Shaw 1992). The organization of labor based on the set plan, contractual agreement, and certified information enabled an objectification of roles in the labor force as much as a discrete definition of practical tasks. Significantly, for Weber the office (or “bureau”) was not just a concrete containment of labor (in the sense of a room or hall equipped with the necessary tools); it was a series of spatial conditions – a consolidation and interconnection of competencies, professional identity and responsibility, and hierarchy and the recognition of authority. Bureaucratic modernity was, therefore, both a liberation (from previous regimes of patronage and local idiosyncrasy) and a form of domination, through instrumental rationality. The paradoxical combination of both can be identified in the contemporary office and the growing literature that celebrates its reinvention. Corporate spaces

20

Aesthetics, Management, and the Organization of Space

405

of today are often remarkable in their seeming critical revision of the modern Taylorist office, as they respond to human sensory requirements like comfort and leisure, individual technical preference, improvised working patterns, and the desire for spontaneous social interaction. The new “funky” office space is an extreme example of the pervasive trend in the integration of leisure and cultural facilities into the workplace (van Meel and Vos 2001) (Warren 2007). Cafes, lounges, “downtime” rooms, personalized work stations, multimedia equipped “break out” spaces replete with bespoke ergonomic furniture are common, along with new spaces to stimulate and facilitate creativity, from “skunk” rooms to creative “labs.” A significant trajectory of academic research into the increasing significance of aesthetics for contemporary organization was pioneered with Fred Steele’s Physical Settings and Organization Development (1973) and later continued with Franklin Becker’s Workspace: Creating Environments in Organizations (1974); it was significantly advanced in critical fashion by Pierre Gagliardi and his edited volume Symbols and Artifacts: Views of the Corporate Landscape (1990). Introduced as a book on organizational culture (or in terms of method, organizational ethnography), it became a singular innovation in a new interdisciplinary field of organization studies, where “organizational life” inhabited an “aesthetic landscape” of symbolic meaning through artifacts (where the “artifact” could be the building as much as carpet, a uniform, or the graphic layout of the office). Gagliardi was analytically attentive to the relation between management, worker, and environment, from corporate representation to dress, office furniture, buildings, and brand design. In the book’s preface, Gagliardi states that “The analysis of artefacts in most cases implies the analysis of a fundamental category of experience: space” (Gagliardi 1990: 4). In Gagliardi’s terms, a new intellectual movement was emerging, against dominant empirical and instrumental understandings of the organization. Organizations were increasingly understood as one space on a continuum of social life, where workers were also citizens, belonging to a culture, and where the location of the workplace manifested itself in its spatial inflection and arrangement of its interior. The study of organization should, therefore, move beyond a focus on “behavior” and even the more holistic “culture” but encompass the whole range of “expressive forms” and “systems of meaning,” situated in a “general theory of sensibility,” which is of course aesthetics (Gagliardi 1990: 30). Continuing Gagliardi’s research trajectory, Rafaeli and Pratt’s edited volume Artifacts and Organizations: Beyond Mere Symbolism (2006) posits and advances the integrated “landscape” metaphor. Artifacts are no longer discrete or delimited phenomenon picked out for independent analysis (or interpreted in terms of how they emit single units of meaning); they are conceptualized as moments in a temporal flow of communication and signification and work together as a lexicon of an ongoing and evolving corporate language of self-representation. The new conditions of labor animating corporate space are indeed more liberal, allowing for social diversity at the same time as strategically managing institutional norms, legitimacy, and shared points of reference. Corporate self-representation does not require a “Fordist” homogeneity or enforced conformity but can manage individual proclivity

406

J. Vickery

with the more pervasive influence of aesthetic values. The aesthetic landscape of artifacts generates common perceptual horizons and educates the sensibility. For this research trajectory, space is not conceived as an abstract meta-framework for containing interpretations of organizational life. Rather, space is entirely relative to the coordinated instrumentality of the artifacts within it (their function and manifold practical uses); and instrumentality is effective only through aesthetics. It is through aesthetics that management affects the operation of identity, authority, governance, and learning that were once conducted as an internal command economy of the scientific management of the workplace. Considering how the rise of the aesthetic landscape is manifest in practice, we need to turn to industry-based literature. One publication that celebrates the recent reinvention of the office is Myerson and Ross’s colorful The 21st Century Office (2003). Here the contemporary workplace is defined as essentially supportive of the sensibility and social character of the individual worker. Their rich compendium of images, plans, and specifications show us a spectrum of very different corporate environments, whose design ideas have been evolving since the 1970s (the earlier stages were the subject of their previous book, The Creative Office of 1999). Myerson and Ross illustrate how so many of the world’s major MNCs (multinational companies) have, intentionally, become design leaders in the production of new workplaces. Firms like Reebok, Sony, or Toyota (along with lesser known design firms, architects, and advertising agencies) are going to great lengths to demonstrate (and publicize) a critical and reflexive approach to office design, emphasizing individual self-determination for workers and enhanced facilities for collaboration and innovative forms of cooperation. The selection of examples is, of course, limited and reflect trends in professional working life (in the USA and North America) and not so much the factory shop floor or heavy industry. And yet the contrast with modern scientific office management is stark: new movements in office design are actively working against “visual uniformity and banality, operational inflexibility, lack of human interaction, and place-dependency” (Myerson and Ross 2006: 9). The 21st Century Office is, rather, modelled on forms of social interaction, which Myerson and Ross categorize sequentially as “Narrative, Nodal, Neighbourly and Nomadic.” Each category is a generalization of a form of contemporary social life and then appropriated by designers and interpreted within the specific place-based requirements of each industry (i.e., they are not exclusive to an industry or mutually exclusive to each other). Narrative environments are animated by a prior conceptualization of the company, its products or services, and its values and personality, usually mediated by a carefully implemented brand strategy. In areas of industry like design or advertising, where buildings are rarely owned, the articulation of interior (not the exterior or architecture) is a strategic priority. Traditionally outward-facing dimensions of strategy (marketing, e.g.) now play a role in the inculcation of corporate aspiration as much as organizational learning (e.g., encourage employees to be examples of “living and breathing” the brand). The narrative environment is where brand strategy is aesthetically translated into a commercially inflected cultural lifestyle: labor takes on the character of the consumer lifestyle articulated by brand.

20

Aesthetics, Management, and the Organization of Space

407

The Nodal office, by contrast, does not provide content so much as infrastructure: it is an interior design-based construction prioritizing communication and the technology and spaces for communicative interaction. This takes the form of incubation spaces, “cocoon” forms, and other spaces for comfortable yet stimulating spontaneous or planned communication. The Neighbourly office is designed to facilitate social informality and community, a friendly multiculturalism where the personalization of space is expected (but not in ways that territorialize or promote exclusivity or selective collegiality). It attempts to provide the conditions and stimulus for the fluidity, spontaneity, and improvisation of everyday social life. And lastly, the Nomadic office would equate to the many mobile, dynamic, and co-working spaces that facilitate workers of no-fixed location. Digital media and Wi-Fi are central to the nomadic, but not exclusively so; its purpose is to dissolve the traditional office altogether, where a workplace is simply an temporary site or platform for improvised activity, owned and adapted by the worker. There is no sense of the worker being restricted, enclosed, ordered, or subjected to arbitrary corporate limits; the authority over space is devolved to the worker. While it is true, these above characteristics pertain mostly of global corporations like Google’s Zurich offices or TBWA in New York; the normative orientation that animates the design is significant. A new pragmatic philosophy of management seems to have emerged, where the rights, liberty, and self-regard of the worker are visible corporate objectives. More importantly, the workplace articulates an attempted optimization of a new social contract of labor, where the firm’s strategic aims and the worker’s highest aspirations find a form of agreement. In other words, the new contemporary organization seeks to activate a worker’s aesthetic and social faculties so as to optimize their individual capability for labor. Design has not only absorbed and adapted knowledge on the phenomenology of aesthetic experience (particularly that nebulous nexus of pleasure and intellectual stimulation), it has co-opted realms of human subjectivity (identity, personality, expression, the intimacy of sensuality, and so on) and integrated them into corporate production.

Conclusion: Space, Aesthetics, and the New Model Worker What needs to be emphasized by way of conclusion is how aesthetics (as articulated in workplace design and to some extent architecture) has been enrolled in combatting the social authoritarianism and instrumental rationality of past hegemonic scientific office management. Yet, we cannot assume that instrumental rationality has simply been defeated or replaced, given the sophistication in how the new corporate landscape has co-opted human subjectivity and aesthetics in the service of brand and an expanded field of corporate production. This is the brave new world defined by the bestsellers, Pine and Gilmour’s The Experience Economy (1999), Anderson and Ray’s The Cultural Creatives (2000), and David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise (2000). There are three different subjects (consumer experience, the rise of the creative industries, the co-option of hippy counter-culture by the new professional classes) but where each is grounded in a

408

J. Vickery

shared economic narrative on the “postindustrial” (or post-Fordist) society. This narrative plots how and why the West experienced a rapid contraction of manufacturing capacity; a pressing need to innovate and develop competitive advantage (over East Asia); new divisions of labor favoring administrative, communication, and creative skills; and a substantive expansion of corporate office complexes as an integral part of every major city. Where industrial labor was once embedded in a stable slowly evolving heavy infrastructure, itself embedded in a clear system of social class and occupation, the proliferation of freelance, sole trading and subcontracting, outsourcing, network, and partnership-based employment, signifies a changing interrelation between economy, society, and the laborer. This is the emergence of the so-called flexible, mobile, and multiskilled worker, whose individual talents (particularly for “flexible specialization,” innovation, and creativity) were and are highly valorized. The worker’s individual identity becomes more apparent; it is composed of a highly differentiated yet highly coordinated skill set, along with interpersonal skills, strong work ethic, and a demonstrable facility to identify with a variety of corporate values. This is the world of the “new model worker” (Austin and Devin 2003; Dobson 1999; Flecker and Hofbauer 1998; Kingma 2018; Hancock and Spicer 2011). Combining the examples of the above publications with others in this genre (Bahamón et al. 2009; Doorley and Witthoft 2012; Turner and Myerson 1998; Yee 2018), it is possible to characterize the “new model worker” in spatial terms – in terms of the new spatial aesthetics of the workplace: Spatial mobility: an imperative for interspatial movement dissolves the once-all defining triad of corridor, foyer, and stairwell; segments of space are designated for tasks and functions more than managers, and reorganization and adaptation become perpetual routine as the organization interior is no longer bound up with the symbolic mediation of corporate management authority; space it is understood as enabling not controlling and as organic or evolving not fixed. Expressive agency: the contemporary corporation’s invested interest in employee freedom and welfare means that employees are afforded unprecedented independence – to accumulate individual capital in terms of skills and knowledge; this severs the direct bond between worker and company, as worker is potentially mobile; the authority of corporations becomes less dictatorial and more paternalistic, where learning, cooperation, and discussion replace the unidirectional command or request; the organization ceases to “contain” the worker and rather becomes a place of influences and persuasions, pleasure, and aspiration. Fluency of adaptation: the workspace has become more integrated, where productivity is closely associated with an employee’s freedom of spontaneity and choice in gaining access to other workers or information and where the visual, ergonomic, atmospheric, and relational dynamics of the space serve to facilitate employee performance (even branded environments serve to direct performance, not simply express corporate identity). Laterally dispersed: the corporate interior no longer organizes itself (either physically or dynamically) around the functions of management but through a

20

Aesthetics, Management, and the Organization of Space

409

workforce continuum (where management is increasingly devolved or absorbed into project-structured labor); segments of space are consequently less delineated, boundaried, or expressive of social superiority and authority; there emerges a priority for groups, project work, cross-team conference, consultation, and collaboration which are formative forces in how the space seems flattened and decentralized. The “open plan” is no longer a mandatory space-saving technique but an assumption of access to management and the obligation of management to develop specialist knowledge in the worker (who must contribute to a general open knowledge infrastructure in the workplace). Internal transparency: organizational space is conceived in terms of the temporal dynamics of production and not just a physical structure; this, in part, has been influenced by the rising centrality of communication and IT within the workplace but also the increasing scrutiny of company performance by executive management, shareholders, and stakeholders. The organization is no longer opaque but open and outward facing; in this, the worker is made conscious that their productivity is relative to external perceptions, interests, and the shifting regimes of value (for instance, in the market). The point of improvising the above spatial world of the “new model worker” is to provoke questions concerning agency and the role of aesthetics in constructing the new corporate environment. To what extent has the new spatial design (as much as Gagliardi’s aesthetic landscape of meaningful artifacts) collapsed the distinction between work and leisure and thereby compromised the aesthetic faculties by rendering both equally pleasurable and a stimulant of taste and the senses? To what extent does the new spatial design, developed out of an explicit critique of modern scientific management, cultivate (or fails to cultivate) a cognitive reflexivity with regard to new forms of repression, conformity, deference to authority, or the emergence of social division? Does the normative orientation (and quasi-democratic forms of cooperation) that characterizes the new approach to office design extend the ethical consciousness of workers? Or the subtle new social relations between workers and managers? If these questions are more sociological than philosophical to that extent, we will need to investigate the actual epistemic function of the new corporate spaces and whether they articulate or conceal new social relations. It raises question on the distinction between subject and object: is the new model able to conceptualize their own experience and exercise judgment or a critical discrimination on how their environment facilitates their aesthetic sensibility, or not?

Cross-References ▶ A Rancièrian Method of Exploring Notions of Management and Organization Through the Artistic Gaze ▶ Critical Moral Philosophy and Management ▶ Curating Management Philosophy: Art and Aesthetics for Business Education

410

J. Vickery

References Adorno TW, Horkheimer M (1979) Dialectic of enlightenment (tr. Cumming J). London: Verso Anderson SR, Ray PH (2000) The cultural creatives: how 50 million people are changing the world. Harmony Books, New York Augé M (1995) Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. Verso, London Austin R, Devin L (2003) Artful making: what managers need to know about how artists work. Financial Times/Prentice Hall, London Bahamón A, Cañizares ACG, Corcuera A (eds) (2009) Corporate architecture: fashion, banking, telecommunications, automotive. W W Norton, London Baldry C (1999) Space – the final frontier. Sociology 33(3):535–553 Becker FD (1974) Workspace: creating environments in organizations. Praeger, New York Becker F, Steele F (1995) Workplace by design: mapping the high-performance workscape. JosseyBass, San Francisco Bilton C (2006) Management and creativity: from creative industries to creative management. Wiley Blackwell, Oxford Brooks D (2000) Bobos in paradise: the new upper class and how they got there. Simon and Schuster, New York Brookes M, Kaplan A (1972) The office environment: space planning and affective behavior. Hum Factors 14:373–391 Burrell G (1997) Pandemonium: towards a retro-organization theory. Sage, London Burrell G, Dale K (2003) An-aesthetics and architecture. In: Carr A, Hancock P (eds) Art and aesthetics at work. Palgrave, Basingstoke, pp 155–173 Cairns G (2002) Aesthetics, morality and power: design as espoused freedom and implicit control. Hum Relat 55:799–820 Cairns G, McInnes P, Robertson P (2003) Organization space/time: from imperfect panopticon to heterotopian understanding. Ephemera 3:126–132 Carr A, Hancock P (eds) (2003) Art and aesthetics at work. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke Clegg S, Kornberger M (2006a) Organising space. In: Clegg S, Kornberger M (eds) Space, organizations and management theory. Copenhagen Business School Press, Copenhagen, pp 143–162 Clegg S, Kornberger M (2006b) Space, organizations and management theory. Copenhagen Business School Press, Copenhagen Dale K (2005) Building a social materiality: spatial and embodied politics in organizational control. Organization 12(5):649–678 Dale K, Burrell G (2008) The spaces of organisation and the organisation of space: power, identity and materiality at work. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills Danto A (1964) The artworld. J Philos 61(19):571–584. American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Sixty-First Annual Meeting (Oct. 15, 1964) Dickie, G. (1971) Aesthetics: An Introduction. Indianapolis: Pegasus de Certeau M (1984) The practice of everyday life (trans: Rendall S). University of California Press, Berkeley de Vaujany FX, Mitev N (eds) (2013) Materiality and space: organizations, artefacts and practices. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndsmills Dickie G (1969) Am Philos Q 6(3):253–256 diMaggio P, Powell WW (1983) The iron cage revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review 48(2):147–160 diMaggio P, Powell WW (1991) The new institutionalism in organizational analysis. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Dobson J (1999) The art of management and the aesthetic manager: the coming way of business. Greenwood Publishing, Westport Doorley S, Witthoft, S (2012) Make space: how to set the stage for creative collaboration. Wiley, Hoboken

20

Aesthetics, Management, and the Organization of Space

411

Flecker J, Hofbauer J (1998) The new model worker. In: Thompson P, Warhurst C (eds) Workplaces of the future. Palgrave, Basingstoke, pp 104–23 Gagliardi P (ed) (1990) Symbols and artifacts: views of the corporate landscape. de Gruyter, Berlin Gerth H, Mills CW (1991) From Max Weber: essays in sociology. Routledge, London, pp 196–244 Gieryn T (2000) A space for place in sociology. Annu Rev Sociol 26:463–496 Gieryn TF (2002) ‘What Buildings Do’. Theory and Society 31(1):35–74 Guillet de Monthoux P (2004) The art firm: aesthetic management and metaphysical marketing. Stanford University Press, Stanford Halford S (2005) Hybrid workspace: re-specializations of work, organization and management. New Technol Work Employ 20:19–33 Hancock P, Spicer A (2011) Academic architecture and the constitution of the new model worker. Cult Organ 17(2):91–105 Harding N (2013) On being at work: the social construction of the employee. Routledge, New York/London Harvey D (1989) The condition of postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Blackwell, Cambridge, MA Hernes T (2004) The spatial construction of organization. John Benjamins, Amsterdam Kaczmarczyk S, Murtough J (2002) Measuring the performance of innovative workplaces. J Facil Manag 1:163–176 Kant I (1781/1988) Critique of pure reason (trans: Guyer P, Wood A). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA Kant I (1790/1987) Critique of judgment (trans: Pluhar WS). Hackett, Indianapolis Kingma S (2018) New ways of working (NWW): work space and cultural change in virtualizing organizations. Cult Organ 1(1):1–24 Klikauer T (2010) Critical management ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke Küpers W, Sonnenburg S, Zierold M (eds) (2017) Rethinking management: perspectives and impacts of cultural turns and beyond. Springer, Berlin Lefebvre H (1974/1991) The production of space (trans: Nicholson-Smith D). Blackwell, Oxford Linstead S, Höpfl H (eds) (2000) The aesthetics of organization. Sage, London Myerson J, Ross P (1999) The creative office. Lawrence King publishing, London Myerson J, Ross P (2003) The 21st century office. Lawrence King, London Myerson J, Ross P (2006) New office design. Laurence King, London Parker M (2002) Against management: organization in the age of managerialism. Polity, Cambridge Pine BJ, Gilmore JH (eds) (1999) The experience economy: work is theatre & every business a stage. Harvard Business School Press, Boston Rafaeli A, Pratt MG (2006) Artifacts and organizations: beyond mere symbolism. Lawrence Erlbaum, London/Mahwah Shaw CKY (1992) Hegel’s theory of modern bureaucracy. Am Polit Sci Rev 86(2):381–389 Smith KL et al (2005) Handbook of visual communication: theory, methods, and media. Routledge communication series. Routledge, London/New York Soja EW (1996) Thirdspace: journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford Steele FI (1973) Physical settings and organization development. Addison-Wesley, Menlo Park Strati A (2000) Aesthetics and organization. Sage, London Taylor FW (1911) Principles of scientific management. Harper Collins, New York Taylor FW (1919) Shop management. Harper Collins, New York Turner G, Myerson J (1998) New workspace, new culture: office design as a catalyst for change. Design Council and Gower, London van Heur B (2010) Creative networks and the city: towards a cultural political economy of aesthetic production. Transcript, Bielefeld van Marrewijk A, Yanow D (2010) Organizational spaces: rematerializing the workaday world. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham

412

J. Vickery

van Meel J, Vos P (2001) Funky offices: reflections on office design in the ‘new economy. J Corp Real Estate 3(4):322–334 Warren S (2007) Organizational topophilia: the countryside and aesthetic pleasure at work. Aesthesis 1(1):36–45 Watkins C (2005) Representations of space, spatial practices and spaces of representation: an application of Lefebvre’s spatial triad. Cult Organ 11(3):209–220 Witz A, Warhurst C, Nickson D (2003) The labour of aesthetics and the aesthetics of organization. Organization 10(1):33–54 Yee R (2018) Corporate interiors no 13. Visual Profile Books, New York

A Smile and a Sigh: Leadership Insights from the East

21

Ralph J. Bathurst and Michelle Sitong Chen

Contents Four Men and Their Ambitions (Analects, 11:26) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Becoming Exemplary: li and yue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discovering Potential . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Coming Together in the Middle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transference Across the Centuries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Aesthetic Turn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Achieving Ensemble . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Unifying Tendencies and Totalitarianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

415 416 419 422 423 424 425 426 427 428 428

Abstract

In this chapter Chinese philosophy is explored by examining one of the narratives found in The Analects of Confucius. Leadership, encapsulated in the concept of “exemplary persons,” comes from the interactions of li (ritual propriety and custom) and yue (music performance). The discussion turns to the notion of the middle way: a way of being in the world that embraces movement and flex, rather than adopting fixed and final positions. Therefore, contemporary leaders can, by becoming aesthetically alert, achieve ensemble and eschew tendencies toward control and domination. Keywords

Aesthetics · China · Leadership · Music · Ritual · Sinology · Social influence R. J. Bathurst (*) · M. S. Chen School of Management, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_21

413

414

R. J. Bathurst and M. S. Chen

The Master said, “I find inspiration by intoning the songs. I learn where to stand from observing ritual propriety, and I find fulfillment in playing music.” Confucius (Analects, 8:8)1

Confucius (551BCE–479BCE) has had an enduring influence on Sinitic cultures, and his ideas have reverberated through several millennia until today. Notwithstanding the mid-twentieth-century initiatives of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party in separating the country from its ancient roots (Teon 2016), Confucianism holds considerable sway in today’s People’s Republic of China and beyond these State borders to other countries in the region. Perhaps the acceptance of Confucian thought in contemporary China serves the purposes of the ruling elites in ensuring political cohesion. Indeed, as Roberts (2014) argues, showing respect for parents and elders serves as a proxy for obedience to the State, and this appropriation of Confucian ideas may account for the deeply embedded hierarchical systems within Sinitic cultures. However, to privilege filial relations as the primary driver of social and political cohesion is to limit the importance of Confucian ideas and in the process inoculates the citizenry from further and richer inquiry. Therefore, this chapter goes beyond the filial concept and by taking an aesthetic approach, explores the importance of music – performing and listening – to the formation of a moral individual who contributes productively to society, namely, a “leader.” By adopting this agenda, along with Wah (2010), there is a global purpose at work, in that Western societies may have much to gain by exploring Confucian ideas. As justification, Wah notes that: “In 1988, 75 Nobel Prize winners made a statement in Paris that if humankind is to survive in the twenty-first century, they must draw wisdom from Confucius” (p. 280). Scholars in the West have been slow to respond to this clarion call, not least because of our orientation toward Judeo-Christian ethical systems and Greek philosophical inquiry. Indeed, as Nelson (2009) argues, Sinitic philosophies are often discounted because of their perceived strangeness and lack of resonance with Western traditions. On the contrary, however, there is much that is rich and relevant to twenty-first-century leadership scholarship and practice. Therefore, this chapter seeks to unravel some of the impulses that underpin Confucian thought, especially the aesthetic dimensions, and advocate for their relevance in this age. Confucius was an educator who was intensely interested in the cultivation of a well-rounded person who could then make a meaningful contribution to society. His agenda was to encourage people to become “exemplary” ( junzi), an attribution that in its narrow sense refers to a mature gentleman but in its wider usage indicated a well-rounded person competent in the arts, and may indeed have included women (Ames and Rosemont 1998, p. 40), and in that process become leaders who would by their actions demonstrate wisdom and who would “first accomplish what they are going to say, and only then say it” (Analects, 2:13). The junzi would eschew narrow self-interest and seek the well-being of the whole of society by “associating openly with others who are not partisan” (Analects, 2:14).

1

Throughout this chapter the Ames and Rosemont (1998) translation of the Analects is used.

21

A Smile and a Sigh: Leadership Insights from the East

415

However, to become a junzi and achieve this high degree of character formation required training around six particular arts, including “observing propriety and ceremony, performing music, and developing proficiency in archery, charioteering, writing, and calculation” (Ames and Rosemont 1998, p. 3). An exemplary person, therefore, would not just possess these competencies as instrumental devices; they would have developed the necessary reflective and artful capabilities to accompany this skill set. In sum, as Ames and Rosemont (1998) claim: “In the Chinese tradition broadly, proficiency in the ‘arts’ has been seen as the medium through which one reveals the quality of one’s personhood” (pp. 3–4). Aesthetic awareness and artful expression were fundamental to Confucian ideology and, indeed, take a central role in contemporary Chinese life. For, as Z. Li and Cauvel (2006) argue, Chinese culture is fundamentally artful, and this aesthetic ground forms the basis for personal and social development. With this perspective to the fore, one of the narratives in the Analects – 11:26 – is explored in relation to the quest to find resources to inform twenty-first-century leaders.

Four Men and Their Ambitions (Analects, 11:26) In this narrative the Master, Confucius, is sitting with four young men – Zilu, Zengxi, Ranyou, and Zihua – exploring an issue that is as relevant today as it was to these men back then: a quest for purpose and meaning that would enable them (and us) to make a significant contribution to society. To provoke the conversation, Confucius said: You keep saying, ‘No one recognizes my worth!’ but if someone did recognize your worth, how would you be of use to them?

The question sets up an obvious instrumental response about what these men planned to do in order to have an impactful life. The question is important because it facilitates a discussion about important stances that these men might adopt toward the people they are leading. Yet beneath the question lies a quest for deeper insights, and this becomes clearer as the four men propose their worth. The first, Zilu, gives a forthright response declaring that he would be a courageous leader able to defeat foreign invaders and eliminate famine and would after 3 years have “imbued the people with courage, and moreover, provided them with a sure direction.” Surely, such a declamation should have inspired the Master, for certainly tough times of invasion and famine would require tough, visionary leaders! Yet the Master only smiled enigmatically and turned directly to the next young man, Ranyou. Ranyou makes a similar claim, declaring that after 3 years he would have presided over the people’s prosperity. He would not bother with either “ritual propriety” or “the playing of music” because they would require a more excellent person. His worth would be measured by his abilities to generate prosperity.

416

R. J. Bathurst and M. S. Chen

The Master does not comment but turns instead to Zihua and asks him for his plan. Zihua said that he had a willingness to learn diplomacy in order to create alliances and then, wearing the appropriate ceremonial robes, would serve as a “minor protocol officer.” Without responding, the Master turned his attention to the fourth young man, Zengxi. After playing a final note on his musical instrument, Zengxi said that he would “choose to do something somewhat different from the rest.” There is no information about what instrument he was playing, but it appears that it was portable, which would suggest that it was something like the pipa, a fourstringed fretted instrument. After the encouragement from the Master, Zengxi said: At the end of spring, with the spring clothes having already been finished, I would like, in the company of five or six young men and six or seven children, to cleanse ourselves in the Yi River, to revel in the cool breezes at the Altar for Rain, and then return home singing.

In response, the Master “heaved a deep sigh, and said, ‘I’m with Zengxi!’” The narrative continues and records that “Zilu, Ranyou, and Zihua all left, but Zengxi waited behind.” Zengxi was curious about what the Master thought of the other three men’s ideas. The Master replied noncommittally that they were free to speak their mind. Zengxi pressed further asking why the Master smiled at Zilu, to which he replied that Zilu did not observe ritual propriety and that “there was no deference at all.” He then went on to chide Ranyou for not focusing on governance. Ranyou wanted to rule a large territory but did not offer insights into how this would transform into a cohesive State: he clearly did not understand the nuances of governance. The Master further criticized Zihua for his lack of vision in bringing senior officials together; for the kind of diplomacy needed to govern the State would require a person of much more gravitas than a “minor protocol officer.” Out of the four, it is only Zengxi who Confucius affirms. What would explain, then, this declaration of allegiance to Zengxi?

Becoming Exemplary: li and yue As previously mentioned, to become an exemplary person in the Confucian context required learning the arts. Underpinning these competencies is two particular elements, li and yue, and these two qualities earned Zengxi his privileged status with the Master. The two virtues interact together and assist in forming a moral character. For Confucius, li resonated with his belief that ancient rulers “governed by observing ritual propriety and custom (li) rather than by law and force” (Ames and Rosemont 1998, p. 3). He was wary of authoritarianism and coercion, and he believed that li was a generative force that facilitated community building both within the family and in matters of State governance. It is a complex word, and as

21

A Smile and a Sigh: Leadership Insights from the East

417

Ames and Rosemont translate: “The compound character is an ideograph connoting the presentation of sacrifices to the spirits at an altar (li 豊)” (p. 51). The metaphor is compelling, because it implies that in li, many elements come together and are presented as a complete whole. The allusion to ritual sacrifice denotes a surrender of the self to a higher, social purpose. Lai (2006) notes that li has developmental stages and that the young acolyte learns li through first discovering rules of behavior and is then taught to mirror those rules in his social conduct. As behaviors are embodied, li becomes less of a straitjacket as people find flex and movement within what was previously highly prescribed. The mature person discovers that li underpins everything in social relations and it guides the “expression of attitudes, intention, and emotion within the boundaries of meaningful action” (p. 76). Moral character is, therefore, not an internal set of psychological drivers but is evidenced entirely through behavior. Lai adds, “In a deep way, the actions are the person, and perhaps even more central to the self than one’s verbal commitments” (p. 76, emphasis in the original). Thus, li is all-encompassing and is embodied freely in actions, hiding nothing. According to Lai (2006), the Confucian philosopher Xunzi, also referred to as Hsün Tzu (c. 310 BCE–c. 220 BCE), believed that human beings tend to be selfinterested, which may result in competition with each other, leading to social disorder. Xunzi’s core beliefs about human nature were significantly less optimistic than the traditional Confucian view. He believed that humans could improve themselves and participate in a cohesive community through music making, which would lead to correct behavior. The joy and emotional arousal that came with music would be a precursor to social harmony. He argued that the precedents were among “the former Kings who hated disorder, and therefore they created the musical forms of the odes and hymns in order to guide [behaviour towards the Way]” (Tzu 3rdC BCE/ 1969, p. 112). In this way [the former Kings] made certain that the voice would fully express the feelings of joy without becoming wild and abandoned, that the form would be well ordered but not unduly restrictive, that the directness, complexity, intensity and tempo of the musical performance would be of the proper degree to arouse the best in man’s nature and that evil and improper sentiments would find no opening to enter by. (Tzu 3rdC BCE/1969, p. 112)

For Xunzi, li acted together with yue, and along with laws and royal decrees, society would improve. Thus, says Kim (2011): In his [Xunzi’s] view, the anarchic state of his time arose from human nature which is selfinterested and passion driven, and this amoral state had to be rectified artificially by means of the Kingly Way consisting of ‘Ritual (li 禮), Music (yue 樂), Penal Codes (xing 刑), and Royal Ordinances (zheng 政)’. (p. 375)

From its beginnings as highly prescribed behaviors and norms to a way of living that is complex and flexible, the development of li is similar to that of a young musician learning scales and exercises as a beginner and developing into to a full-fledged

418

R. J. Bathurst and M. S. Chen

musician able to perform with ease in different environments. It is no surprise, then, that music ability (yue 樂) is foundational for Confucius. The ancient sage Yan Zi argued that just as a delicious soup requires many different elements like “water, fire, vinegar, sauce, salt, and plum to cook fish and meat” (cited in Li 2008a, p. 424) cooked over a fire that is at just the right temperature, so too music (yue) is a compound of many sounds performed together in harmony. Observing the accumulation of elements, Yan Zi noted that “different elements complete one another: one breath, two styles, three types, four instruments, five sounds, six measures, seven notes, eight winds, and nine songs. Different sounds complement one another” (cited in Li 2008a, p. 424). Achieving cohesion in music is no easy feat. Rather than subsuming some elements in favor of others, with one triumphing over the other (melody over harmony, rhythm over texture, for instance), music retains the integrity of all its elements together as a harmonious whole (Tan 2016). However, harmony should not be understood as the resolution of competing elements nor the smoothing out of differences into a unified homophony. Music both preserves and relies on a multiplicity of diverse elements that come together and is a model for how society should function. Therefore, for Confucius, music performance models healthy social relations and in turn mirrors the metaphysical relationship between Heaven and Earth (Wang 2004), which is both symbolic and generative. For, “Music does not only symbolize harmony, it also positively promotes harmony” (Li 2008a, p. 425). Therefore, as Li further notes: A mentality of harmony is a contextual mentality. The requirement of harmony places a constraint on each party in interaction, and, in the meantime, provides a context for each party to have optimal space to flourish. In the Confucian view, the world is not there just for one item or one kind of thing. It is for the ‘myriad things.’ Monopoly and hegemony are contrary to the spirit of harmony. (Li 2008a, p. 427)

This being the case, it is no surprise that the Master smiled at Zilu’s sheer hubris at wanting to conquer invading forces and give the people certainty. This tendency toward totalitarianism has deleterious effects, and, as the Master’s cryptic smile suggests, the tendency for wresting control and of taking charge is an unfortunate tendency of State leaders. Nisbett (2003) makes a similar claim: Chinese social harmony should not be confused with conformity. On the contrary, Confucius praised the desire of the gentleman to harmonize and distinguish it from the petty person’s need for conformity. (p. 7)

A harmonious society, therefore, is not one that is unified around a single idea. While harmonious relationships are sought for on the diplomatic stage and in governance regimes, its essence is in music. Therefore:

21

A Smile and a Sigh: Leadership Insights from the East

419

In the Confucian view, music more than anything else captures the essence of harmony. Music is the process of bringing a plurality of sounds into concord. The Confucian notion of harmony is modelled after music. (Li 2008a, p. 425)

This begs the question about the nature of music itself, and when the word “music” is invoked, what does it mean? Some clues can be found in the story of the four men discussed above (Analects, 11:26). Zengxi was identified by the Master as summarizing, most potently, social value. He invested his ideas in li and yue. He planned to attend to ritual observances, not alone as a personal obligation but with a group of young men and children. On the other hand, Zilu, Ranyou, and Zihua came from a self-absorbed orientation. Zilu declared his own strength of character to deal with large difficulties; Ranyou would ensure prosperity of the land he had at his disposal; and Zihua would establish alliances and demonstrate his importance with his ceremonial robes. Zengxi, in his statement of intent, embodied the essence of music; for music performance relies on a community of performers. In a concrete sense, music performance embodies the same elements of meaningful action that characterizes a mature expression of li. It is not surprising that the Master sighed deeply on hearing Zengxi’s plan; for the intake of breath precedes sound and is the precursor for music making (Gu 2009). The breath is the fundamental element that ensures the dynamism of li and yue. Given that li and yue are in a dynamic interrelationship, how might they inform social and organizational development? The next section explores the dynamism that the breath invokes, the space that it opens, and its invitational potential.

Discovering Potential Jullien (1995) in his discussion of Chinese history explores the ideas of potential and propensity that underpin the culture. He discusses the imprecise and almost indefinable concept of shi (勢) which gives “breath” to otherwise static and inanimate concepts. Shi is both a fixed structure as well as indicating a sense of “force and movement” (p. 11). Therefore, a stroke or dot in a written character or an official seal is replete with fecund possibilities, suggesting “the breath that lives in that character and makes itself felt through it” (p. 78). To understand this foundational concept of shi, Jullien (1995) discusses activities as concrete as making war and as conceptual as landscape painting. By way of illustrating the complexities of the idea, he poetically discusses the calligrapher’s art as a dynamic interchange of fixed and fluid elements that both attract and repel: The logic of the dynamism at work depends on contrast and correlation. Each element composing the configuration of the ideograms must either attract or repel another, either ‘turning to face another’ or ‘turning its back on another’. A line at the top bending downward

420

R. J. Bathurst and M. S. Chen

is complemented by one at the bottom curving upward; and the tip of the former implicitly prefigures and initiates the latter. In similar fashion, one stroke turns heavily back on itself while another carries on into a free-flowing tip; here the ink is thicker, there thinner. Separation gives rise to closeness, opposition to balance. Polarity engenders reciprocity and conversion. (Jullien 1995, pp. 78–79)

As already noted from Confucian antecedents, music was foundational to Chinese culture. Just as the art of war, painting, and calligraphy all relied on the potentiality of shi, so too was the art of playing the lute. Jullien writes that by the time of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), fingering positions on the instrument were related to various images from the landscape and animals, accompanied by a short poem and sketch to imaginatively encapsulate and teach correct fingering and hand positions. He writes: Diagrams, rubrics, pictures, poems: every method – intellectual, visual, emotional – is employed and every approach – analytic, intuitive, methodical, suggestive – used to convey the character, both physical and spiritual, of each hand position. (Jullien 1995, p. 110)

Thus, allegorical rendering would imply a physical posture and an appropriate state of mind. In lingering on this idea, the importance of music to Chinese culture throughout its history is reaffirmed. Indeed, the Chinese discovered, along with the ancient Greeks, overtones that music instruments produce when a string is plucked. According to Menuhin and Davis (1979), documents older than 3000 BCE reveal that the Chinese had discovered the relationship between octaves and fifths and the need for tempering because of uneven ratios at the upper end of the harmonic series. The Chinese settled on a pentatonic scale which mirrors acoustically natural phenomena. The discovery of the circle of fifths was a great one to the Chinese, for they honor the number five as sacred, dividing the basic elements into five, namely earth, fire, water, wood and metal, as they also recognize five basic human relationships and five basic kinds of grain. (Menuhin and Davis 1979, pp. 29–30)

The implications of this are profound. By acknowledging that all intervals between notes need to be negotiated for musicians to be in tune with each other, music performance becomes an analogue for performing social relations. In the West, musicians finally resolved the problem of tuning in the early twentieth century by establishing a system of equal temperament that would enable all keys to be explored without the need for retuning keyboard and fretted instruments. This opened up the possibilities of using a wide range of keys but, as Duffin (2007) argues, compromised accurate and nuanced intonation negotiated moment by moment. The importance of this cannot be overestimated. The ancient Chinese and Greek solutions to the acoustic problems resulted in “just temperament”: tunings that were based on a relational intra-musical context. The modern Western solution removed the need for contextual adjustment and in the process provided a standardized

21

A Smile and a Sigh: Leadership Insights from the East

421

solution that would suit everyone everywhere. A fuller explanation of the physics of tuning and temperament is beyond this study here but is mentioned because of the ways the Chinese understood the centrality of music performance and listening in social development. In her study of ancient Greek and Chinese documents, Yuhwen Wang (2004) found that like the Greeks, the Chinese had a sense of the cosmological importance of music. She discovered that in: Both Plato’s view of music and that found in the Yue Ji and Yue Shu associate closely not only with the ethos, education, and government, but also with their respective views of the cosmos – with what is observed on earth and in the cosmic universe. In the Chinese documents, a strong connection was established between music and the harmony found in Heaven (tian) and Earth (di). (p. 95)

Notwithstanding the formalist tenancies of Confucian ideology, its focus on music (yue) and the need for harmony in the State and family reveals a continual negotiation for a sense of ensemble rather than an insistent coercion. This sense of collaboration acknowledges that it is the breath that is at the core of all social functions (Kalmanson and Mattice 2015); and it is the breath of being and the breath of music that underpin “a conviction that harmony between music and the cosmos entails harmony among and within humans” (Wang 2004, p. 96). However, this harmony should not be equated with a unified perspective. For, as Perl et al. (2013) argue following Jullien, Chinese painting lacks the controlling and intensifying function of vanishing points. The skill of the Chinese visual artist is to open space for viewers and to let the gaze wander unconstrained through the features within the landscape which they are painting. The later Ming dynasty critic and artist, Li Rihua, as setting down that painters must achieve ‘a complete void’ in consciousness in order that ‘mists and clouds and all the brilliance of the world, in concert with the breath-energy that ceaselessly brings to life between heaven and earth’ will arise and then ‘extraordinary forms spring up’ under the brush. (Perl et al. 2013, p. 418)

Such openness and the suggestive potential can also be observed in music. In the focal narrative, Zengxi’s response began with him playing a final note on his instrument. Far from being a perfunctory gesture, here the concept of shi is writ large. Jullien (2007) notes: Chinese music is attentive to the harmonic capacity of a pared-down sound (the more the sound is pared down, the greater this capacity is). As the Laozi says (§41), there is ‘great sonority (in) little sound’: a few notes played on the lute are enough for us to hear the silence they will fall back into. (Jullien 2007, p. 68)

As a self-confessed Sinologist, Jullien argues that music, like the visual arts, does not have the same forceful effraction as Western art forms (Jullien 2007, p. vii). It is the suggestive breath of Zengxi’s final note that invites his disclosures about his social value based on his experiences of li and yue.

422

R. J. Bathurst and M. S. Chen

Coming Together in the Middle Rather than producing specific answers to problems that are simple and clear, adaptation to flux and fluidity evident in Chinese art requires leaders who can deal with opposing ideas without necessarily privileging one over the other. This requires a change in the ways that leaders position themselves vis-à-vis the people who they are leading. Instead of being atop a hierarchy, giving directions and creating goals, the leader’s position is reoriented to the middle at the heart of the action, because that is the place where meaning and purpose are continually negotiated. Being in the middle avoids the tendency toward fixed and final solutions that must be defended; and thus Peng and Nisbett (1999) argue that: Chinese deal with contradiction through what might be a compromise approach, showing tolerance of contradiction by finding a ‘middle way’ by which truth can be found in each of two competing propositions. (p. 742)

For Westerners, adopting a middle position may imply ambivalence and indecision. However, in the traditional Chinese context, this “middle way” refers to the idea of zhongyong (中庸), explored in the Doctrine of the Mean, by the grandson of Confucius, Zengzi (Zengzi/Zisi 3rdC BCE/ 2016) and considered as one of the four foundational Confucian texts (Groff 2017). It is both a concept and the name of the text, and Cheung et al. (2003) write that “the tenet zhongyong is composed of two words, namely zhong, meaning the middle, and yong, meaning commonplace” (p. 115), a quality that leads to a quest for excellence, and is a construct that Confucius had prefigured as being “of the highest order” (Analects, 6:29). This middle way translates into everyday leaderful behavior that is unexceptional; and privileging the quotidian over the exceptional clarifies further why the Master affirmed Zengxi over Zilu, Ranyou, and Zihua in the focal narrative (Analects, 11:26). This has had important cultural implications says M-J Chen (2002), given that “zhong guo, the ‘Mandarin word for China, literally translates as ‘middle kingdom’” (p. 183). In this way, to occupy the middle means to dynamically amalgamate competing elements into a whole, which is both a political and philosophical ideology. Zhong guo referring to central government has its origins in dynastic China where authorities refer to the central administration and is the name adopted by postrevolutionary China of the Central Communist Party (CCP). Chen writes: Chinese culture today continues to place a high value on the middle way. Confucian philosophy recommends zhong he, a concept based on middleway thinking (literally, “middle way,” zhong, and “harmony,” he) as the key to obtaining prosperity. . .In this view, a system is harmonious only when it has achieved a balance between paradoxical tendencies. The middle way philosophy, therefore, embraces two opposing but interdependent ideas: holism and paradox. (p. 183)

Indeed, Chinese thinking has traditionally embraced an integrative view of the world, which expresses a sense of holism distinct from the formal logic paradigms

21

A Smile and a Sigh: Leadership Insights from the East

423

that dominate Western traditions (Liu 1974; Lloyd 1990). All things in life are inseparable from their opposites. The strength of “middle-way” thinking may enable people to tolerate contradictions and appreciate unresolved tensions, consequently maintaining a view of the big picture by synthesizing the link between the opposites (Li 2008b). Competence at middle-way thinking and acting comes through li and yue. As in the epigraph that begins this piece (Analects, 8:8), observing li is about knowing the appropriate gesture for the occasion. There is no one way of being and behaving; rather, a junzi knows that each situation itself calls for a particular response. Further, this ability to harmonize with others in the context and avoid an extreme position is symbolized through yue. The experience of music making and listening not only brings joy to individuals but also an acute awareness of others within the community. Thus the harmony of the middle way is encountered through ritual propriety and music performance. Yet, how might these eloquent and paradoxical ideas from bygone times relate to twenty-first-century leadership practice?

Transference Across the Centuries The claim in this piece is that Confucian ideas are relevant to contemporary times, especially in the ways organizations are led. Recent steps by the Chinese government to create linkages that stretch around the globe illustrate this conviction. In March 2015, under the banner, China unveils action plan on Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced an ambitious goal to connect global trade routes by land and sea. Modelled on networks of trading patterns that go as far back as 200BCE and the ancient Silk Road, this twenty-first-century initiative would be a new Silk Road Economic Belt under Xi’s tenure. Furthermore, at its 19th National Congress in October 2017, the initiative was enshrined in the constitution of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC), further cementing Xi Jinping’s presidency (Shepard 2017) and strengthening his hold on power. The Belt and Road Initiative makes the quest for understanding the roots of Chinese cultural values all the more urgent. As China seeks increasingly for markets and resources beyond its own shores, other nations may perceive an inherent threat to their own sovereignty or an opportunity for cultural reciprocity. This second, more optimistic view calls for global citizens who can willingly explore the philosophical and cultural antecedents of the Chinese people. In this section ideas that are over 2000 years old are translated into a milieu quite different from the context within which the ideas were originally generated. Indeed, the problem with exploring ancient texts is their transferability from one context to another. Certainly, Confucius was a man of his times, and he was addressing issues pertinent to his cultural and political situation. He was primarily concerned with familial relationships and argued that the health of the family would impact directly on the health of larger societal and governance issues.

424

R. J. Bathurst and M. S. Chen

Someone asked Confucius, “Why are you not employed in governing?” The Master replied, “The Book of Documents says: It is all in filial conduct! Just being filial to your parents and befriending your brothers is carrying out the work of government. In doing this I am employed in governing. Why must I be ‘employed in governing’?” (Analects, 2:21)

The family and the State were therefore intimately entwined for Confucius. This begs a further question beyond issues of historical distance, namely, the contemporary problem of cultural disorientation. It may be said that Westerners simply do not understand Sinitic cultures, misunderstanding the importance of Chinese thought and dismissing it for its “radical strangeness” which lacks “any familiar voice or inflection” or resonance with the “Greco-Judeo-Christian West” (Nelson 2009, pp. 177–178). The perceived strangeness of Chinese ideologies has important implications when Westerners approach potential Chinese business partners with the same expectations and beliefs of their home country. This is compounded politically by the apparent opacity of the Chinese Communist Party and its policies with regard to the West in the Belt and Road Initiative, where local communities fear being overcome through the sheer numbers of Chinese migrant staff hired to implement infrastructural developments. This chapter responds to this sense of strangeness and dismissal by returning to a core Confucian text, observing its provocative relevance for leadership in the twenty-first century. For sure, Sinitic people and Westerners are different, as art forms reveal (Jullien 2007). Yet there is much to learn from Confucian antecedents, and in particular three ideas distilled from the focal narrative are pertinent to today: the centrality of aesthetics, the quest for ensemble, and the resistance to unifying totalitarian ideologies. The dynamic interplay between li and yue, ritual propriety and custom and music performance, is explored.

The Aesthetic Turn At its heart, China is an artful society according to Z. Li and Cauvel (2006), who justify their claim through the continuing popularity of the art of calligraphy and the revival of “ancient Chinese artistic traditions” in post-Mao Zedong China (p. ix). The irregular brushstrokes and their poetic impulses mean that aesthetics is central to China’s cultural fabric. Further, as noted earlier, the Master sighed deeply in response to Zengxi’s orientation around li and yue. This sigh is an aesthetic response, which comes from deep within the lungs and is expressed out through the breath. The centrality of breath is not only fundamental to human existence; it is also an aesthetic phenomenon. Indeed, Dobson (2010), drawing on Onians (1951/1973) and his study of ideas that have informed European philosophy, discusses the origins of “aesthetics.” He notes that: Pre-Socratic origins of the word are etymologically derived from the Greek equivalents ‘to gasp’ or to ‘breathe in suddenly’; the word is also linked to ‘play’ and being ‘beyond time.’

21

A Smile and a Sigh: Leadership Insights from the East

425

Phenomena which manifest or appear with the impact of a prominent or memorable emergence. . .provoke the involuntary intake of breath. . .A gasp of this order ‘stops’, as it were, time itself – one is invariably ‘breathless’ before the emergence of the authentically beautiful. (Dobson 2010, p. 393)

Because in the gasp a sense of linear time stops, the possibility is then created of dynamism “beyond time” (Dobson 2010, p. 393). The gasp is an opening where all the senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch are activated in the moment of perception. The eyes, therefore, sigh along with the vocal gesture. Onians (1951/ 1973) describes this paradox by claiming that “‘to breathe at,’ means ‘to look at,’ the eyes being in fact not only passive and recipient like the ears, but active outwardly” (p. 75). Therefore, “the gasp creates a fecund moment rich in sensory possibilities, it is this moment that creates opportunities for the kind of play that seeks to make sense of the past and anticipate the future” (Bathurst and Edwards 2011, p. 66). Thus in the Master’s sensate affirmation of Zengxi through his sigh, and in Zengxi acknowledging the centrality of li and yue, the importance of the dynamic interplay between dignified behavior and music making can be observed. This may be at odds with contemporary Western business practices and leadership concepts which focus on instrumental logics. For, in the West, music along with other arts is usually considered as peripheral and not mainstream. Yet if partnerships with Chinese firms are to be rich and responsive, it is important to observe the primacy of aesthetics to ways of being in the world.

Achieving Ensemble Leadership is first and foremost an activity of people with people; but the productive potential for leadership has been compromised by enduring beliefs in a hero figure, going as far back as mid-nineteenth-century Victorian concepts (Carlyle 1841). And there seems to be seeds of this phenomenon in the focal narrative, where Zilu’s claims earned an ambiguous smile from the Master. Clearly, for one man to possess the power to raise an army to withstand foreign invaders, and deliver the populous from famine, is absurd. Yet this idea still resonates until today where leaders are placed on pedestals and expected to perform outstanding feats on behalf of their constituents and organizations. This focus on a sole individual as leader is not the Confucian way, however. In their translation of the Analects, Ames and Rosemont (1998) explore the character ren (仁), which denotes an exemplary person. They demonstrate that the character used by Confucius is a combination of “person” and the number “two.” They write: This etymological analysis underscores the Confucian assumption that one cannot become a person by oneself – we are, from our inchoate beginnings, irreducibly social. [The Sinitic scholar] Herbert Fingarette (1972) has stated the matter concisely: ‘For Confucius, unless there are at least two human beings, there can be no human beings’. (p. 48).

426

R. J. Bathurst and M. S. Chen

The assumption that Ames and Rosemont draw on is inherent in the character 仁. H. Chen (2010) explores the origins of this character and notes its beginnings referring to the reproductive relationship between a man and woman. The ancient Chinese used the analogy of the apricot and peach kernel, where the seed is at the center of the fruit and contains all its reproductive potential. Later the word developed from the marriage relationship to embrace familial and other social relations and included “a manifestation of the harmonious ‘loving’ relations between people” (Chen 2010, p. 516), beyond its primary sexual origins. A group of musicians embodies this idea, for music performance is essentially relational. Indeed, contemporary music performance confirms that musicians achieve ensemble among themselves through intense cooperation and collaboration (Wing et al. 2014), inviting their listeners into a co-constructed space (Bathurst and Williams 2013). Each performer is acutely aware of others in the group, striving continuously to achieve a sense of ensemble. To this end, musicians continually ask of themselves: “Am I in time and am I in tune?” Both these elements of pacing and intonation are necessary preconditions to ensemble developing because they both require each musician to be acutely aware of the others in the group. Music performance draws on plural processes (Bathurst and Ladkin 2012) as each member takes their leadership responsibilities by opening space (shi), attending to each other and inviting them to participate. Thus, it behooves leaders to be continually invitational, to be present to the others in the business ensemble, and to be attentive to what the partnership might offer. In this way li and yue interact together. Mencius (372–289 BCE), often described as the “second sage” to Confucius, confirms the importance of music to achieving social cohesion. While he acknowledges that music brings joy to individual listeners, it is in performance that people come together in harmony. Talking with Chuang Po, he discusses a conversation with the King about enjoying music making. Po asks: Which is greater, enjoyment by yourself or enjoyment in the company of others? In the company of others [the King replied]. Which is greater, enjoyment in the company of a few or enjoyment in the company of many? In the company of many [said the King]. (Mencius 4thC BCE/ 1984, p. 27)

The pathway to authentic leadership, then, would be for the King to enjoy his life and invite the people into that same positive and productive world. Indeed, concludes Po: “Now if you shared your enjoyment with the people, you would be a true King” (Mencius 4thC BCE/ 1984, p. 33). By living in this way, Mencius believed that the King would embrace benevolence and reject cruelty.

Unifying Tendencies and Totalitarianism The focal narrative tells a story of how to demonstrate worth and thereby achieve social influence. This is the leadership issue: how to influence people to take meaningful action (Howard 1996). Zilu, Ranyou, and Zihua gave responses oriented

21

A Smile and a Sigh: Leadership Insights from the East

427

around their own egos in a quest for some form of power, whether in an entire state or as a minor official. Each interlocutor revealed a tendency toward taking control, which left the Master offering a smile. He was unimpressed. Zengxi declared a different view which was applauded by the Master with a sigh: a deeply aesthetic response. By focusing on the interactions of li and yue, Zengxi could avoid the need for domination. Leading through controlling behaviors tends toward closure and shuts down the very initiatives needed for healthy organizations. Although each of the three interlocutors in the focal narrative gave an appearance of openness, they did not demonstrate a capability for reaching beyond their ego boundaries. However, Zengxi opened space, through music, to embark on a journey, taking others with him in the process. Totalitarianism and managerialism are all too often comfortable bedfellows (Cherniss 2006), and this tendency dogs both the East and West. In this case, the hegemony of a single dominating logic cannot be pinned to one cultural identity or political ideology. Even in spite of the desire for openness and the interplay of li and yue, seen in the Analects, leaders are prone to subverting the integrity of these ideas for their own controlling ends. As noted by Chenyang Li (2008a): In practice Chinese rulers and those with power from ancient to contemporary times have often demonstrated an undisputable tendency in suppressing individuals for the sake of the state or society, and they have done this in the name of social harmony. (p. 433)

Yet to achieve the fecundity that the middle way offers necessitates movement and flex. It calls breath into being and, out of that potentiality, allows for the development of leaders aware of their abilities, exemplary people who are able to work in concert together to achieve a music that is transformative and life-giving.

Conclusion This journey into ancient Chinese philosophy through one of the narratives found in the The Analects of Confucius has brought us back to the present. How might global citizens understand the political and business implications of Chinese expansionism? The Belt and Road Initiative ostensibly aims at developing infrastructure necessary to assist countries trade with China and facilitate partnerships throughout the rest of the world, in a spirit of cooperation. Although targeting mainly the African continent (Chen 2016), the initiative is also designed to develop energy resources across the Middle East, South Asia, and Russia (Duan et al. 2018). Whatever the drivers and motivations of the Belt and Road Initiative, undoubtedly it will bring in its wake an increase in business partnerships between Chinese and local companies in host countries, calling for the need for mutual understanding, acceptance, and respect for cultural and philosophical differences. There is literature that might facilitate greater understanding and which explores management through a particularly Chinese lens (Chen 2005; Wah 2010), offering helpful and specific advice about Chinese leadership (Wang and Chee 2011). To

428

R. J. Bathurst and M. S. Chen

expand this canon, one of the narratives from the Analects specifically addresses ideas of leading and managing. Thus, the missing dimension to the extant management and leadership texts has been highlighted and enriched in ways that will be helpful to non-Chinese managers and leaders in understanding the Confucian roots of Chinese culture. Nations and businesses that become involved in developments like the Belt and Road Initiative will be better equipped to deal with the vicissitudes of partnership relationships, especially at intercultural levels. Finally, this offering here invites readers who may identify as Chinese to rediscover and explore their own cultural roots. As leaders from different cultures converse together, we may perform the music of our age and discover the joy and social cohesion that comes with its harmonies.

Cross-References ▶ Confucianism and Ethics in Management

References Ames RT, Rosemont H (1998) The analects of Confucius: a philosophical translation. Ballantine Books, New York Bathurst RJ, Edwards MF (2011) Carving our future in a world of possibility: exploring contemporary implications of the Māori-Pākehā relationship in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Tamara: J Crit Postmod Organ Sci 9(3–4):65–76 Bathurst RJ, Ladkin D (2012) Performing leadership: observations from the world of music. Adm Sci 2(1):99–119 Bathurst RJ, Williams LP (2013) Managing musically: how acoustic space informs management practice. J Manag Inq 22(1):38–49 Carlyle T (1841) On heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history. James Fraser, London Chen M-J (2002) Transcending paradox: the Chinese “middle way” perspective. Asia Pac J Manag 19(2/3):179–199. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016235517735 Chen G (2005) An organizational learning model based on western and Chinese management thoughts and practices. Manag Decis 43(4):479–500. https://doi.org/10.1108/00251740510593503 Chen H (2010) Reproduction, familiarity, love, and humaneness: how did Confucius reveal “humaneness”? Front Philos China 5(4):506–522. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11466-010-0112-4 Chen H (2016) China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative and its implications for Sino-African investment relations. Transnational Corp Rev 8(3):178–182 Cherniss JL (2006) Isaiah Berlin’s political ideas: from the twentieth century to the Romantic age. In: Hardy H (ed) Political ideas in the Romantic age: their rise and influence on modern thought. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp xxi–xlx Cheung T-S, Chan H-M, Chan K-M, King AY-C, Chiu C-Y, Yang C-F (2003) On zhongyong rationality: the Confucian Doctrine of the Mean as a missing link between instrumental rationality and communicative rationality. Asian J Soc Sci 31(1):107–127. https://doi.org/ 10.1163/156853103764778559 China unveils action plan on Belt and Road initiative (2015, March 28) Retrieved from http:// english.gov.cn/news/top_news/2015/03/28/content_281475079055789.htm Dobson J (2010) Aesthetic style as a postructural business ethic. J Bus Ethics 93(3):393–400

21

A Smile and a Sigh: Leadership Insights from the East

429

Duan F, Ji Q, Liu B-Y, Fan Y (2018) Energy investment risk assessment for nations along China’s Belt & Road initiative. J Clean Prod 170:535–547. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.09.152 Duffin RW (2007) How equal temperament ruined harmony (and why you should care). W. W. Norton & Co, New York Fingarette H (1972) Confucius: the secular as sacred. Harper & Row, New York Groff B (2017, April) Analysis: the Doctrine of the mean, section 2. Retrieved from http://eds.a. ebscohost.com.ezproxy.massey.ac.nz/eds/detail/detail?vid=1&sid=0e6a2ed8-05a4-45a0-b71b2c50f7fc8bf0%40sessionmgr4007&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ% 3d%3d#AN=111872462&db=ers Gu MD (2009) From yuanqi (primal energy) to wenqi ( literary pneuma): a philosophical study of a Chinese aesthetic. Philos East West 59(1):22–46 Howard VA (1996) The aesthetic face of leadership. J Aesthet Educ 30(4):21–37 Jullien F (1995) The propensity of things: toward a history of efficacy in China (trans: Lloyd J). Zone Books, New York Jullien F (2007) The impossible nude: Chinese art and Western aesthetics (trans: de la Guardia M). University of Chicago Press, Chicago Kalmanson L, Mattice S (2015) The De of Levinas: cultivating the heart-mind of radical passivity. Front Philos China 10(1):113–129. https://doi.org/10.3868/s030-004-015-0007-2 Kim S (2011) Confucian constitutionalism: Mencius and Xunzi on virtue, ritual, and royal transmission. Rev Polit 73:371–399. https://doi.org/10.1017/S003467051100341X Lai K (2006) Li in the Analects: training in moral competence and the question of flexibility. Project Muse 56(1):69–83. https://doi.org/10.1353/pew.2006.0001 Li C (2008a) The philosophy of harmony in classical Confucianism. Philos Compass 3(3):423–435. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00141.x Li PP (2008b) Toward a geocentric framework of trust. Manag Organ Rev 4(3):413–439. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-8784.2008.00120.x Li Z, Cauvel J (2006) Four essays on aesthetics: toward a global perspective. Lexington Books, Oxford Liu S-H (1974) The use of analogy and symbolism in traditional Chinese philosophy. J Chin Philos 1(3/4):313–338. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6253.1974.tb00654.x Lloyd GER (1990) Demystifying mentalities. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Mencius (4thC BCE/1984) Mencius: volume one (trans: Lau DC). Chinese University Press, Hong Kong Menuhin Y, Davis CW (1979) The music of man. Methuen, Toronto Nelson ES (2009) Levinas and early Confucian ethics: religion, rituality, and the sources of morality. Levinas Stud 5(4):177–207. https://doi.org/10.5840/levinas2009411 Nisbett RE (2003) The geography of thought: how Asians and westerners think differently. . .and why. Free Press, New York Onians RB (1951/1973) The origins of European thought. Arno Press, New York Peng K, Nisbett RE (1999) Culture, dialectics, and reasoning about contradiction. Am Psychol 54(9):741–754. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.9.741 Perl JM, Beasley-Murray T, Butterfield A, Wiegers G, Nicholson AJ, Elverskog J, . . ., Gafijczuk D (2013) Fuzzy studies: a symposium on the consequence of blur. Common Knowl 19(3):411–423. https://10.1215/0961754X-2281756 Roberts R (2014) The Confucian moral foundations of socialist model man: Lei Feng and the twenty four exemplars of filial behaviour. N Z J Asian Stud 16(1):23–38 Shepard W (2017, October 25) Why China just added the Belt and Road initiative to its constitution. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/10/25/why-china-just-addedthe-belt-and-road-initiative-to-its-constitution/2/#1ecd4822242b Tan L (2016) Towards an ancient Chinese-inspired theory of music education. Music Educ Res 18(4):399–410. https://doi.org/10.1080/14613808.2015.1122751 Teon A (2016) Mao Zedong, legalism and Confucianism: similarities and differences. Greater China Journal. Retrieved from https://china-journal.org/2016/05/16/mao-zedong-legalism-con fucianism-similarities-differences/

430

R. J. Bathurst and M. S. Chen

Tzu H (3rdC BCE/1969) Hsün Tzu: basic writings (trans: Watson B). Columbia University Press, New York Wah SS (2010) Confucianism and Chinese leadership. Chin Manag Stud 4(3):280–285. https://doi. org/10.1108/17506141011074165 Wang Y (2004) The ethical power of music: ancient Greek and Chinese thoughts. J Aesthet Educ 38(1):89–104. https://doi.org/10.1353/jae.2004.0009 Wang BX, Chee H (2011) Chinese leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, New York Wing AM, Endo S, Bradbury A, Vorberg D (2014) Optimal feedback correction in string quartet synchronization. J R Soc Interface 11(93):1–11. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2013.1125 Zengzi/Zisi (3rdC BCE/2016) Doctrine of the mean (trans: Legge J). CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Louisville

The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action From the Yuk Factor to “Feeling Right”

22

Donna Ladkin

Contents Choosing an Ethical Path . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Is Ethical Engagement? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ethical Habits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Body’s Role in Ethical Engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Embodiment as a Way into Empathetic Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emotional Responses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bodily Knowing and Aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aesthetic Judgment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kant’s Critique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Connecting Aesthetics and Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Linking the Beautiful with the Good . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Using Aesthetic Sensibilities to Foster the Capacity to Engage Well Ethically . . . . . . . . . . . Practical Steps Forward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

432 433 435 436 437 437 438 439 440 441 441 442 444 445 445

Abstract

This chapter argues that making good ethical decisions and taking appropriate ethical action are not solely dependent on engaging in rationally based deliberation grounded in an “objective” stance. Instead, bodily responses should also be included in ethical deliberation, both because they enable us to feel empathy for those whose lives will be affected by our decisions and because the body is the means through which ethical perception occurs in the first place. Embodied reactions should not be used in an unfettered way however. Aesthetic judgment needs to be engaged in order to bring distance to subjective feeling while examining the wisdom such emotional reactions and sense perception offer. The case is made that arriving at sound ethical decisions occurs through D. Ladkin (*) Graduate School of Leadership and Change, Antioch University, Yellow Springs, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_28

431

432

D. Ladkin

undertaking a deliberate dance between subjective reactions and attention to the external world. Philosophically, the chapter’s argument is underpinned by four thinkers: Maurice Merleau Ponty and his modern-day interpreter Maurice Hamington, Mary Midgley, and Immanuel Kant. Keywords

Aesthetic judgment · Aesthetic perception · Disinterested interest · Embodiment · Empathy · Habits · Purposiveness

Choosing an Ethical Path How does a manager make good ethical decisions, and then take action which aligns with them? Much traditional business ethics literature assumes that making good ethical decisions is a matter of working through “decision trees,” presupposing that the “right” answer can be found if a manager adheres to a formulaic process. However, the world that managers routinely face is much messier than that which can be navigated by such abstract models. In managers’ worlds, where they have relationships with real people, where their knowledge of the total impacts of their decisions can never be known, and where regardless of how objective they might try to be, they will still have their own personal interests, these approaches often fall short. For instance, consider the following scenario: Anita is a regional manager for an NGO aimed at helping orphaned children based in Bosnia. In an effort to stop bribery from occurring, the Head Office, based in Washington, DC, has formulated a policy stipulating that field workers cannot accept gifts of any kind from the people with whom they work. Anita discovers that one of the new field workers, Freddie, has indeed accepted a small gift from a family he has been helping, a painting of the local area in which they live. When Anita confronts Freddie about taking the gift, he admits to taking it, and also to understanding the “no gift” policy. But in his view, the gift had nothing to do with trying to influence him in the sense that a bribe would, but was the family’s way of “evening the playing field” between them. He had helped them, and rather than just being passive recipients of that help, the family was asserting its own agency and ability to be more than recipients of assistance, by offering him this small token. Freddie’s story makes sense to Anita – she understands how important it is for those who receive help to be able to express their own autonomy by reciprocating with gifts. But company policy is company policy. It was put into place for good reasons. What should Anita do?

This chapter suggests that such situations are not necessarily resolved by relying on rationally determined rules.1 There are some instances that call for a different kind of wisdom, one that appreciates context, one that understands human engagement as something that cannot always be navigated with neat company policies. When such

1

It is important to point out that I am not including situations that are clearly illegal in this category!

22

The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action

433

events arise, tapping into the wisdom of the body can help one might move forward ethically. As will be described in more detail, the body is constantly taking in information about the world and the human beings within it. For instance, when Freddie was offered the gift, how was it done? Was it proffered with “a wink and a nudge,” or was it done with shyness and uncertainty? Such perceptions are critical in interpreting the giving of a gift, in this instance, but also many other situations that fall into the gray area of ethical deliberation. Although we may not always adequately bring that knowledge to conscious awareness, it can appear to us through emotions and moods, hunches and intuitions. Rather than dismissing such moods and fleeting impressions, this chapter argues for the value in lingering with them, reflecting on them and including them in decisions of an ethical nature. It is important to stress that the argument presented here is not suggesting that bodily knowledge should be acted upon in an unreflective way. Just relying on one’s “gut feel” about a situation does not necessarily result in good ethical actions. Indeed, our body’s “natural” reactions – to hit out when we feel threatened, to grasp for that which we desire, to avoid that which we find repulsive or upsetting – can take us away from ethical engagement with others. It is also important to highlight that our emotional and aesthetic responses are influenced not only by our own individually based emotions and reactions but also by the culture in which we live. Behaviors, language, even food can be thought of as disgusting in some cultures but acceptable in others. For all of these reasons the body does not necessarily always tell us what is best to do. However, noticing and attending to the body’s responses, inquiring into them and taking them into account within the overall situation, avails managers of crucial data in relation to how ethically dubious dilemmas might best be resolved. The chapter begins by establishing the role bodies play in ethical perception and action. Two aspects of bodily responses – emotional and aesthetic – are then introduced and distinguished. The latter of these, aesthetic knowing, is explored in further detail, particularly in relation to the nature of aesthetic judgment. This leads to an explication of how “the aesthetic” and “the ethical” have been seen to be related, and finally, the chapter concludes by considering the practical implications of attending to embodied reactions to situations in determining sound ethical decisions and actions. Philosophically, the ideas introduced in the chapter draw primarily from four thinkers: Maurice Merleau Ponty and his modern-day interpreter Maurice Hamington, Mary Midgley, and Immanuel Kant. Let us start, however, by considering what I am meaning by the term “ethical engagement.”

What Is Ethical Engagement? In order to understand the argument offered here it is important to be clear about what I mean by ethical engagement. Acting “ethically” is generally construed to be about “doing the right things” in relation to other people. All individuals have needs, desires, and aspirations, and when we live together in social groups these can come into conflict with one another. For instance, you may have a mobile phone which I

434

D. Ladkin

find particularly attractive, and I may want it. In most contexts, it is considered wrong for me to just steal your phone because of my desire for it. For most of us, stealing the phone is not just illegal, it is also unethical because it denies the owner due regard for his or her possessions. In deciding on a course of ethical action, a number of different guiding frameworks can be applied. In the case of stealing the phone, I can refer to a “principle” that is generally accepted that people should not steal from one another. Such principles are helpful in enabling us to live together in harmonious ways. As long as we all accept that such a principle is correct, we can rely on the fact that deviating from that principle will be treated as just that: deviant behavior – and the society in which we live will have various ways of dealing with such deviance. If I just take the phone merely because I like it, most of us would agree that doing so constitutes a straightforward case of wrongdoing. However, what if I need to use the phone, because of an emergency situation, and my own phone has stopped working? Are there circumstances in which taking the phone might be considered less wrong? This question shows the flaw in always adhering to principles. Because principles are broad and abstract, they can’t always be applied to every situation. Other ethical orientations may be better suited to providing guidance on particular issues. A utilitarian, or consequentialist approach, might be more applicable in situations in which weighing up the relative merits of outcomes is useful (should we fire 10 people in order that 75 people can keep their jobs?). Rawlsian approaches to justice inquire into what the “just” or fair thing to do in a situation would be. Care-based approaches encourage us to think of the particular people involved and what their specific needs are. Virtue approaches suggest that we should consider what a “virtuous” person would do if faced with the dilemma we are trying to resolve. Interestingly, considering the same ethical issue from different perspectives can result in different outcomes. For instance, as a manager a situation might arise in which you are asked by a staff member to allow them to work flexibly in order to be able to drop their children off at school before coming in. For operational reasons you are not able to offer the same degree of flexibility to the rest of your staff. Do you deny the staff member this degree of flexibility, and risk losing him (as might be suggested by a justice-based approach), or do you allow him to work flexibly (which could be the outcome if you use a care-based approach). In such cases, is there another source of wisdom about how you might make this decision? Asking such a question itself is what I consider to be “ethical engagement” (Ladkin 2015a). It involves explicitly considering a situation and asking the question, “what is the right thing to do here, in relation to the people involved?” It’s important to note that the way in which I am using the term does not require that you necessarily arrive at a “correct” response. Indeed, one of the things about ethical situations is that you may never know if what you do is indeed the “right” thing. It may seem “right” at the time, but consequences which you could never have imagined may prove it to be otherwise in the future. Ethical engagement is the deliberate attention to consideration of what might be “right” or “wrong” in a given situation. It involves noticing that there is an ethical issue at stake in the first place,

22

The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action

435

asking questions about who will be affected by different outcomes, as well as exploring who should best be involved in making the decision. It also involves thinking reflexively about how you are going about framing the ethical situation itself, and how your own frames of reference affect that way of seeing the situation. In these ways, ethical engagement is a much more holistic approach to understanding the ethical situation and how you yourself are interpreting it than following prescribed decision-making processes.

Ethical Habits Another aspect of ethical engagement that is important to point out is the role “habits” play in the way in which we recognize and respond to situations of an ethical nature. One way of thinking about ethical habits is that they are our default position for how we deal with life as it presents itself to us. We see a homeless person in the street and we avert our glance and mentally think, “it’s her own fault she is homeless.” We are asked to give money to help victims of a fire, hurricane, or other natural disaster and we put 20 dollars in the mail. Our Facebook feed asks us to sign a petition for a cause we believe in and we give it a thumbs up. We readily put problems into different kinds of categories in habitual ways: this is the sort of an issue and this is the way it should be dealt with. Sometimes that is really helpful, but when we encounter an issue that is totally different from the kinds of issues we have dealt with before, such an approach can leave us wanting – particularly if we want to squeeze the issue into the “wrong shape.” What if the homeless person who we habitually pass on the street turns out to be our cousin when we look a little closer? What if the political advertisement we read on Facebook is a lie? Additionally, it can be helpful to periodically reevaluate ethical habits and responses and consider whether or not they are still serving one well. The difficulty with ethical habits, like all of the habits we cultivate, is that noticing them can be difficult. They are “just the way we do things.” Attending to our body’s responses as we navigate the warp and weave of our life can alert us to a circumstance in which we might benefit from examining those habits more closely. Is the feeling that wells up in my body when I see the homeless person actually fear, because I am worried about ending up on the streets myself? Is it a sense of compassion and concern that can become overwhelming and is thus better left unexamined? By dwelling with bodily reactions rather than quickly dismissing them, we can reconsider what is going on from a habitual perspective and make more conscious choices about the extent to which a habit is the best response to a particular situation. Habits are deeply engrained in our bodies and disrupting them often requires our bodies to unlearn them as well as cognitively rethinking them. Noticing the central role bodies play in creating the world in which we live, and therefore the choices we make within it, is a radical undertaking. The next section of the chapter explores the connection between embodiment and ethical engagement in more detail.

436

D. Ladkin

The Body’s Role in Ethical Engagement Bodies don’t make much of an appearance in the business ethics literature. Overall, frameworks and models treat ethical decision making as a rational process. For instance Rest’s (1994) much used four-stage model of moral action (ethical sensitivity, prescriptive reasoning, deliberate reasoning, and ethical action) treats ethics as a function of cognitive processes. Hekman (1995) observes this assumption present in much moral theorizing, writing that the “epistemology that informs modernist moral theories assumes a disembodied knower that constitutes abstract, universal truth” (p. 23). Indeed, the quest for objectivity – that is getting as far away from the ethical situation as possible and trying to consider it from a dispassionate perspective – is seen as a virtue in many ethical models based on abstract notions of justice or fairness. However, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau Ponty argues that the body is the means by which consciousness itself arises. As the means through which we engage with the world, he asserts that what we identify as our rationality is completely entangled with our corporeality (Merleau Ponty 1962). Put bluntly, without our bodies we do not have consciousness. Our very ability to perceive is due to the fact that we are material beings with sensual bodies which see, hear, feel, and taste. Hamington makes the link between our embodied reality and our capacity to engage ethically with others by suggesting if “the body is our general medium for having a world – as Merleau Ponty posits, then the body must be our medium for having morality, as well” (Hamington 2004: 46). The assertion that bodies are our medium for morality is perhaps not as strange as it might first appear to be. For instance, if we revisit Rest’s model in more detail, we notice that the first aspect of it is “ethical sensitivity.” The word “sensitivity” connotes sensual engagement; we can only exercise sensitivity through our embodied senses: eyes, ears, skin, and heart. Sensitivity is not a quality of disembodied minds. Furthermore, what we are able to sense is completely determined by our bodies. As a mixed race, able-bodied woman who stands 5 feet 5 inches tall, I literally sense the world differently from the way my elderly, white mother who is now wheelchair bound senses it. When we go shopping together, she is constantly on the lookout for doors that open by push buttons (placed at a height she can reach), a feature of life I can happily ignore in my able-bodied state. Such differences in sensory “starting points” have important implications for whether or not we even notice the ethical aspects of situations. (Before going shopping with my mother, I was never aware of the way disabled people can be excluded from entering buildings, merely because automatic push buttons for opening doors were either not present or not placed at the right height.) In other words, our bodies are the means through which we can even perceive a situation has an ethical component. Our bodily habits further prescribe what we become aware of in relation to others; if I am able-bodied and only interact with other able-bodied people, my ability to understand how disabled bodies navigate the world is severely limited. This insight leads to the next way in which bodies are implicated in ethical engagement, empathetic imagination.

22

The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action

437

Embodiment as a Way into Empathetic Imagination As well as being the means by which we sense that a situation has an ethical aspect in the first place, it is because we are bodies that we can engage in empathetic relations with the other. For many moral philosophers working from the “care” tradition, empathy is critical to our capacity to respond ethically to others (Gilligan 1982, Noddings 1984). Hamington (2004) and the biologist Francisco Varela (1992) stress that this capacity arises through our bodies. For them, the capacity to put oneself into the shoes of others (notice the body-based metaphor) only arises because we are embodied beings. Our ability to experience the grief of losing a loved one or the joy of becoming a parent provides the bridge to comprehending what it might be for another human being to experience similar emotions. Of course, we can never truly know how another experiences pain or pleasure, but our own capacity to do so enables us to imagine how another might feel these things. The capacity to feel our own experiences as human bodies, and to be able to imagine how others feel, arises precisely because we are embodied. Our chest might tighten as we listen to someone recounting a sad experience, our mood lightens when we watch a child playing happily with a puppy, or we may even experience sympathetic pain when someone close to us becomes ill. Being able to access such awareness is crucial in developing the capacity to understand the world from another’s position. By doing so, we are able to better discern an ethical way forward, as we will be better able to account for how our actions will affect the other. Without being able to experience and feel what things feel like for ourselves, it is very difficult to imagine how our actions might affect others. (Indeed, there is increasing evidence to suggest that people with psychopathic disorders do not experience pain in the same way others do – thus limiting their ability to empathize with others (Jones et al. 2010).) It is important to point out that the body provides us with a range of different responses and sensory experiences. The next section elaborates on two different categories of embodied responses: emotional responses, and sensory, aesthetic responses. Let us look at emotional responses first.

Emotional Responses Throughout the writings on morality there is a debate about whether or not one should rely on rationality or feeling in making ethical judgments. As has been alluded to earlier, principle-based ethical approaches tend to favor rationality above feeling, and ethics of care approaches tend to focus on the affective dimension rather than rationality. Emphasizing one and dismissing the other is not necessarily helpful, however. As the moral philosopher Mary Midgley so brusquely puts it: “Morality, like every other aspect of human activity, has both its emotional and its intellectual side, and the connection between them can’t be just an external one, like the stones brought together for a building. It is an organic one, like the shape and size of an insect” (Midgley 1981: 6).

438

D. Ladkin

In an article which she writes about the ethics of biotechnology, Midgley asserts the importance of listening to our emotional responses to matters of ethics. She suggests that strong feelings always accompany the judgment that something is seriously wrong, and rather than ignoring such reactions, we should include emotional responses when considering right from wrong. Echoing Hannah Arendt’s view, she goes as far as to suggest that “Someone who does not have such feelings. . .someone who has merely a theoretical interest in morals, who doesn’t feel indignation or disgust and outrage about things like slavery and torture, has missed the point of morals altogether” (Midgley 2000: 9). Midgley coins the phrase “the Yuk Factor” to encapsulate that emotional response to things which our bodies intuitively know to be wrong. Our minds can convince us of anything, but our bodies will tell us loud and clear, if we listen to them, when things are not right. Midgley argues that strong emotional responses, like the feeling of “yuk” in relation to proposed biotechnological advancement, should be listened to. Although some would argue that such a response is “beneath the level of the real argument” (Midgley 2000: 9), she makes the case that we should not discount such a visceral response. It is telling us something very important about the nature of the territory we have moved into. She is very clear that those strong emotional responses should not be the only source of data we use when making moral decisions. However, in order to engage well ethically, she asserts that we must “spell out the message of emotions to find out what they are telling us” (p. 9). There are a number of factors that make delving into emotional responses difficult. Firstly, emotions can be overwhelming. We can get caught up in their energy in ways that can consume us (consider being overcome with rage or paralyzed by grief). Secondly, cultural norms have often taught us that some emotions are “good,” and others are “bad.” The labeling of an emotion as bad can mean that we habitually repress it. A habit of closing down almost immediately on a “bad” emotion can mean that we are not able to engage with it in helpful ways. Perhaps a way of beginning to gain the muscle to work with emotions more effectively is to step back from labeling the emotion and inquire into it instead. The first step in doing so is to attend to the sensory information which is the foundation of emotional experience. A way of framing that sensory information is as aesthetic perception, as discussed below.

Bodily Knowing and Aesthetics When I introduce the world “aesthetics,” many readers might immediate think, “what does art have to do with ethics?” The word “aesthetics” is commonly associated with “art,” notions of “the beautiful,” or questions of “taste.” Unfortunately, the meaning of the word aesthetic has been reduced to connote something to do with fine art. However, when I use the word aesthetic, I am referring to the body’s sensory response to things outside itself. The philosopher Susan Buck-Morss reminds us that “the etymology of the word ‘aesthetics’ is the Greek, aisthisis, which literally means ‘perception by feeling’” (Buck-Morss 2008). She explains

22

The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action

439

further, “aisthisis is the sensory experience of perception. Accordingly, the original field of aesthetics is not art but reality, corporeal, material” (p. 6). It is indicative of that sudden intake of breath when you see something surprisingly beautiful, or the way in which your body recoils when it encounters something disgusting or frightening. The body is continuously picking up aesthetic information. For instance, as I type these words into my computer, if I stop to pay attention, I notice that the air is chilly in my office and my fingers are cold. I can hear the gentle hum of a fan heater blowing warm air into the house. I can smell onion and garlic cooking for the soup my husband is making, and as I attend to it more closely my mouth begins to water and my tummy rumbles. All of this sensory information is the basis of an aesthetic response. Often that aesthetic response is connected, almost without thinking to an aesthetic judgment. Being chilly is not comfortable, the whir of the fan is comforting, the soup smells good. In the normal course of events I do not even register such judgments, they just arise “naturally.” In its most direct form, aesthetic experience does not include aesthetic judgment. It is the recognition of the sensory experience itself. This is one way in which aesthetic experience differs from emotional experience. Emotions have labels which are distinct from the sensations associated with them: sad, angry comic, morose. In their purest form, aesthetic experiences are related to those sensations themselves: the heaviness associated with sadness, the agitation we recognize as anger. This kind of awareness might be referred to as “aesthetic perception.” It is important to reiterate the distinction I am trying to draw here because it is quite subtle and something rarely thought about. Aesthetic experience is sense perception at its most immediate level. Examining and inquiring into the sensory responses to ethical conundrums can be helpful because such responses are the starting point for “spelling out the message our emotions are trying to tell us.” Once again it is important to point out that the sensory perception we receive needs to be worked with in order for it to help us take ethical actions. Not all of our bodily urges and responses are to be acted upon in order to be ethical. My body may respond to the sight of a beautiful man by wanting to kiss him, but feeling that impulse does not mean it is right for me to do so. Attending to and deciphering the body’s sense-based experiences can provide useful data when trying to establish an ethical way forward, but acting ethically does not end by responding to what the body tells us in an unfiltered manner. In order to use the body’s intelligence well, we need to engage judgment.

Aesthetic Judgment It may be helpful to summarize the argument presented so far. The chapter began by asserting that making good ethical decisions and taking appropriate ethical action are not solely functions of engaging in rationally based deliberation grounded in an “objective” stance. Instead, bodily responses should also be included in ethical deliberation, both because they enable us to feel empathy for those whose lives

440

D. Ladkin

will be affected by our decisions and because the body is the means through which ethical perception occurs in the first place. Such bodily knowing often presents itself in the form of emotions, which provide us with insight into our subjective experiences. However, to really be able to “spell out” the information that our emotions are giving us, we need to delve more deeply into the immediate, sensory foundation of those emotions. This can be accomplished by examining their bodily based, sensory qualities. The kind of knowing such engagement reveals is encapsulated in the concept of aesthetic perception. However, aesthetic perception alone does not give us the information we need to discern right from wrong; for this, aesthetic judgment is required. We have to be able to make judgments about those aesthetic perceptions, and those judgments can help us to develop insight into the rightness or wrongness of a particular course of action. In exploring the notion of aesthetic judgment, I turn to the work of Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Judgment is a foundational text concerning the nature of aesthetic discernment.

Kant’s Critique It is important to point out that Kant’s Critique of Judgement (Kant 2005) was written primarily as a way of understanding aesthetic judgment as it is applied to notions of the beautiful and the sublime. Its purpose was not to apply aesthetic judgment to issues of ethics. However, there are two concepts central to Kant’s notion of judgment which have important implications for bringing aesthetic judgment to the real of ethical engagement: disinterest and purposiveness. Disinterest is the notion that when distinguishing whether something is “beautiful” or not, one should not consider how such a judgment contributes to one’s own well-being. For instance, if I am trying to sell a work of art that I have made myself, I am perhaps not best to judge its artistic merits; I will have too much interest in it being viewed favorably. This introduces a level of “objectivity” into a subjective arena of inquiry. This may seem to go against the overall thrust of the argument I am making (that subjectivity, emotion and aesthetic judgment should inform ethical engagement). However, the vital point here is that Kant argues that in order to discern whether something is beautiful or not, self-interest should not bear on the judgment. Similarly, I would argue that disinterest is also an important aspect of sound ethical engagement, especially in relation to one’s emotional and aesthetic responses to ethically difficult situations. Notice the important distinction I am making: I am not arguing that such subjective responses should be negated (as many justice based approaches assert) but rather that I should regard that subjective response from a distance. I need to be able to inquire into it, too, rather than be carried away by it. The term Kant uses to describe such a stance is “disinterested interest.” This term seems to capture the sense of a balancing point around which interest needs to pivot in order to provide the best vantage point for engaging judgment. I need to be concerned, but from a vantage point through which I can observe my engagement

22

The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action

441

itself and how that engagement influences how I come into relationship with the situation. President Trump’s decision not to offer his resort as the location for the 2020 G7 summit indicates that perhaps he (or his advisors) noticed that the level of “interest” associated with having the event take place in his hotels would be out of keeping with ethical practice. The second aspect of aesthetic judgment Kant offers which may be helpful here is that of “purposiveness.” For Kant, something is “beautiful” if it is beautiful in its own right. It is serving no purpose other than to be beautiful. By analogy, something could be considered to be ethical if it is so “of its own right.” The good is inherently good. We discern its “rightness” in the way it sits within our bodies. Caring for those in need, cleaning up after ourselves, keeping promises, all have an inherent quality of goodness to them and seem to be recognized for their goodness across a myriad of cultures and social settings.

Connecting Aesthetics and Ethics How might we move beyond the value of “disinterested interest” and “purposiveness” in understanding how aesthetic perception can inform sound ethical engagement? In previous work I have reviewed the ways in which other scholars have theorized the connections between aesthetics and ethics (Ladkin 2015b). Of most interest to the argument developed here are ontologically based accounts which link “the beautiful” and “the good” (e.g., Bathurst and Edwards 2011), as well as epistemological accounts which suggest that aesthetic engagement can foster perceptual discernment (Waddock 2010), emotional sensitivity (Abowitz 2007), imaginative capacity (Ladkin 2011), integrative apprehension (Kokkos 2010), and critical reflexivity (Koehn 2014). The following sections expand on the ways in which aesthetic sensibility can assist in making judgments about what is good, as well as exploring the perceptual capacities the aesthetic can help to foster.

Linking the Beautiful with the Good In making the link between what is good to do and the aesthetic, philosophers since Plato have suggested that the aesthetic category to aim for is “the beautiful.” In his essay Phaedrus Plato (1966) equates that which is good to that which is beautiful, and the neo-Platonist Plotinus (1984) writes eloquently about the connection between the two. But how does one judge what is beautiful? For this discussion we turn again to Kant’s Critique of Judgment. There are three aspects of “the beautiful” as theorized by Kant which are of particular relevance here. Firstly, something is considered beautiful because of the “form” it takes. That which is beautiful is “symmetrical and regular” (Kant 2005). It must have a form that is harmonious and well bounded. The second is that to be judged as beautiful, the perceiver must experience pleasure and a sense of contentment when viewing it. This pleasure is not due to the item’s usefulness but is wholly situated in the item itself.

442

D. Ladkin

Finally, for something to be deemed beautiful, it must be universally recognized as beautiful. Let us consider how each of these relates to ethics. Firstly, Kant notes that the beautiful is symmetrical and harmonious. When bringing aesthetic judgment to ethical deliberation, this would suggest the importance of asking questions such as “What is the way forward which will create the greatest sense of harmony?”, or “What outcome would lead to the greatest sense of symmetry and balance?” This opens up new ways of thinking about ethical dilemmas and how one might go about resolving them. For instance, in relation to the scenario about gift giving which opened the chapter, Anita might ask questions such as “what actions would bring balance to the situation?” Indeed, was the family’s impulse to give Freddie a gift based on their own felt need to establish a sense of harmony, having gained so much from Freddie’s help? Would not acknowledging him in some tangible way leave the situation unbalanced and unfinished? In relation to the second point, Kant is referring here to the intrinsic nature of beauty. Something is beautiful in and of itself, not because of its usefulness. In relating this to an ethical decision, this refers to the sense that something is “good” in and of itself, not because it serves the most people or prevents more pain. On a mundane level, it is making the decision to pick up a piece of trash on the side of the road, just because “it is the right thing to do,” rather than leaving it for someone else to collect. We often don’t have to think hard about situations like those. The third point relating to the notion that something which is beautiful can be determined to be universally beautiful is slightly more tricky. Indeed, such a claim raises problems from cultural- and class-based perspectives. However, I think there is a foundational idea in operation which could helpfully be applied across cultural contexts. That is the notion that questions of ethics, like questions of beauty should be open to a broader community’s judgment, rather than relying solely on one’s own judgment. Such a suggestion may once again seem to contradict the overall argument which calls for attending to subjective responses. However, what is really at stake here is the need for dancing between one’s own individually based aesthetic response and a wider subjectivity which Kant invokes. A useful takeaway for those charged with making ethical decisions is to consult a wider community, at the very least, to test their views.

Using Aesthetic Sensibilities to Foster the Capacity to Engage Well Ethically In addition to theorizing how “the beautiful” can point to what is “good,” a range of scholars have been investigating how developing aesthetic sensibilities could foster better ethical engagement. In particular they have considered the ways aesthetic sensibility can help people notice the ethical content of situations as well as how it could encourage the capacity for moral imagination more widely. For instance, Moberg and Seabright (2000) suggest that it is the power of the arts to move us deeply which can help us to want to understand others and become more empathetically disposed toward them. Abowitz (2007) recounts taking student teachers to see

22

The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action

443

artwork depicting the murderers of three civil rights workers just before they themselves were killed in 1964 as a way of helping these students to extend their imaginative capacities. While viewing the painting, students were prompted to consider questions such as: “What are the deeper storylines which infuse this depiction?,” “What were your assumptions when you first encountered the picture, and how did they change as you engaged with it more fully?” Art which prompts people to engage with this kind of wondering can push the bounds of our perceptual awareness, alerting us to the way in which decisions and actions can impact on others. The power of conscious aesthetic engagement is that it involves our whole self: bodily aspects as well as rational ones. Kokkos (2010) suggests that “whole selfengagement” can lead to integrative understanding. Such integrative understanding can enable the capacity to comprehend the way various parts of a system interact, thus fostering the capacity to understand how disparate aspects of the system will be affected by a particular decision or action. Drawing on this kind of integrative understanding, which Waddock (2014) defines as “wisdom,” one has a chance of understanding the way a specific incident fits within a larger whole. Such an orientation provides a contextual perspective which more rationally based approaches exclude. In summary, aesthetic sensibility has been theorized to extend our capacity to engage well with ethical dilemmas in a number of ways. It can alert us to the fact that “something is wrong” in the first place: we note the imbalance or lack of harmony inherent to a situation. Drawing on the intelligence of aesthetic sensibility requires noticing those impressions, fleeting feelings, and inquiring into them. They help us to focus in on the tone of voice with which someone says something, the sense of hum in an office when work is going well, the electricity and pop of frazzled colleagues. In order to use these impressions well, rather than judging them as “good” or “bad,” it is important to inquire into them, to stay with the “sense” of them. The longer one can stay with the sensory awareness of what is going on, the better chance one has of discovering something new. Springborg (2010) encapsulates this capability when he writes of the importance of leaders and mangers “staying with their senses” in order to discover what is happening behind the habitual storylines we tell ourselves. In addition to enabling us to notice more about particular situations, scholars have also explored the ways in which aesthetic engagement can foster our capacity to integrate both feelings and thought in our assessment of circumstances. Such engagement prompts us to ask new questions which delve below habitual ways of interpreting the world around us. For instance, in relation to the scenario introduced at the beginning of the chapter, aesthetic engagement might prompt us to ask questions about the affective aspects of the case. By always accepting help, was the family involved feeling disempowered and victimized, and did their ability to offer Freddie a gift help restore a sense of balance to that relationship? Anita might explore Freddie’s own experiences of the situation and the feelings that arose in him as the gift was offered: was it given in the spirit of wanting to influence him in the future (analogous to a bribe) or did it have the feeling of exchange? And how would

444

D. Ladkin

any action Anita took in relation to the incident affect the wider system of which the family and the NGO were part? Such questions may seem to complicate a dilemma which could readily be resolved by disciplining Freddie and insisting he return the gift, on the basis that “the rules say so.” In matters of human relationships however, the kinds of sensitivities sparked by aesthetic awareness can offer other ways of both interpreting and resolving such tricky situations.

Practical Steps Forward How does an appreciation of aesthetic sensibility help the busy manager or leader who is deliberating a difficult ethical issue? There are three important points to reiterate. Firstly, engaging aesthetic sensibility does not require acting on your “gut reaction” in an unfiltered form. It does, however, suggest attending to the visceral, bodily based sensations which arise as you engage with the world. Importantly, such reactions may not arise in relation to something which you have actually framed as an ethical situation. The aesthetic response itself can alert you to the presence of something that should be considered from an ethical perspective. It can arise as a sense of unease, dismay, or even incoherence – this is alerting you that something is not “right.” Secondly, once you become of those sensations, it is important to inquire into them, and to resist labeling them right away. Rather than immediately jumping to the conclusion that something is “bad” or “sad,” or “to be avoided” because it feels unpleasant, it is important to stay with those sensory data for a while, and to inquire into them. Where exactly do they settle in your body? What do they remind you of? Can you get behind the storyline you tell yourself about what is going on to access a deeper level of knowing? Does the information you are gathering suggest a way forward that is not just habitual? Finally, asking more questions about what is going on is almost always a good next step. Inquiring into how others are experiencing the situation can be helpful: “I notice I’m feeling a bit uneasy about this, is anyone else feeling that way?” It is important to distinguish between feelings which arise because of one’s own individual pathology and history, or because there is truly something external to the self which needs attention. Engaging aesthetic sensibility requires a continual interchange between the external world and internally based reactions. Navigating the movement between subjective response and external occurrence in a conscious way can be uncomfortable and challenging, as well as taking time which managers often feel they do not have. Learning to pause and observe the dance between inner and outer words, however, can ultimately save time if doing so prevents hasty decisions resulting in harmful outcomes. Making good ethical decisions is one of the most difficult aspects of managing others. This is because by their nature, ethical decisions affect others’ lives. Depending on the scope of a decision, many others’ lives can be affected.

22

The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action

445

Furthermore, in our virtual and global world, managers often make decisions which affect the lives of people they will never know. In order to make those decisions well, it is important to generate as much wisdom as possible. Relying solely on rational ways of making decisions discounts a wealth of knowledge and insight that the body offers. Even asking the initial question of “how am I going about making this decision?” can alert managers to the possibility of alternative sources of information. This chapter offers the possibility that actively seeking out one’s aesthetic response, inquiring into it and using the kinds of judgment it offers can help managers develop the wisdom to engage well with the ethical conundrums so often at the heart of their work.

Cross-References ▶ Feminist Ethics

References Abowitz KK (2007) Moral perception through aesthetics engaging imaginations in educational ethics. J Teach Educ 58(4):287–298. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487107305605 Bathurst R, Edwards M (2011) Carving our future in a world of possibility: exploring contemporary implications of the Māori-Pākehā relationship in Aotearoa/New Zealand. TAMARA J Crit Organ Inq 9(3/4):63–74. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct¼true& db¼buh&AN¼74263382&site¼ehost-live Buck-morss S (2008) Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s artwork essay reconsidered . October 62:3–41 Gilligan C (1982) In a different voice: psychological theory and Women’s development. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Hamington M (2004) Embodied care: Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and feminist ethics. University of Illinois Press, Chicago Hekman S (1995) Moral voices, moral selves: Carol Gilligan and feminist moral theory. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park Jones A, Happe F, Gilbert F et al (2010) Feeling, caring, knowing: different types of empathy deficit in boys with psychopathic tendencies and autism spectrum disorder. J Child Psychol Psychiatry 51(11):1188–1197 Kant I (2005) Critique of judgment. (trans: Bernard JH, ed). Dover Publications, Mineola Koehn D (2014) Ethical darkness made visible: Michael Moore’s Roger and me. In: Koehn D, Elm D (eds) Aesthetics and business ethics. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 83–101 Kokkos A (2010) Transformative learning through aesthetic experience: towards a comprehensive method. J Transform Educ 8(3):155–177. https://doi.org/10.1177/1541344610397663 Ladkin D (2015a) Mastering the ethical dimension of organizations. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham Ladkin D (2015b) ‘The aesthetic’ and its relationship to business ethics: philosophical underpinnings and implications for future research. J Bus Ethics 147(1):35–51. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10551-015-2928-2 Ladkin D (2011) The art of “perceiving correctly”: what artists can teach us about moral perception. TAMARA J Crit Postmod Organ Sci 9(3):91–101. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/ login.aspx?direct¼true&db¼bth&AN¼74263375&site¼ehost-live Merleau Ponty M (1962) Phenomenology of perception. ((trans: Smith C ed.). Routeledge, London:

446

D. Ladkin

Midgley M (1981) Heart and mind: the varieties of moral experience. Routledge, London Midgley M (2000) Biotechnology and monstrosity. Hastings Center Report (Sept-Oct.):7–15 Moberg DJ, Seabright MA (2000) The development of moral imagination. Bus Ethics Q 10(4):845–884 Noddings N (1984) Caring: a feminine approach to ethics and moral education. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA Plato (1966) Hippias Major. In: Carritt EF (ed) Philosophies of beauty. Oxford University Press, London, pp 83–101 Plotinus (1984) Plotinus on the beautiful: Ennea 16. (T. (trans. . Taylor, Ed.). Godolmany, Surrey: Shrine of Wisdom Rest J (1994) Background theory and research. In: Rest J, Narvaez D (eds) Moral development in the professions. Drlbaum & Associates Springborg C (2010) Leadership as art – leaders coming to their senses. Leadership 6(3):243–258. https://doi.org/10.1177/1742715010368766 Varela F (1992) Ethical know-how: action, wisdom and cognition. Stanford University Press, Stanford Waddock S (2010) Finding wisdom within – the role of seeing and reflective practice in developing moral imagination, aesthetic sensibility, and systems understanding. J Bus Ethics Educ 7: 177–196 Waddock S (2014) Wisdom and responsible leadership: aesthetic sensibility, moral imagination, and systems thinking. In: Koehn D, Elm D (eds) Aesthetics and business ethics. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 129–147

A Rancièrian Method of Exploring Notions of Management and Organization Through the Artistic Gaze

23

Wim Vandekerckhove and Myrtle Emmanuel

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Artist’s Gaze: Francis Alÿs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dissensus of Sensibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

448 449 451 457 458 458

Abstract

This chapter suggests that Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of politics can be applied as a method for questioning our understanding of management. We explain the method through demonstration. More precisely, we contrast organization shown in the work of the video artist Francis Alÿs with Gareth Morgan’s seminal palette of images of organization. We argue that Morgan’s metaphors convey a distribution of sensitivities and sensibilities with regard to organization that partition and tie people to particular places and functions in organizations. The work of Alÿs involves a dissensus of that partitioning and hence a rupture of business ethics based on images of self-serving organizations. We assert that this dissensus opens the possibility for a business ethics scholarship that decenters the organization and fundamentally changes how we can ethically speak of organizations, i.e., how we can do business ethics. W. Vandekerckhove (*) University of Greenwich, London, UK EDHEC Business School, Lille, France e-mail: [email protected] M. Emmanuel University of Greenwich, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_30

447

448

W. Vandekerckhove and M. Emmanuel

Keywords

Aesthetics of politics · Metaphor · Morgan · Organizational aesthetics · Rancière · Alÿs

Introduction The field of organizational aesthetics is a young one (Bereson and de Monthoux 2017) and is currently comprised of two streams, of which the key authors are Antonio Strati and Pierre Guillet de Monthoux. Antonio Strati’s stream “emphasizes aesthetics as a central but forgotten dimension of ‘organizational life’ [and] focuses on sensible knowledge and aesthetics judgment in everyday organizational practices” (de Monthoux and Strati 2008, p. 4). Pierre de Monthoux’s stream sees “the arts as an arena and laboratory for aesthetic experiments,” and thus studies the arts as “showcases of aesthetic practices threatened and marginalized by bureaucracy and corporate managerialism” (de Monthoux and Strati 2008, p. 4). While de Monthoux and Strati insist their approaches are complementary, scholars working in Strati’s stream seem to have little interest in artistic work, or work from the axiom that everyone is an artist. In contrast, scholars working from de Monthoux’s Art firm approach primarily have an interest in how the artistic is managed, or how management approaches threaten the artistic. Beyes (2008) suggested what can be regarded as a third approach in his paper on Rancièrian aesthetics. For Rancière (2010), art is a “dwelling in a common world” – a way-ofbeing. It is, however, a rupture-ous dwelling. Art reconfigures the sensible; it is a “dissensual re-configuration of the sensible” (Rancière 2010, p. 140). He defines “politics” as another form of such dissensus, thereby distinguishing politics from police. The latter denotes “a symbolic constitution of the social” (Rancière 2010, p. 36), a partition of the sensible as a dividing-up of the work and of the people. This partition separates and excludes, as well as allows participation: Society here is made up of groups tied to specific modes of doing, to places in which these occupations are exercised, and to modes of being corresponding to these occupations and these places. (Rancière 2010, p. 36)

Politics then, is a rupture of that partitioning. In this sense, Rancière writes of the “aesthetics of politics,” precisely because art also ruptures established partitions of the sensible. However, art is not educational; art cannot, through the artist’s intention, educate the spectator into political subjectivation. Art “may create a new scenery of the visible and a new dramaturgy of the intelligible” (Rancière 2010, p. 19), but it “cannot know or anticipate the effect that its strategies of subversion may or may not have on the forms of the political subjectivation” (Rancière 2010, p. 19). Hence, we can look at art to find alternative arrangements of the sensible, of what can be shown and said, of (un)tying groups to functions and places. Because management and organization revolve around division of labor and resources – partitioning groups, functions, and places – in this chapter we turn to works of

23

A Rancièrian Method of Exploring Notions of Management and. . .

449

art to find ruptures of such partitioning, and thus turn to art as an aide to the philosophical questioning of organization. More precisely, we use the work of a contemporary video artist, which shows visualizations of organization as a coordinated division of labor: When Faith Moves Mountains by Francis Alÿs (2002). This is not deliberate work about organization. Rather, a coordinated division of labor is made visible as part of another intervention by the artist. Hence, organization is a secondary yet undeniable layer in the work. The primary layer of this particular work is found in the artist’s oeuvre, the artistic gaze that shapes a body of work. We take this secondary approach for two reasons. The first is that, if artwork is indeed about organization or management itself, merely describing the work would make little contribution to the work itself, apart from promoting it. This chapter is different and does make a contribution, by focusing on something that is figured in the artwork but haphazardly found its way into the work, as part of a broader rearrangement of the sensible. In this way, we might say that we are reading between the artist’s lines. The second reason is related to that and revolves around Rancière’s dislike for critical art. Critical art mistakenly assumes a direct cause-effect relation between the educational intention of the artist, the educational content of the artwork, the spectator’s reading of the work, and political subjectivation. Because such direct relation does not exist, “art with a message” ends in disappointment (Charnley 2011). As mentioned earlier, Rancière posits that such subjectivation may or may not happen, and in any case is not predictable; it may happen in a very different way from what the artist intended (Wildemeersch 2019). This is echoed in Bishop’s (2006) attack on a tendency to evaluate art in ethical rather than aesthetic terms. We should be careful not to reduce artistic expressions of concerns about pleasure, visibility, engagement, and conventions of social interaction to moral criteria (Charnley 2011). Hence, our Rancièrian approach is not to read a message into these works of art, let alone the artist’s message about organization. Rather, it is to start from the dissensus found in the artist’s oeuvre, to arrive at a questioning of our partitioning involved in organization. Writing in a similar approach as this chapter, Wildemeersch (2019) states that “[dissensus] relates to an interruption in the takenfor-granted (or natural) perception of reality” and denotes a conflict between the senses and sense; between what we see and how we make sense of it. Thus, the approach taken in this chapter is to analyze what the artist’s gaze is, and from their particular arrangement of the sensible explore the implicated sensitivities (senses) and meanings (sense) with regard to organization.

The Artist’s Gaze: Francis Alÿs The work of Alÿs is often characterized as relational art (Bishop 2006). His interventions in polemic situations are always subtle. In Watercolor, he fills a bucket with water from the Red Sea (Jordan) and pours it into the Black Sea (Turkey), thereby re-arranging connections between senses and sense with regard to colonial attitudes towards the region (Amado 2012). In The Green Line, Alÿs walks around in Jerusalem with paint dripping from a bag, leaving a trail. His trail is like the line

450

W. Vandekerckhove and M. Emmanuel

on a map dividing Jerusalem. Walking, and marking space by walking, is a recurring theme in the work of Alÿs. The walking leaves a residue. Thus, the walking has effects beyond the activity of walking itself, but these effects are minimal. What Alÿs shows us is a dissensus between an act and its effect. That is, we take for granted that action results in something. Yet in the work of Alÿs, there is minimum result; while the act takes effort, the act is always futile. In Paradox of Praxis I, we see Alÿs pushing a block of ice in front of him. The ice melts, making the block smaller at every step until nothing but a wet stain remains on the street, which eventually dries up too. Couchez (2012) has written that what is visible in the work of Alÿs is how geography influences human emotions. What Alÿs does is to liberate bodily movement from purpose and destination. The walking is not walking towards somewhere. The gaze of Alÿs is to search for the tension between the act and the ineffective: “sometimes doing something leads to nothing” (Alÿs, cited in Couchez 2012, p. 109). In When Faith Moves Mountains, Alÿs shows 500 volunteers moving a sand dune outside Lima (Peru), in white t-shirts and with shovels. It is not hierarchy we see here but aspects of organization that are just as unsophisticated: people in a uniform (white t-shirt), receiving instructions, working in the heat, shoveling sand in front of them, and moving in line with the other volunteers over a tall sand dune. At 70 0900 we see t-shirts and shovels being handed out to the 500 volunteers, and instructions are given for moving in a line (70 4300 ). Then, a siren goes to signal volunteers to get ready (80 2500 ), and the instruction to start is given through a loudspeaker (80 3600 ). At 9’1700 we see the line of workers going uphill, and at 90 5300 a helicopter passes over to keep oversight and blows a wall of sand onto the volunteers. Although the work itself was simple and did not require skill, it did require determination to finish the work in challenging conditions. Participants reported: “When you sign up for something you have to finish it” (80 1400 ) and “It was torture because of the sun, the heat . . .” (80 1700 ). As in the other work of Alÿs, futility mocks function, purpose, and efficiency, but it is not meaningless. Moving a mountain is the summon of the impossible and pointless task. And yet people do it. The absurdness of the task was immediately clear to participants: “the idea of moving a sand dune [. . .] this crazy idea” (20 0100 ), “These guys coming down here to waste their time” (20 1100 ). A number of times throughout the video the impossible task for an individual is juxtaposed with the same task being simple when approached with a large number of people, i.e., through organization. This notion of collectivity is apparent at the formation stage, e.g., “At first I thought it was . . . just silly. To move a stone, to move a rock . . . but I got more involved because it’s about doing something with a bunch of people, no?” (30 2200 ), “We all agreed: ‘Let’s go’. Everyone with his own reasons” (30 3400 ), and “The main persuasion was from one friend to another”: (30 3900 ). But not only does the video show organization based on a community, it also shows how the work performed collectively on an absurd task is building community. When we arrived, we were in the middle of this shanty town. I thought it was strange, but ok. Then we climbed the dune and reached the other side. I mean, when we got to the top and started to go down, I paid more attention to the houses, to the people living there. I felt . . . not sorry but it made me think (40 1400 –40 3400 ).

23

A Rancièrian Method of Exploring Notions of Management and. . .

451

The shoveling up and down the sand dune is marking space. The mark itself is minimal – each movement of the shovel lifts a bit of sand and puts it 10 cm further, and the movement of the dune cannot be noticed. But the space that is marked is one of a community: “Up at the top, we could see for miles around” (110 0500 ), “We felt on top of the world, you know” (110 0900 ). When they reach the end point at the other side of the dune, shouts of joy, achievement, and celebration are heard. It is almost like the end point marks the establishing of the community of those who moved a mountain: ‘Everyone was waiting for that moment! Like: We’re getting there, we’re nearly there . . .’ (120 3200 ) ‘And when we started to get to the very last part, when they said “Continue shoveling to the end”, everyone began shoveling harder and when we were about to finish everybody started screaming’ (120 4100 ) ‘The truth is that the people who took part felt totally involved. And the fact that it took on such a huge dimension means that it will generate one story after another. And the story will be passed on like an oral tradition’ (130 2600 )

People in this area were unemployed and in need of an economic project that would make them productive. Yet the organization Alÿs shows is highly unproductive. Alÿs said that the guiding idea for this work was “maximum effort, minimum result” (Alÿs 2002). Indeed, the movement of the dune was infinitesimal. The day after the event, one cannot notice the difference. Hence the event is a non-event. Yet people will recount this story. In this sense, Alÿs introduces a rumor in the narratives of Peru (Biesenbach and Starke 2010): the day people moved a mountain. The organization Alÿs sets up is an intervention in the group relations of people; it creates an oral tradition that might be constitutive of a community, as creating a space of belonging.

Dissensus of Sensibility We noted in the introduction that we would use dissensus visible in works of art as an aide to the philosophical questioning of management and organization. Our claim is that the work of Alÿs ruptures the partitioning of sensitivities (and hence also of sense) of organizations. Nevertheless, Alÿs shows us “organization.” So, to what extent is this a rupture? In other words, what exactly are we taking for granted – in Rancière’s words, “policed” – when we imagine “organization,” and how is what Alÿs shows us a dissensus of that? To answer this question, we explore the assumptions inherent in the mainstream images of organization, as written up by Morgan (1986). The authoritative work of Morgan has continued to dominate our understanding of metaphors and their implications for organizational behavior and management (see Morgan 1980, 1983, 1986, 1997, 2006, 2011, 2016). Scholars have since extended this work to include the “Learning Organization” metaphor denoting organizational, team, and individual double and triple loop learning (Senge 1990); the “Icehotel” metaphor that is cognizant of a temporary, emergent organizational design capturing unifinality,

452

W. Vandekerckhove and M. Emmanuel

purity, eco-coreness, and rebirth (Pinto 2016) and the “Justice metaphor” as a framework for exploring and resolving gender and inequality (Kemp 2016). In his seminal work on “Images of Organization,” Morgan (1986) identified eight different metaphorical ways of construing organizations. These include organizations as machines, as organisms, as brains, as cultures, as political systems, as psychic prisons, as flux, and as instruments of domination. Metaphors are defined as images, words, or literary devices for embellishment and evoking meaning (Morgan 1980, 2011; Oswick et al. 2002) or as a figurative speech taking the source domain and overlapping it with the target domain for rhetorical effect (Pinto 2016, p. 892). Despite Morgan’s belief that metaphors are ways of seeing and thinking about organizational life, there are reservations against the overly focused use of metaphors as rarefied and abstracted epistemological or metonymy constructs (see Morgan’s commentary 2016). The analytical focus of the eight metaphors is also laden with functionalist and normative connotations that are “cognitively prescriptive rather than liberating” (Oswick et al. 2002, p. 298). Consequently, the “one best way” of thinking and viewing organizational experience is more likely to constrain generative knowledge. Likewise, Morgan acknowledges this problematic nature of metaphors in postulating: I feel that one of the big problems in this field rests in the fact that people often assert their own personal perspective on metaphor as “the view” or the “best view” when in point of fact it is just “a view” that happens to make sense from their perspective. It is a simple trap to fall into, and I willingly recognize that some of my own writings, especially the early ones, share this problem. (Morgan 1997, p. 227)

Morgan contends that social scientists, particularly in the areas of organization and management, are often trapped by their own theories and perspectives and: as a result, they construct, understand, and interpret the social world in partial ways, creating interesting sets of insights but obliterating others as ways of seeing become ways of not seeing. (Morgan 1997, p. 277)

Morgan’s metaphors provide a multidimensional view of organizational science along with a framework for organizational analysis and theory construction (Örtenblad et al. 2016). Table 1 gives an overview of Morgan’s eight metaphors, along with the criteria for success stemming from these metaphors. What Table 1 shows is that, apart from the psychic prison and the domination metaphors, all of Morgan’s metaphors depict organizational success in reference to the organization. Efficiency of the machine is the success of the machine, survival the success of the organism, learning that of brains, organizational identity that of organizational culture, power of a political system that of political systems, and selfrenewal that of flux and transformation. Hence, Morgan shows us images of organization in which organizations are self-serving. The psychic prison metaphor shows organizations as traps, as structurally determined by repressed drives. In turn, the domination metaphor shows organization as a means to reproduce social segregation and inequality.

23

A Rancièrian Method of Exploring Notions of Management and. . .

Table 1 Morgan’s metaphors, and criteria for success

Organizations as Machines Organisms Brains Cultures Political systems Psychic prisons Flux and transformation Instruments of domination

453 Criteria for success Efficiency Survival Learning Identity Power Determinism Self-renewal Social reproduction

Thus, Morgan’s palette of how we can see and make sense of organizations has but three colors: (1) self-serving, (2) reproducing human deficiency, and (3) reproducing societal deficiency. None of these, let alone any mix of these ground colors, seem apt to induce ethical “ways of thinking” or “ways of being” (Morgan 2016). All of the three major ethical schools encompass a notion of otherness that constitutes the ethical: in deontology this is the intrinsic value of any human being or the Kantian humanity-as-an-end-in-itself, in consequentialism, it is the effect of the action at hand on the wellbeing of others, and in virtue ethics, it is the other’s perception and recognition of my behavior. It follows that the ethicality of organizations must involve an understanding of organizations that includes an exteriority to organizations, i.e., the ethicality of organizations has its reference outside of the organization. Morgan’s metaphors do not meet that criteria. He writes that we need to think about all metaphors in terms of their generative potential and judge the power of a particular metaphor in these terms [. . .] The focus on generative potential also leads to a focus on the question ‘generative for what and for whom?’ (Morgan 2016, pp. 1035–1036)

What Morgan asserts here – namely, that images or metaphors bridge ways of thinking and ways of being, and in this sense have generative potential – resonates with what Rancière writes about the distribution of the sensible (Rancière 2010, p. 44, thesis 7). The possible forms of partaking in work are defined by the “modes of perception in which they are inscribed.” Hence, the relation between what we share (organization) and the specific role or part we can take in that is determined by our sensory experience. That is why the image is so important. The image itself is a “distribution of what is visible and what not, of what can be heard and what cannot” (ibid.). Different metaphors render different images that define different possibilities of partaking – namely, Morgan’s generative potential. However, Rancière distinguishes two ways of performing such a distribution of the sensible: police, and politics. The police principle denotes an absence of void in the distribution of the sensible. There is no Other in Rancière’s police as a symbolic constitution of the social. Everyone is tied to a specific function, to a place to exercise that function, and to a mode of being that corresponds with that function and place. There is no space

454

W. Vandekerckhove and M. Emmanuel

for what “is not.” In contrast to this “policing,” Rancière’s politics “is an intervention in the visible and the sayable” (Rancière 2010, p. 45). This intervention consists of showing the void within the police partitioning. Rancière conceptualizes politics as a dissensus, as a showing of two worlds in one. It is the “demonstration of the gap in the sensible” (p. 46) rather than a confrontation between interests or stakeholders. Morgan’s images do not show this gap. They are either closed (self-serving) or merely reproduce(d). Kemp (2016) asserts that women’s equality and inequality cannot be seen in scholarly work using Morgan’s images. That is because these images do not make women’s equality and inequality visible. What cannot be seen cannot be thought and therefore cannot become. Hence why Kemp (2016) had to construct new images to release our trapped ways of seeing and thinking organizations, and also make organizational praxis for women’s equality possible. Indeed, one cannot simply add to an image what that image does not show. In Rancière’s words, “otherness does not come to politics from the outside” (Rancière 2010, p. 61). Hence, since we asserted that the ethicality of organizations lies outside of the organization, it follows that the image of organization that allows us to think and enact the ethical must be an image that already holds its otherness. We will argue that Alÿs shows us such an image but before we do that, we want to make clear that our argument is not simply that Morgan’s images are inapt for business ethics but also that much of the business ethics scholarship does not have the images to think ethics. Morgan writes that he chose his metaphors so that his book “would illustrate a broad range of social theory” (Morgan 2016, p. 1039), more precisely different strands of organizational theory. We noted earlier that Morgan’s book had (and has) a profound influence on organizational scholars, as sales figures and citation metrics can evidence. Thus, since Morgan’s metaphors are the images of mainstream organizational theory schools, we may assume that business ethics scholarship will also have been influenced, if not by Morgan’s images directly, then by these mainstream schools in organizational theory. We would thus expect business ethics scholarship to suffer from distributions of the sensible that leave no place for the void, or that do not hold otherness. As of yet, very few scholars have explicitly discussed notions of ethics and morality in the context of metaphors. An exception is Alexander (2005), who writes that metaphorically morality is health and hence, business ethics is about the health of an organization. Rhodes and Pullen (2018) reviewed the critical business ethics literature, i.e., critiques of business ethics scholarship from an ethical lens, and identified three lines of critique supporting the idea that corporate self-interest can be enhanced using ethics: (1) that ethical programmes are only engaged in when there is a demonstrable ‘business case’ to do so, (2) that ethics is used as a form of ‘impression management’ designed to create a favourable and beneficial organizational image and identity among stakeholders, and (3) that organizations seek to position themselves as ethically self-regulating so as to ward off demands for external regulation, and hence to increase their independent power. (p. 486)

Rhodes and Pullen further assert that business ethics scholarship does not explore the possibility of non-instrumentally rational means-end accounts of business self-interest. They then go on to offer such an account through Agamben’s

23

A Rancièrian Method of Exploring Notions of Management and. . .

455

political theology. Thus, corporate business ethics are practices of glorification of corporate power. This glorification can be seen in the “repeated acclamation of the righteousness of power” (Rhodes and Pullen 2018, p. 492) whereby power is rendered “unaccountably powerful” (ibid.). What needs to be made unthinkable is that “the empty center of the corporation be revealed as meaningless” (ibid.). What we assert in this chapter is that Morgan’s images of organization contribute to hegemony work that makes possible corporate business ethics as a glorification of corporate self-interest. In Rancière’s words, these images are policing; there is a consensus of what can be shown and what can be said (senses and sense), and this consensus confirms the allocation of people to places and functions, of which the reference point is the self-interest of the organization. In contrast, Rancière’s politics occurs when there is a dissensus between senses and sense. For Rancière (2009, p. 5), it is possible that “the artistic experience – as a refiguration of the forms of visibility and intelligibility of artistic practice and reception – intervenes in the distribution of the sensible.” Such a “refiguration” is not the same as choosing the side of the underdog or seeing a victim for whom we would fight. That would still amount to confirming the given partitioning or distribution of sensitivities and understanding. Let us turn to an example that Rancière gives himself. In a text from 2009, Rancière mentions a passage in a revolutionary workers’ newspaper published in 1848, in which a joiner (woodworker) describes a day at work. This piece is presented as a kind of diary: Believing himself at home, he loves the arrangement of the room so long as he has not finished laying the floor. If the window opens out onto a garden or commands a view of a picturesque horizon, he stops his arms a moment and glides in imagination towards the spacious view to enjoy it better than the possessors of the neighbouring residences. (Rancière 2009, p. 7)

Rancière writes that the joiner here puts two worlds in one, by speaking of belief and imagination and opposing their enjoyment to the reality of possessions, or to a “disconnection between the activity of the hands and that of the gaze” (p. 7). What the joiner’s writing does is to dismantle a body of experience that was partitioned to a specific place-occupation, i.e., “the artisan who knows that work does not wait and whose senses are geared to this lack of time” (p. 8). The aesthetic judgement is possible only by “ignoring to whom the palace belongs, the vanity of the nobles, and the sweat of the people incorporated in the palace.” However, “this ignorance is by no means the illusion that conceals the reality of possession” (ibid.). Rather, it is the means for building a new sensible world. Rancière asserts that “this aesthetic description is in its proper place in a revolutionary newspaper because this dismantling of the worker’s body of experience is the condition for a worker’s political voice” (ibid.). This passage illustrates well how dissensus is not the same as conflict. Dissensus adds a supplement which cannot be described as a part of the parts. In that sense, it is two-worlds-in-one. There is a similar dissensus at work in the video of Alÿs. Table 2 provides a list of senses and sense that can be identified in the video.

456

W. Vandekerckhove and M. Emmanuel

Table 2 Senses and sense in When Faith Moves Mountains (Alÿs 2002) Dissensus Senses

Sense

Notions (visible or expressed) Heat Dust Lined and forwards Siren Walking Openness Chatter Marking space Community Story Futility of organizational performance Absurd organizational purpose

In this video, the heat the people work in, the dust and sand blown into them by the helicopter, and the uniform instructions contrast with the pace of walking, the chatter, and the openness of the surroundings. At the same time, the futility of the performance and the absurdness of moving a dune contrast with the sense of community people report and the amazing story they believe they are making. The video does not deny the heat, the instructions, the absurdness, or futility. It shows all of these. But it also shows how the marking of space is creating community. Not in defense or justification of the organization, rather, by ignoring the heat, the absurdness, etc. Alÿs shows us an image of organization that has the void/otherness already in it. Rancière would say that the aesthetic judgement here is disinterested: whilst the video is not “about” an organization, it does not deny or conceal the organization. Another, sensible, world speaks from the video, suggesting a refiguration of people and organizations. It seems to us that this refiguration questions a number of assumptions about how people are tied to the space of organization. The particular assumptions that are ruptured in the work of Alÿs are: 1. Organizations are (not) spaces for self-development: the video does document self-development of people, but this development is not in shoveling sand to move a dune. Rather, the self-development happens where the organization is ignored. In that sense, the space for self-development transcends the organization. 2. Organizations are (not) spaces of productivity and efficiency: moving the dune is futile and the way it is organized is highly inefficient. Yet community is built; a story has been produced. However, what is produced is not an organizational goal. In that sense, it is the people, not the organization, that is the space of productivity. 3. Organizations are (not) spaces of community: as in the other work of Alÿs, marking space is the activity that holds meaning beyond the activity itself. In this video, moving a dune is the activity but this marking of space leads to meaning beyond the dune, for example when people get on top of the dune (“on top of the world”), or the story for generations to come. Hence, it is not the

23

A Rancièrian Method of Exploring Notions of Management and. . .

457

organization that is the space of a community, but a community may well hold or exploit a number of organizations within its space. 4. Organizations (do not) have memories: the organization ceases to exist. Yet this event is memorable. Thus, it is not the organization that has a memory (cf. Morgan’s brain metaphor). Rather, people have memories of organization. It is perhaps in this way that the organization is most important, i.e., in the memory of people. This refiguration of people and organization decenters the organization from our understanding of organization. Even if our memory of an organization figures in a story through which we give our life meaning, it is our memory of what we did rather than the fact that the memory belongs to the organization. We do not need to deny or conceal the realities of work in organization in order to imagine organizations as meaningless or disposable. In building our communities and marking our spaces, the attributes of organization are not really what matters. We submit here that this suggests another business ethics is possible, breaking the hegemony of business ethics that unquestioningly assumes self-serving organizations.

Concluding Remarks In this chapter, we argued that the organization shown in Francis Alÿs’s video When Faith Moves Mountains (2002) is a dissensus of common notions of organization as they can be found in Morgan’s methaphors. We used a Rancièrian lens to discuss the implications of this for business ethics scholarship. We argued that the organization shown in Francis Alÿs’s video When Faith Moves Mountains (2002) is a dissensus of common notions of organization found in academic literature. Rancière’s aesthetics of politics implies that ruptures of the established ways of what can be said and shown can be found in art. Alÿs’s art video shows people being organized to move a sand dune in challenging conditions. Much could be said about this “organizing” from a business ethics perspective – pointless work, low-skilled tasks, workers’ treatment, etc. Yet how workers make sense of it, and how Alÿs allows us to make sense of it through what he shows, fundamentally changes the perspective of how we can ethically speak of organizations, i.e., how we can do business ethics. Rather than being about how people are organized, this Rancièrian repartitioning of senses and sense turns business ethics into speaking about what people (can) do with organizations. It alters the unit of analysis from the organization to the life of humans and communities. As such, it demands from us to turn away from making the business case for ethics or constructing the strategic importance of CSR. A confrontation with Gareth Morgan’s (1986) seminal palette of images of organization allows suggestion of how radical Alÿs’s repartitioning is. We argue that even Morgan could not imagine organizations as disposable consumables, while this is precisely what Alÿs is showing us. Morgan (2006) advocates the use of metaphors for making sense of organizational experience. Morgan (1986, 2006)

458

W. Vandekerckhove and M. Emmanuel

argues that metaphors are useful ways of viewing and thinking about the world and about one aspect of phenomena in terms of another. This therefore provides a basis for both hermeneutical and heuristic value representing a departure from the objectivist to the subjectivist view of sense-making whereby the elucidation of a particular phenomenon lies with the “knower” rather than the “known” (Morgan 1997). In this chapter, we have used a Rancièrian lens to question the possibility of business ethics when understanding organizations from any of Morgan’s eight metaphors. Such questioning is triggered by an alternative visualization of organization, which we have found in the work of Alÿs. We have argued that Morgan’s metaphors are ethically constrained by a hegemonic self-referential understanding of business ethics, and that a Rancièrian dissensus visible in the work of Alÿs offers a possibility for heterogeneity in business ethics. Our assertion is that business ethics scholarship, because it is constrained by a hegemonic partitioning of senses and sense, is caught up in a self-referential understanding of organization. Alÿs’s video offers a repartitioning of people, work, and organization. This visual and cognitive decentering of organization allows for a heterogenous business ethics, one that speaks of people using organizations in and for their lives, and hence a business ethics that does not have the organization as its reference point. Rather, we – people in communities – are the reference point of a business ethics that is not “ethics of business” but rather “ethics in business.”

Cross-References ▶ Aesthetics, Management, and the Organization of Space

References Alexander JK (2005) Metaphors, moral imagination and the healthy business organisation: a manager’s perspective. Philos Manag 5(3):43–53 Alÿs F (2002) When faith moves mountains. http://francisalys.com/when-faith-moves-mountains/. Accessed 6 Feb 2017 Amado M (2012) Contested territories: dissensus and the city. Dorsky Gallery, New York Bereson R, de Monthoux PG (2017) Poetic pragmatism and artful management. Philos Manag 16(3):191–196 Beyes T (2008) Reframing the possible: Rancièrian aesthetics and the study of organization. Aesthesis 2(1):8–41 Biesenbach K, Starke C (2010) Francis Alÿs: A to Z. In: Godfrey M, Biesenbach K (eds) Francis Alÿs: a story of deception. Tate Publishing, London, pp 34–43 Bishop C (2006) The social turn: collaboration and its discontents. Artforum, February 2006 Charnley K (2011) Dissensus and the politics of collaborative practice. Art Public Sphere 1(1):37–53 Couchez E (2012) A line going out for a walk. On the rhetoric of walking in Francis Alÿs’s oeuvre. Image Narrat 13(3):101–114 de Monthoux PG, Strati A (2008) Ponte dei Sospiri: bridging art and aesthetics in organisational memories. Aesthesis 2(1):4–7

23

A Rancièrian Method of Exploring Notions of Management and. . .

459

Kemp LJ (2016) Trapped by metaphors for organizations: thinking and seeing women’s equality and inequality. Hum Relat 69(4):975–1000 Morgan G (1980) Paradigms, metaphors, and puzzle solving in organization theory. Adm Sci Q 25(4):605–622 Morgan G (1983) More on metaphor: why we cannot control tropes in administrative science. Adm Sci Q 28(4):601–607 Morgan G (1986) Images of organization. Sage, London Morgan G (1997) Imaginization: new mindsets for seeing, organising, and managing. Sage, London Morgan G (2006) Images of organization, 3rd edn. Sage, London Morgan G (2011) Reflections on images of organization and its implications for organization and environment. Organ Environ 24(4):459–478 Morgan G (2016) Commentary: beyond Morgan’s eight metaphors. Hum Relat 69(4):1029–1042 Örtenblad A, Putnam LL, Trehan K (2016) Beyond Morgan’s eight metaphors: adding to and developing organization theory. Hum Relat 69(4):875–889 Oswick C, Keenoy T, Grant D (2002) Metaphor and analogical reasoning in organization theory: beyond orthodoxy. Acad Manag Rev 27(2):294–303 Pinto J (2016) ‘Wow! That’s so cool!’: the Icehotel as organizational trope. Hum Relat 69(4): 891–914 Rancière J (2009) The aesthetic dimension: aesthetics, politics, knowledge. Crit Inq 36:1–19 Rancière J (2010) Dissensus: on politics and aesthetics. Continuum, London Rhodes C, Pullen A (2018) Critical business ethics: from corporate self-interest to the glorification of the sovereign pater. Int J Manag Rev 20:483–499 Senge PM (1990) The fifth discipline: the art and practice of the learning organization. Doubleday/Currency, New York Wildemeersch D (2019) What can we learn from art practices? Exploring new perspectives on critical engagement with plurality and difference in community art education. Int J Art Des Educ 38(1):168–181

The Aesthetics of St Thomas Aquinas and the Art of the Beautiful Business

24

Tom Cunningham

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In (Eternal) Search of Excellence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Category Error of the Aesthetic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Tale of Two Traditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From the Footplate: An Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aquinas on Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aquinas: The Formal Criteria of Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Euler to Venn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Implications for Organizational Aesthetics and Organizational Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pulchrum est Bonum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

462 462 463 465 465 467 467 468 471 473 473 474 475 475

Abstract

Organizational Aesthetics describe the beauty of artifacts and activities within the business, whereas organizational and management theories focus and prescribe performance indicators for successful management strategies and structures. This chapter will discuss, however, the aesthetic of the organization itself by exploring the canons of perfect beauty detailed by Aquinas so we can consider the possible modalities and norms for the beautiful business. By co-opting the simple Thomist constructs that describe beauty – namely, proportion, integrity, and clarity – into a formal integrated model that can incorporate classic organizational theories, the beautiful business can be described, detailed, and actualized to satisfy both the empirical and aesthetic in management research. T. Cunningham (*) Institute for Business and Professional Ethics, Driehaus Business School, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_29

461

462

T. Cunningham

Keywords

Aquinas · Organization · Aesthetics · Management

Introduction It is something of an understatement to say that there is a certain tension between scholars of aesthetics and management studies depending on the viewpoint they come from. Classic management research has largely ignored or been positively antagonistic to aesthetic philosophical inquiry on the organization. Zanutto (2008, p. 597) argues that “we are aware that no proposal for innovative change to the methods used for the aesthetic analysis of organisations can hope to be adopted given the scientific community’s strong adherence to the unifying rationality expressed by its epistemologies.” It is easy to undermine the largely subjective and anecdotal approach taken by the aesthetics school from the rigorous viewpoint of modern organizational theory that has evolved from the scientific method of Taylorism, the industrial process focuses of Fordism through to today’s empirical approaches dominated by the social sciences and Organizational Psychology. The oft-cited criticism of Organizational Aesthetics is the danger of what Rusted (2000, p. 111) describes as connoisseurship in its research approach and methodologies which are reliant on subjective interpretation over verifiable evidential analysis. In response, the vanguards of Organizational Aesthetics, Strati and de Monthoux (2002, pp. 755–766), argue that, “organizational scholars and organizational actors are generally not authorized to develop organizational discourses in aesthetic terms”. Some of this hostility can be attributed to the mismatch in thinking between the two paradigms and the lack of ways to reconcile this under a shared conceptual umbrella that can accommodate the rigor of the scientific and the other predominately philosophical traditions of research. However, both Organizational Aesthetics and Organizational theory fundamentally share a normative approach, and this chapter posits the potential for uniting them by returning to the simple but elegant model of beauty propounded by Aquinas as the basis for an actionable model of Organizational Aesthetics that incorporates and utilizes the body of classic organizational and management theories.

In (Eternal) Search of Excellence Organization theory is characterized by vogues, heterogeneity, claims and counterclaims. Waldo (1978)

The theoretical landscape of Organizational Studies ranges from the overly mechanistic and structural approach of the formal classical theories of Taylor, Weber, and Fayol to the complexities of the humanistic neoclassical approaches of

24

The Aesthetics of St Thomas Aquinas and the Art of the Beautiful Business

463

Mayo, from the socio-technical school to the modern approaches of situationalist relativism of the contingency theorists. It has been a fractured evolution. Modern Organization Studies also face an issue of contemporaneity: any organization is in a state of flux and constantly evolves as the interference wave patterns of technological advancements, increasing globalization of political economies and demands of society have formed to create phases from manual through semiautomated manufacturing towards our present digital age which heralds the innovation of fully autonomous production, services and products. The vanishing point for many jobs in the production and service economy is already on the horizon and the virtual organization, (though often a misnomer and possibly an oxymoron) a distinct possibility in a fully technocratic future. It will be incumbent on Organizational Studies, therefore, to broaden their reach from just the analysis of the organization to situate it within a broader social and econopolitical context. For Taylor, efficiency was beauty (Guillen 1997), for Ford it was the potential for mass production and in the case of worker unrest, the machine gun. Just as form follows function, this rationalist view of industry informed not only the aesthetics of the modern age but also the academic approach to the way we studied organizations well in to the last century. Neo-classical organizational theories did emerge to challenge the purely mechanistic paradigm to reflect the social and individual factor in performance as the very nature of work and technology changed. Only now are academics trying to get a grip of the rapid disruptive technologies of our own time as the digital age moves towards maturity in the future. Organization and management studies as a whole are reflective of the very nature of the type of organizations and industry of their own epoch. This has led to a reactive a posteriori discipline that forms a descriptive analysis of current forms of organization, production, process, and structures. These are necessarily shaped and definitively influenced by the nature of the social, economic, and political zeitgeist of their time. As a result of this latency and situationalism, they are derivative and descriptive and serve to compound the orthodoxy of any concurrent management or economic philosophy rather than develop a transcendental organizational theory sui generis that can accommodate the emergence of future organizational landscapes. Finally as in most research, there exist academic silos within Organizational Theory itself and while advances are made in every specialist area within the discipline, there are few compounded views of the complete model of the organization itself as Gestalt theory has largely fallen from favor in formal organizational research.

The Category Error of the Aesthetic Barnard (1938) was to radically challenge the prevailing paradigm of organization theory by expounding a systems theory that included social factors such as motivation, leadership, and social psychology and importantly the aesthetic dimensions of management:

464

T. Cunningham

(The executive process) . . .transcends the capacity of merely intellectual methods, and the techniques of discriminating the factors of the situation. The terms pertinent to it are ‘feeling,’ ‘judgment, ‘sense,’ ‘proportion,’ ‘balance,’ ‘appropriateness’. It is a matter of art and it is aesthetic rather than logical. (Barnard 1938, p. 235)

This challenge was to eventually spur on the development of organizational aesthetics, which employs a philosophy of organizational aesthetics, informed by the traditional intellectual and epistemological approaches of writers such as Kant (1998), Baumgarten (1750), and Dewey (1932), towards the study of the organization through the aesthetic lens and ultimately the potential for art practice in management and work. As a relatively young discipline, Organizational Aesthetics is still attempting to forge its approach within a philosophical tradition that is “a chaotic field of inquiry which has had unusual difficulty defining and organizing itself. It is also one of the most fascinating and challenging branches of philosophy,” (Walton 1998, p. 8). Vandekerckhove and Emmanuel (▶ Chap. 23, “A Rancièrian Method of Exploring Notions of Management and Organization Through the Artistic Gaze”) identify two major streams of research: the first, led by Pierre de Monthoux, sees “the art as an arena or laboratory for aesthetic experiments and the other by Antonio Strati which emphasizes the intellectual and affective uses of aesthetic judgement in organizational practice.” Strati (2009) identifies four main approaches to the study of organizational aesthetics: (i) The archaeological approach which privileges the symbolic dimension of aesthetic understanding (ii) The empathic-logical approach which seeks to grasp the pathos of organizational life (iii) The aesthetic approach which emphasizes the negotiation of organizational aesthetics (iv) The artistic approach which examines flow, creativity, and playfulness None of these approaches are not without their critics even within the discipline itself. Taylor and Hansen (2005, pp. 1211–1232) are cynical of Strati’s summary of the approaches to organizational aesthetics: “Although these categorizations are interesting, they seem to be based in the authors’ sorting of the existing literature and offer little analytic insight into the overall form of the field.” Instead they proffer their own analysis’s circumscribed by axes of the Instrumental/Aesthetic and Intellectual/Artistic. I would posit that all these approaches to the definition and practice of Organizational Aesthetics research unwittingly make a fundamental category error – that these approaches focus on instances in, potential for, analysis and examples of aesthetics within the organization but not the aesthetic of the organization per se.

24

The Aesthetics of St Thomas Aquinas and the Art of the Beautiful Business

465

A Tale of Two Traditions Apart from the problem of defining a comprehensive taxonomy for organizational aesthetics, there is a greater challenge - that of acceptance of this aesthetic philosophy within traditional organizational theory, business education, management science, and practice. Shrivastava and Statler (2010: p. 112) pinpoint three factors that mitigate against this lack of authority and deployment of organizational aesthetics: • The fact that management thinking relies upon rationalistic and scientific model and that “Scholars and managers interested in adopting aesthetic approaches will have to overcome this prejudicial bias against this form of knowledge.” • The current educational system does not adequately include the necessary critical aesthetic theory and skills in most curricula. • Finally, the most difficult hurdle for the discipline – “In the organizational context, it is very difficult to assess the utility of aesthetic inquiry and skills on the same productivity metrics as other technical and soft skills. These skills often don’t have direct measurable outcomes. They offer perspectival value that is not always appreciated. So, getting resources to develop aesthetic orientation is a major challenge.” Given these interdisciplinary prejudices, a more novel approach is needed to gain acceptance of aesthetics in management practice – to provide an aesthetic schema that provides an architecture that embraces extant orthodox organizational theories and practice.

From the Footplate: An Example In the best and worst of times, the late 1980s, as a young business consultant, I was tasked with helping the British Rover car company with the design team to fulfil the new Chairman’s vision of what he called the Roverization of the company’s line of cars. For years, the company, as BMC and latterly British Leyland had been in terminal decline. Its reputation was marred by poor design, bad build quality, chronic industrial relations, constant restructuring issues, and a lack of focus in establishing a competitive market niche. The plan was to partner with Honda and build a limited range of high-quality vehicles that could span the family run around, company fleet and luxury saloon sectors of the market. The key to create this new line of cars was to use Honda’s established chassis, engine and components but create an overall design and style that would evoke the

466

T. Cunningham

cars that established the Rover as the professional’s car in the 1950s and 1960s. Working with the design team, we tried to determine exactly what were the style cues that could be repurposed to lend the new cars with the feeling of the robust quiet luxury of the Rover P Series. Individual elements were easy enough to identify: chrome detailing such as front grille and footplates, leather and walnut in the interior, down to sound of the door close. These considerations were not trivial – it surprised me at the time to find the tooling costs of the grille alone would run into many hundreds of thousands of pounds – but research at design clinics around the country suggested this array of style cues had a marked effect on consumer perception of the brand that could warrant a higher price mark in the respective model segments and propensity to consider buying a Rover. However, when it came to the actual styling of the car body, it became rather more difficult. It was clear that the aesthetic was to be as important as performance. The engineers and designers struggled to find a common language to debate the merits or otherwise of design offerings on the one hand and appreciation of the process ramifications on the other. In an attempt to free the thinking of the team I tried to introduce them to classic aesthetic theory. I realized quite quickly that the engineers on the team had difficulty embracing the concepts involved and in desperation I turned to the work of French semiotician Odile Solomon (1988) who had deconstructed familiar car marques such as the Mini and Volkswagen Beetle and emphasized the phatic function of design, both the physical and psychological function of product design. She drew heavily on Gestalt principles of grouping and subdivision that could break down the aesthetics of car into an ordered syntactic list of the variables in car shapes. Immediately, the designers and engineers had a syntax with which they could explore and assay design concepts and this resulted in a range of cars that returned the car group to profitability for the next five years before its ultimate demise and breakup, owing largely from its legacy of debt burden and mismanagement in the previous decades. In the more blue skies discussions we tried to consider the notion of the perfect car – but in a joke by a production foreman that, like the artisans that built the great cathedrals, flaws should be intrinsic and deliberate as “perfection was for God alone” – a flawed but telling appreciation of the medieval concept of beauty still flourishing in the languishing British car industry. What I learned from this episode was that aesthetics could be married to modern organizational and management theory but only if there was an analytic framework common to both and perhaps a return to the scholars of the middle ages might be enlightening. For this I propose a return and reexamination of the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, in particular his concept and criteria of beauty, in order to explore how it might serve as a framework that can marry aesthetic ideal and the tenets, measures and real world implementation of contemporary organizational theories to create the art of the beautiful business.

24

The Aesthetics of St Thomas Aquinas and the Art of the Beautiful Business

467

The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas There have been moderate advancements incorporating Aquinas in modern management theory and business ethics. His Summa Theologiae has been useful with its distinction of private property and the common good, (Finnis 1998), the repurposing of Aristotelean ethics for business, the structures of human choice and models of problem solving behavior for management and finally the notion of the “just price” notably without reference to the invisible hand (Marco 2014). His concept of the “fair” trade invokes both the moral argument and the concept of the aesthetic in business practice for Dewey (1932) points out that the unity of aesthetics and ethics is in fact reflected in our understanding of behavior being “fair” – the word having a double meaning of attractive and morally acceptable. It is true to say that Aquinas is the master of creative synthesis out of the tradition that was handed on to him by his teacher Magnus and his aesthetic theory, though fundamentally Aristotelian in nature, builds on the definitions of beauty expounded by Socrates in the Memorabilia, Plato, Plotinus, Pseudo Dionysus and latterly St Augustine. His theory of Beauty, although a relatively short discourse in the Summa Theologiae and Commentary on the Divine Names, has been a massive influence on more contemporary thought from Kant’s Critique to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. Even Marshall McLuhan (1969, pp. 368–369) admits “. . .I am a Thomist for whom the sensory order resonates with the divine Logos. I don’t think concepts have any relevance in religion. Analogy is not concept. It is community. It is resonance. It is inclusive. It is the cognitive process itself. That is the analogy of the divine logos.” Macintyre (1990) advocates philosophical Thomism to counter the rationalism he perceives predominate in American education he recognizes it is “a debate between fundamentally different viewpoints.”

Aquinas on Beauty The motivation for Aquinas to write his Summa treatise was to defend the Church’s reliance on Plato and Aristotle to explain the theological nature of God and knowledge and an express Papal mandate to counter the influence of Averroïsme in the new universities that were being founded in Europe at that time. It was written at the time when metaphysical debate was faced with the re-emergence of mathematics, optics, alchemy and astronomy with the call by early empiricists such as Bacon for the education of theologians in natural philosophy. The incunabulae of empirical psychology also served to open the doors of perception and reignite the debate of subjective versus objective truth. One also suspects that in developing his criteria for Beauty, Aquinas was pursuing his personal iconoclastic effort to limit the aesthetic excesses of church architecture

468

T. Cunningham

and ornamentation in the Cluny tradition. Umberto Eco (1988) in his seminal thesis The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas observes that the formal criteria of beauty for Aquinas, while well known, have been “rendered obscure by an excess of exegesis and immoderate use in the Scholastic tradition” (p. 64) and he attempts to represent them more faithfully in a return to the original writings of Aquinas. At its simplest, Aquinas states “pulchra sunt quae visa placent” or “those things are beautiful which please when seen” which Eco notes is, at first glance “imprecise, profoundly allusive or cleverly elliptical” (p. 55). Some commentators such as De Munnynck (1923) concentrate on this apparent subjective and intuitive definition but Eco goes to lengths to explore the precise meaning of this aesthetic Visio for which argues there is both an ontological and formal meaning and an implication of both the sensory experience and intellectual knowledge in the use of “visa” to describe the recognition of beauty by Aquinas.

Aquinas: The Formal Criteria of Beauty Whereas many contend that Aquinas did not formulate a complete and comprehensive theory of Aesthetics and that it has been the interpretations of later writers such as Maritain, Eco, Maurer and others to postulate and invoke a more developed model, the elegant simplicity of his criteria of Beauty offers a viable framework to reposit organizational dimensions to describe the beautiful business (even if we may differ to his conclusive transcendalist attribution of perfection to God). Aquinas provides a systematic formulation of all three criteria of beauty in only one passage of the Summa: “Three things are necessary for beauty: first integrity or perfection, for things that are lacking in something are ugly; also due proportion or consonance a; and again, clarity, for we call things beautiful when they are brightly coloured” ST, 1q.39 a.8.

Aquinas is trying to compromise between the two preexisting Hellenic approaches of the time – that beauty was a matter of proportion on the one hand and radiance and clarity on the other, by introducing the qualifier of integrity. James Joyce allows his hero and alter ego, Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as Young Man (Joyce 1916), to explain these concepts with a light note of casuistry: Integrity (Integritas) “An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time. What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and self-contained upon the immeasurable background of space or time

24

The Aesthetics of St Thomas Aquinas and the Art of the Beautiful Business

469

which is not it. You apprehend it as one thing. You see is as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness.” Proportion (Consonantia) “Having first felt that its is one thing you feel now that it is a thing. You apprehend it as a complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious.” Clarity (Claritas) “When you have apprehended it as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing.” Umberto Eco’s comprehensive analysis and masterful scholarship on the aesthetics of Aquinas seeks to determine a faithful representation of the Doctor’s true intent by examining the entire corpus of his writings to clarify the exact and contemporary meaning and contemporary equivalence of these three terms. Drawing on Eco’s analysis, we are able to extrapolate the key dimensions of these three criteria: Proportion • Form and matter/dynamic unity • Essence & existence • Sensible relationship of matter • Logical relationships • Form & function • Relation of parts to whole • Sentient/intellectual Integritas • Wholeness or perfection • Default/excess • Moral ideal • Physical ideal Claritas • Light & color • Lumen rationis • Reputation • Glory It is quite easy to see at a glance how these dimensions might have a relational correspondence with some of the characteristics of the modern organization:

470

T. Cunningham

24

The Aesthetics of St Thomas Aquinas and the Art of the Beautiful Business

471

From Euler to Venn For Aquinas, in considering the transcendental beauty and perfection of the three person God, these qualities are consubstantial and map onto each other in an absolute, immutable whole – each quality in what he calls “immanent procession” between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, bearing a total relationality to the other. In a purely abstract notion of beauty, there is therefore an inter-relationality between the three criteria. In our model, there are discrete dimensions and overlaps in the organizational corollaries outlined above but if we were to consider the relationality of a near perfect system of beauty, we could take the liberty of representing Aquinas’ three criteria and their corresponding Organizational dimensions as a Venn diagram thus:

472

T. Cunningham

24

The Aesthetics of St Thomas Aquinas and the Art of the Beautiful Business

473

The Implications for Organizational Aesthetics and Organizational Theory Most of the dimensions in the above model are supported by a large corpus of existing academic research within traditional organizational theory. In this manner, it is hoped that an aesthetic approach to management could be achieved by the wedding of these theories to the criteria set out by Aquinas for beauty. The fact that the components of these organizational approaches are derived from empirical analysis and research that can be observed, measured and tailored to the specific organization would directly address the concerns and resistance to aesthetics in management culture. Management who would be comfortable with the proven methods in say leadership studies like LMX theory, Ohio state studies or Fiedler’s model of the dynamics of the leadership process, can situate their given approach in the aesthetic model with the confidence in support of empirical derived dimensions that appeal to the rational Cartesian model of Management Science. Conversely, organizational aesthetics can examine orthodox management theory such as Lawrence and Lorsch’s contingency model of differentiation and integration of organizational structure, for example, through the prism of Thomist aesthetic criteria. Its holistic approach could hopefully re-engage Gestalt theory with Organizational Aesthetics as according to Biehl-Missal and Fitzek (2014, p. 262), “Gestalt psychology can be considered the “lost brother” of organizational aesthetics research that eventually came to theorize the aesthetic constitution of organizations, to which Gestalt theory pointed many decades ago.” An embracing structure, it can accommodate, change, evolve and be modified not only to individual organizational circumstance but also future organizational and aesthetic theoretical approaches as the nature of the organization evolves in the future.

Pulchrum est Bonum Further reflection and robust debate should serve to refine this outline model which could serve to create the beautiful business and hopefully broach the differences between the aesthetic and rationalist approaches to organizational studies. As Plato stresses, Beauty is Good, so then the beautiful business has a moral and ethical core in addition to its marriage of aesthetics and efficiency. Business ethics is situated as a key activity within this approach, and it is interesting that at the intersection between all the criteria for the beautiful business (leadership, mission, motivation, morale on the one hand and societal impact, political, and economy on the other) invoke both the notion of the common good, stakeholder theory and the qualities of the individual manager to act within society. “The institutional leader is primarily an expert in the promotion and protection of values” (Peters and Waterman 1982, p. 85) It is possibly this last point that might be the greatest potential for the development of the truly beautiful business. Actuality is not overtly expressed in the Thomist

474

T. Cunningham

criteria for beauty but actuality for Aquinas is the basis of beauty. According to Maurer, actuality is used in three ways when referring to beauty: existence, form, and action (Maurer 1983). For Maritain (1962, pp. 7–9), reflecting on Aquinas, “Art belongs to the practical order. It is turned towards action, not towards the pure interiority of knowledge. . . wherever we find art we find some productive operation to be contrived, some work to be made. . . This habitus is a virtue, that is to say, a quality which, triumphing over the original indetermination of the intellectual faculty, at once sharpening and tempering the point of its activity, draws it, with reference to a definite object, to a certain maximum of perfection and thus of operative efficiency.” In this analysis of beauty in Aquinas, Maritain identifies art and aesthetics as something the modern manager can immediately value - operative efficiency. The Thomist model may serve as a reflective aesthetic lens for the consideration of the organization as a whole and appraisal of the beautiful business can clarify for the individual manager and researcher their respective “espoused theories” versus “theories-in-use” (Argyris and Shön 1978) by employing double loop learning (familiar to Dewey, James and the other Pragmatists) or planned examen so that it may help the modern manager develop the virtues of an Aristotelian habitus for the beautiful management of a beautiful business.

Conclusion We have explored if a via media can be found between the apparently antagonistic positions of Organizational Aesthetics and classic Organizational research by situating classical organizational theory within an aesthetic framework derived from Aquinas to accommodate the existing theoretical paradigms of organizational practice and management science. Ultimately it is hoped that this inclusivity enables the communication or lingua franca between the two approaches to go towards creating a cohesive analytical framework in the pursuit of the Beautiful Business that would satisfy both disciplines. By describing the organization with this aesthetic approach it is hoped to: • Incorporate the best features of extant classical and neoclassical organizational theories within an aesthetic framework that can employ their tangible performance and evaluation measures. • Critically situate CSR and business ethics as a core corporate function rather than adjunct activity. • Allow organizational aesthetics to field its multiplicity of approaches within a cogent, rational taxonomy. • Encourage the formation of a habitus in the modern manager by reforming the narrative of both classical, neoclassical, and emergent organizational theories into an efficient, reflective practice.

24

The Aesthetics of St Thomas Aquinas and the Art of the Beautiful Business

475

This nascent approach may find traction within the disciplines of Organizational Aesthetics and Organization studies, it may be challenged. The liberties taken with the Doctor’s philosophy may very well offend the sensibilities of Thomist scholars. But it is a welcome discourse.

Cross-References ▶ A Rancièrian Method of Exploring Notions of Management and Organization Through the Artistic Gaze ▶ The Social Role of the Virtue of Integrity

References Argyris C, Shön DA (1978) Organizational learning: a theory of action perspective. Addison Wesley, Reading Barnard CI (1938) The functions of the executive. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, p 235 Baumgarten AG (1750) reprinted in 1936) Aesthetica. Laterza, Bari Biehl-Missal B, Fitzek H (2014) Hidden Heritage: a gestalt theoretical approach to the aesthetics of management and organisation. Gestalt Theory 36(3):251–266 De Munnynck M (1923) L’esthétique de St. Thomas d’Equin. In: San Tomasso d’Aquino. Various Authors, Milan Dewey J (1932) Ethics, with James Tufts. In: The collected works of John Dewey, 1882–1953 Edited Jo-Ann Boydston. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbonsdale, p 275 Eco U (1988) The aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. Radius, London Finnis JRG (ed) (1998) Public good: the specifically political common good in Aquinas. In: Natural law and moral inquiry: ethics, metaphysics, and politics in the thought of Germain Grisez. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, pp 174–209 Guillen MF (1997) Scientific management’s lost aesthetic: architecture, organization and the Tay-lorized beauty of the mechanical. Adm Sci Q 42(4):682–715 Joyce J (1916) Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Published by Heubsch BW, Kant I (1987) Critique of judgment (trans: Pluhar W). Hackett, Indianapolis, 1987 Kant I (1998) Critique of pure reason. In: Gruyer P, Wood AW, (eds and trans.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Macintyre A (1990) Three rival versions of moral enquiry: encyclopaedia, genealogy, and tradition. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame Marco V (2014) Happiness and the market: the ontology of the human being in Thomas Aquinas and modern functionalism. Bus Ethics 23(4):444 Maritain J (1962) Art and scholasticism and the frontiers of poetry (trans: Evans JW). Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York Maurer A (1983) About beauty: a thomistic interpretation. Center for Thomistic Studies, Houston McLuhan M (1969) Letters, to John W. Mole, O.M.I., 18 Apr 1969, pp 368–369. Letters of Marshall McLuhan (eds: Molinaro M, McLuhan C, Toye W). Oxford University Press, Toronto. 1987 Peters TJ, Waterman RH (1982) In search of excellence: lessons from America’s best-run companies. Harper & Row, New York Rusted B (2000) “Cutting a show”: grounded aesthetics and entertainment organizations. In: Linstead S, Höpfl H (eds) The aesthetics of organization. Sage, London, pp 111–129 Shrivastava P, Statler M (2010) L’esthétique des systèmes résilients. Télescope 16(2):115–130

476

T. Cunningham

Solomon O (1988) Semiotics and marketing: New directions in industrial design applications. Int J Res Mark 4(3):201–215 Strati A (2009) Do you do beautiful things? Aesthetics and art in qualitative methods of organization studies. In: Buchanan D, Bryman A (eds) The Sage handbook of organizational research methods. Sage, London, pp 230–245 Strati A, Guillet de Monthoux P (2002) Introduction: organizing aesthetics. Hum Relat 55:755–766 Taylor S, Hansen H (2005) Finding form: looking at the field of organizational aesthetics. J Manag Stud 42(6):1211–1232 Waldo D (1978) Organization theory: revisiting the elephant. Public Adm Rev 38:589–597 Walton K (1998) Review of encyclopedia of aesthetics (ed: Kelly M), 4 vols. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Times Literary Supplement, September 29, 2000, p 8 Zanutto A (2008) Representing organisational aesthetics: an open issue at every stage of field research. Aesthesis: International Journal of Art and Aesthetics in Management and Organizational Life 2(1):8–15

State of the Art on Aesthetics and Leadership

25

Wendelin Ku¨pers

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The State of the Arts and Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Understanding Art and Aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Art as a Practice and Artifact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aesthetics and Aesthetic Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Artful and Aesthetic Experiences and Processes in Relation to Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aesthetics and Creative Responsiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leadership as Professional Artistry and the “Art of Living” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

478 479 481 481 481 484 486 487 488 489

Abstract

What is the status of art and aesthetics in our contemporary world of vested interests, attachments, capitalized desires, and instrumentalist appropriations? How can noninstrumentality, intrinsic values, playfulness, or contemplation find a place in an instrumentalized and rationalized world of extrinsic orientations and incentives that seems to have no time or energy for playing, musing, and introspection? This chapter aims at providing a platform to start to answer these questions. Based on a brief view of the “state of the art” on aesthetics and leadership, it offers some basic differentiations and a critical understanding of artful and aesthetical dimensions. This chapter then sets out to show how art-related experiences and

W. Küpers (*) Karlshochschule – International University, Karlsruhe, Germany ARTEM ICN, Nancy, Paris, Berlin, France e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_63

477

478

W. Ku¨pers

processes, in relation to leadership, amount to a capability for creative responsiveness. Finally, this chapter rounds off by some concluding remarks about the role of professional artistry and the art of living. Keywords

Aesthetics · Art · Management · Leadership

Introduction Art or aesthetics is either appropriated into economic modes or the differences that are supposed to exist between high-flying up-to-heaven aesthetics and art and pragmatic down-to-earth orientations which are emphasized. Nevertheless, and interestingly, there are two tendencies emerging: an appropriating managerialization of art and aesthetics and an aestheticization or aestheticized reality of everyday life objects, spaces, and experiences in society, economy, and leadership. However, an increasing aestheticization may imply an overstimulation or exploitation for economic purposes that can turn into an an-aestheticization (Welsch 1996). This an-aestheticizing excess in turn can cause a desensitization to the world around us and, in particular, sensory overload in organizations in the context of an experiential and aestheticized economy (Hancock and Tyler 2009). Furthermore, with the business world’s orientation towards “scientific control over social life” (Guillet de Monthoux et al. 2007: 6), aesthetic qualities, for example, the quest for beauty of social organization (Ramirez 1991) and the sublime, have been “dismissed as irrational and taboo” (ibid.). Seen as supposedly irrational and impractical, art and aesthetic processes have been conceived by conventional economic and business practices as irrelevant or incalculable and thus have been ignored or neutralized and repressed or exploited. Asked in turn in a different way: What role can qualities of artful and aesthetic “states of the body and mind” play in our contemporary world of vested interests, attachments, capitalized desires and attachments, instrumentalist appropriations, and hegemonic neoliberalism? This question is challenging even more as art and aesthetics are characterized by suspension, disinterestedness, or detachment of utility, while facing the desires, needs, urgencies, and dominance of practical concerns. How then can noninstrumentality, intrinsic values, playfulness, or contemplation find a place in an instrumentalized and rationalized world of extrinsic orientations and incentives that does not have time or energy for “purpose-suspending” playing, musing, and introspection? This chapter aims at responding to these questions. It provides a brief overview of the state of the art on aesthetics and leadership and offers some basic differentiations and critical understandings of artful and aesthetical dimensions. Subsequently then it sets out how artful and aesthetic experiences and processes in relation to leadership amount to a capability for creative responsiveness.

25

State of the Art on Aesthetics and Leadership

479

Finally, this chapter concludes with an interpretation of leadership as professional artistry connected to the art of living.

The State of the Arts and Leadership Considering the limits and impasses of conventional leadership and its education and development (Küpers 2017), art and aesthetics can offer new approaches towards an extension and integration of a more genuinely beautiful, responsive, responsible, and wiser leadership. In our current context, the old, traditional ways are no longer workable, nor walkable, as the conventional practices of economic and business functioning apparently no longer work or are in problematic unsustainable ways. The time seems to be ripe and right for a cross-fertilization of arts and aesthetics with leadership (Adler 2006, 2015), exploring what it means to lead beautifully (Adler 2011; Ladkin 2008) and recognizing the value of artful and aesthetic knowing for leadership (Katz-Buonincontro 2011). Integrating artful and aesthetic ways of leading may allow re-embedding leadership to life-worldly practices in organizations (Sandberg and Dall’Alba 2009). Moreover, it enables reconnecting to an overarching prâxis anew with regard to the world of business in civic society, with all the material and sociocultural dimensions as they emerge in situated sayings, doings, and relating. Interpreting leadership as an art form in and of itself is characterized as much by its artfulness as its transactional skills may offer a revealing transformation of ways of comprehending and enacting forms of leading. Learning that leaders have much more in common with artists, scientists, and other creative thinkers allows a rediscovery of valuable perspectives. Correspondingly, leadership has been reinterpreted as a practice of navigation and wayfinding through an enacted aesthetics of an adaptable awareness and visionary orientation (Merritt and DeGraff 1996). Such orientation has its roots in classical role modeling, starting from bygone ancient, resilient heroes, like Odysseus, Hercules, or Perseus, variations of “great man” fantasies to the post-heroic distributed interpretation of leading, and shared leadership in the plural or servant leadership, today. With regard to making concepts of artful and aesthetic leadership innovative, what is important is avoiding construct proliferation, which happens when new leadership constructs resemble existing ones to such an extent that they are redundant. Such orientation is in danger of violating the parsimony principle, which holds that entities ought not to be needlessly multiplied and minimize the chance of falsifiability, or is trapped in tautology concepts. Instead conceptualizing artful and aesthetic leadership can open different ways of investigation and interrogation ways of leading and organizing. Accordingly, art and aesthetics can be used as a means to reimage, rethink, and reshape notions of leadership in organizations. For some time now, there has been a growing interest in and a turn towards arts and aesthetics by organization and leadership scholars (e.g., Guillet de Monthoux 2004;

480

W. Ku¨pers

Gagliardi 1990, 1996, Küpers 2005, 2011, 2018; Linstead and Höpfl 2000; Ramirez 1991; Strati 1999, 2019, Taylor and Hansen 2005). A while ago, Chester Barnard said in 1938 that leadership is “. . .a matter of art rather than science and is aesthetic rather than logical” (ibid.: 235). In addition, Selznick (1957: 152–153) already interpreted leadership as art. For him, art can serve as a kind of institution building and reworking of human and technological materials to fashion an organism that embodies new and enduring values. Besides these and other precursors, early contributions addressed questions of “Managing as an Art Form: The Aesthetics of management” (Kuhn 1982), “The Aesthetics of Leadership” (Duke 1986), Leadership Is an Art (de Pree 1989), or The Art of Management and the Aesthetic Manager (Dobson 1999), and “The Aesthetic Face of Leadership” (Howard 1996). Thus, for some time several significant streams and tractions of research indicated already that art and aesthetically rich experiences can have value for organizations and leadership. Originating particularly in the 1980s and onwards, the aesthetic perspective on organizations and leadership often functioned as a “counter-orientation” contrasting dominating rationalist and positivist paradigms, theories, and ways of mainstream thinking and practice (e.g., Ropo et al. 2002). Beyond the use of art as an or metaphor for different aspects of organizational and leadership life, participation in and interpretation of artful creation (Darsø 2004) and various artistic practices in relation to organizing and managing have been advocated by theorists and practitioners in a variety of contexts. In particular, aesthetic ways of leading and leadership as art have been explored conceptually (e.g., Guillet de Monthoux 2004; Ladkin and Taylor 2010). Aesthetic leadership has been seen in relation to managing fields of flow in art and business (Guillet de Monthoux et al. 2007). A special issue on “leadership as art” discussed variations on the theme (Ladkin and Taylor 2010). Furthermore, specific ontological and epistemological assumptions of aesthetic leadership have been studied (Hansen et al. 2007). Overall, aesthetic leadership has been acknowledged as a “unique, distinct, and valuable approach within leadership studies” (Hansen et al. 2007: 545), and “aesthetics can complement and offer valuable insights to leadership given current trends in leadership studies” (ibid.). Apart from English-speaking discourses, there have been other approaches in France (e.g., Heitz 2013). In the German-speaking context, aesthetics has been identified as a “future fundamental category” in the area of strategic economic leadership (cf. Scharmer 1991: 9), including implications of corporate aesthetics. Furthermore, aesthetic leadership has been explored in the arts as part of the leading creative artistic work (Ropo et al. 2017). Aesthetic forms of leading have also been related to artists as leaders, practitioners, visionaries, and inspirers of organizations and management (e.g., Austin and Devin 2003; Hatch et al. 2004). Accordingly, aesthetic leadership can also be interpreted as the manner in which artists and other aesthetic workers perform leadership functions within groups, communities, and culture, often outside established positions of authority (Schroeder 2008). Moreover, aesthetic forms of leading have also been connected to political

25

State of the Art on Aesthetics and Leadership

481

and civic leadership (e.g., Schroeder and Fillis 2010). One field of application has been aesthetic leadership for educational organizations, especially school management (e.g., Polat and Öztoprak-Kavak 2011). Before having a closer look at the interrelationship between art, aesthetics, and leadership, the following section provides a basic understanding and differentiation of art as a practice and artifact and defines aesthetics and aesthetic approaches, critically. Afterwards, this section focuses on the process of artistic as well as aesthetic experiences and events in relation to organizing and leading.

Understanding Art and Aesthetics Art as a Practice and Artifact Art comprises a very diverse range and arrangement of human activities and events constituted by the creation of materio-sensual, visual, auditory, or performing artifacts as works of art. These artworks express imaginative, conceptual, or other kinds of ideas by artists for various intentions that are open to all kinds of interpretations and criticisms as well as ways of exhibiting or disseminating them. Classic forms of art have used various media like painting, sculpture and architecture, or performing arts such as music, theater, film, and dance, as well as literature and other mediations that are more interactive or take the form of installation. Interestingly, for a long time, art was understood as a competent mastery, closely related to crafts and science. With modernist differentiation and the development of aesthetic ordering, the so-called fine arts became separated and distinguished from acquired skills in general and were relegated to decorative or applied arts.

Aesthetics and Aesthetic Approaches Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy devoted to conceptual and theoretical inquiry into aesthetic experiences and phenomena such as works of art, including their creation/making and appreciation (Levinson 2009) and communication. Accordingly, properties, features, or aspects of art and aesthetic processes, such as beauty or ugliness, sublime, tragic, comic, grace, as well as how to relate to those facets and processes, have been explored. What has been investigated systematically were certain kinds of entwined attitudes and perceptions and what experiences of aesthetic qualities were like and how to judge them. Etymologically, deriving from the Greek aiesthesis, a(i)esthetics comprises expressions that designate embodied sensation and perception (‘aisth’ ¼ feel) taken together as a whole, prior to the assignment of any cognitive or artistic meaning. The Greek verb aisthanomai denotes the capacity to perceive and know through or by using the senses. Phenomenologically, art-related and aesthetic experiences are constituted by us as sensually based, embodied-perceptual, emotional-responsive, and

482

W. Ku¨pers

expressive-communicative relationships. A(i)esthetic knowledge and understandings come from the perceptive bodily sensuous faculties of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. Thus, all forms of a(i)esthetics require a full engagement and refinement of sensibilities in perception, feeling, thinking, and acting in their interconnections. In this sense, having an a(i)esthetic experience is mediating a sensual sense of wholeness and of belonging to an expanded reality. Thus, as pre-reflective embodied experience and affect, a(i)esthetic intercedes a process of sensing and revealing meaning in a sensuous form or expression otherwise inaccessible. As a philosophical discipline and concept, aesthetics describes and studies specific characteristics or capabilities of artful phenomena that are stirring or evoking specific relationships. Classically, being a study especially of beauty and philosophy of the arts, aesthetics reflects epistemological, ontological, and ethical dimensions of art and art-related phenomena including their creation, reception, and appreciation. Historically, there have been different definitions and conceptualizations of aesthetics, reflecting the various roles and interpretations of art, from ancient times to classical and modern and postmodern ones. The following cannot present all the various aesthetic approaches and schools in detail. Idealist traditions emphasizing the nexus of the beautiful, true, and good and that of unity (Platon) and the classifying focus on mimesis, imitation, or representation of an external world that classified beauty into types as in the theory of drama served as a basis in medieval and Renaissance times. Corresponding to the spirit of his days, the age of Enlightenment, Baumgarten defined “modern” aesthetics for reflecting the experience of art as a means of knowing. Subsequently, Kant’s formalist aesthetics with its a priori assumption of a separation between subjectivity and objectivity emphasized the cognitive capacities of the transcendent subject, making the aesthetic subservient to rationalistic and system-generated preconceptions. Kant argues that aesthetic judgments (or “judgments of taste”) must be disinterested, universal, and necessary as well as beautiful objects appear to be “purposive without purpose,” while it is mediated by a free play between the cognitive powers of imagination and understanding. For Kant aesthetic judgments are not based on concepts, or things that can be known, but on intuitions or sensations. Therefore, a true judgment of beauty is disinterested that is it is not based on any known concept (nor desire, want, or prior attitude on the part of the observer all to be eliminated) but a sensation of unconstrained, completely detached pleasure. While a beautiful object is purposive, that is, containing the property or quality of purposefulness, it is without actually having a concrete purpose. As much as we respond to the object’s rightness of design, which satisfies our imagination and intellect, we are not evaluating the object’s purpose. The representation must have the appearance of being organized with respect to some purpose or end, though that end point remains unspecified and unspecifiable. With Kant aesthetics became central to modern philosophy, as it

25

State of the Art on Aesthetics and Leadership

483

was seen as providing the metaphysical link for understanding the relationship between subjectivity and nature and the status of disinterestedness, as an experience, where the object is appreciated for its own sake and where no other interests are at stake. Understanding aesthetics as the philosophy of art, Hegel viewed beauty, as expressed through art, as the materialization of the unfolding of the absolute spirit through human consciousness and action. In contrast to rationalist and idealist philosophies, empiricists focused on aesthetic (and moral) subjectivism and appeals to sentiment: for an empiricist, such as Hume, beauty is an impression, while aesthetic (and moral) judgments have practical consequences that mere reason lacks. For Nietzsche, in his aesthetic a-moralism, the post-metaphysical value of art and artistry is given by its power to ensconce an illusion and to serve as a source of higher-order lessons on how to create value. Criticizing spectatorial, impersonal, and passive accounts of aesthetics, Nietzsche connects creative “arousal” in states of “interested” willful engagement with beauty directly to desire and exalted feeling of power. Relating rational and sensuous powers, Schiller discusses aesthetics with a focus on purposeless play in which form-impulse and sense-impulse come together and provided influential educational implications. Broadening the meaning of aesthetics, it is not only the history of theories and doctrines on art, on what is beautiful or on works of art, but also a field that comprises sensitivity, imagination, and expressions often subordinated to rational knowledge in the Western civilization. Today, there are traditions of analytic aesthetics as well as continental aesthetics, especially phenomenological aesthetics. While in the analytic tradition, meaning and truth are frequently thought to be exemplified by logic, science, and the formal structures of language, in continental philosophy, art and aesthetic reflection have often taken the role of exemplifying and thinking about meaning and truth. As such, this philosophy emphasizes art’s historical and social situatedness and asks questions concerning its role and value in culture, politics, and everyday life, mediated through lived experience. Phenomenologically, art and aesthetics are constituted by embodied, perceptual, emotional-responsive processes and expressive-communicative relations (Merleau-Ponty 1995, 2012; Küpers 2015). Accordingly, for example, a MerleauPontyian approach towards an aesthetic “interworld” (Daly 2018) emphasizes the bodied pre-reflective, and the primordial, that undermines dichotomous prejudices while reclaiming and reinstating the status of perception and the perceived world. Such relational approach towards an embodied aesthetics is realized through the recognition of the interdependence between the mind and body, between the self and other, between the subject and world, between appearance and reality, between reason and nature, and between form and content. A corresponding interrelational aesthetics is situated and experienced as in-between form and matter, emphasizing in-between spaces and times as well as the relational process, which is highly relevant for organizations and leadership.

484

W. Ku¨pers

Artful and Aesthetic Experiences and Processes in Relation to Leadership As mentioned before, with its roots in aiesthesis, aesthetics is based on and mediated as a sensual experience and reflects an embodied event. Aesthetic and aesthetic-like processes are a pervading part of the fabric of organizational activities, experiences, judgments, and realities that can be seen as a cycle. The cycle starts with an embodied sensual awareness that is somatic and sensory attentiveness as a starting point (Katz-Buonincontro 2011: 9) and implies an aesthetically oriented sensitivity, perception, and imagination. Sensually opened ways of relating and a somatically mediated aesthetic knowing are that which come from embodied and perceptive faculties of hearing, sight, touch, smell, and taste, thus, sensibilities “actionable” for supporting the perception of phenomena and dynamic experiential processes, not bound to “objects.” Accordingly, art-related and aesthetic experiences and events are constituted by sensually based, embodied-perceptual, emotional-responsive, and expressivecommunicative relationships. A(i)esthetic knowledge and understandings are mediated by the mentioned perceptive sensuous capacities of listening, viewing, touching, seeing, and tasting and touching of agents. Thus, all forms of a(i)esthetics require a full engagement and refinement of sensibilities in embodied sensing, feeling, thinking, and acting in their multisensorial interconnection. A(i)esthetic responses can then be followed by aesthetic interpretations, a(i)esthetic judgments, and aesthetic communication that are carrying a transformational potential. Accordingly, an aesthetic or artist(ically oriented) leaders process senses in their practice, while recognizing the bodily nature of all materio-social interaction and cultural influences. To have such an aesthetic experience, an aesthetic attitude in a disinterested and sympathetic way has been proposed as a basic requirement (Stolnitz 1978). Such aesthetic attitude is an openness and sympathetic attentiveness – and suspense of purpose and relating noninstrumentally – to experiencing an object or a process aesthetically. Importantly, an aesthetic contemplation with such attitude does not involve simply sitting back, relaxing, and letting the mind wander. Rather it involves mental focus and thought and may manifest itself in a tightening of muscles during a thrilling scene, a foot tapping to the beat, or a tilt of one’s head like the figure in a painting, exemplifying the active, engaged state that itself does to constitute the proper attitude. To be interested in something for its own sake involves a desire to go on experiencing it, but not in order to satisfy another, separate desire, but there is a certain kind of “should”-ness involved, or explicitly or implicitly it contains a value judgment. The aesthetic attitude is normative in the sense that any judgment that comes out of the aesthetic attitude carries a normative force. In other words, when we think that something is beautiful, we think that other people should find it beautiful, too. An aesthetic attitude can be described as “a readiness to explore an object, to see what it might suggest. . . Art does not evoke or cause aesthetic experience, you need

25

State of the Art on Aesthetics and Leadership

485

a willing and able beholder” (Sandelands and Buckner 1989: 115). This orientation proposes that there is a certain way to look, hear, feel, and perhaps imagine an object or a process that lends itself to a more profound experience. The aesthetic attitude is qualitatively one of detachment from purpose. Thus, to experience an object or a process truly aesthetically is to experience it for its own sake and not for any practical or ulterior motive. The aesthetic attitude is thus characterized by disinterestedness and distance from an instrumental relation to the object or process. As such, aesthetic experiences have a value in themselves and are not only as a means for some other purposes or experiences. For example, the flow process can be seen as an intrinsically motivated and rewarding proto-aesthetic or aesthetically arousing experience of working beautifully, as “flow arises in activities that are art like” (Sandelands and Buckner 1989: 121). Here, “one relates oneself to work with a non-instrumental and non-utilitarian attitude allowing one to recognize that the work justifies itself and that the employee can recognize and take pleasure in this fact” (White 1996: 204). However, despite the neoromantic ideal of appreciating art for art’s sake, people cannot ignore who they are and where they have come from in their experience of art. In a pragmatic way, it can be argued that art can be experienced simultaneously for its social, moral, and intellectual value and specific engagements. Correspondingly, classical aesthetic value can be defined as the one that an “object,” event, or state possesses in virtue of its capacity to elicit pleasure beauty, elegance, gracefulness, harmony, proportion, and unity (positive value) or displeasure, ugliness, deformity, or disgustingness (negative value), when appreciated or experienced aesthetically, related not only formally but also to contextual, cognitive, and moral dimensions. A phenomenological pragmatist-inspired understanding of aesthetic engagement (Berleant 2010) is based on somatic awareness and refers to a specific, embodied involvement. This involvement can be characterized by experiential reciprocity, as a participatory, situated, sensuous, and immersive engagement that is or allows moving beyond the dichotomy of the subject and object. Such an orientation not only challenges the traditional claim of aesthetic disinterestedness but also leads to new perspectives on a variety of traditional aesthetic topics and approaches. This becomes relevant in partnerships with stakeholders as it relates today to possibilities for a contextual-situational and ecological aesthetics, especially in a period of climate change (Miles 2014). This extended orientation implies that besides psycho- and sociologics also “ecologics” of be(com)ing can be considered for developing an eco-aesthetic leadership. As an aesthetics beyond the arts (Berleant 2012), aesthetic engagement and “ecoaesthetics” (ibid.: 117–130; Berleant 2010) not only help to better evaluate forms of living and leading practices. Rather, mediated by an emotional sensitivity and perceptual acuteness, discrimination, and meaning, aesthetic forms of being engaged and an enacted eco-aesthetics are transformative and thus may contribute to a more convivial and sustainable reality, urgently required for a future to come. An “eco-aesthetic” approach considers how space, mass, volume, time, movement, color, light, smell, sound, tactility, kinesthesia, and various environmental

486

W. Ku¨pers

patterns are occurring as well as how they involve all the sensory modalities synesthetically and “synaesthetically,” in particular in leadership. Such integration engages in intense perceptual awareness and relationships, including those of immediate and intrinsic value. Complementing positive appreciations and also identifying forms of aesthetic negativity such as aesthetic affront, aesthetic pain, and aesthetic depravity and even the negative sublime can lead to broadening the scope of aesthetics. This may concern harmful practices and negative exploitative values that can be linked to social criticism (Berleant 2010: 155–192) of economic and managerial practices. Overall, an aesthetic lens shifts the attention to that which is sensuous and makes sense in relation to an object or a process. Such focus does not deny or exclude other valid aspects of the perceived. For the existence of an aesthetic attitude, it is important to place an emphasis on the attentiveness and openness that one must have in experiencing an object or a process aesthetically.

Aesthetics and Creative Responsiveness The form and content of aesthetic experiences lead to themselves eliciting responses or are response-dependent on qualitative or expressive dimensions of the object or process (Carol 2001: 51). This means that in aesthetic experiences, affects, demands, and claims are processed as “Other” that come from elsewhere and call us as to respond. Understanding the responding to foreignness can be seen as a basic feature of all sensing, saying, and doing, of all embodied and motorsensory behavior and experience. Importantly, foreignness or alienness announces itself and solicits us on the level of the lived body (bodily responsorium) in terms of pathos or affect, as a kind of pre-reflexive suffering or irritation. Moreover, having an a(i)esthetic experience means being sensually responsive to the pattern that connects (Bateson 1979). In particular, for Bateson – framed within the cybernetic discourse on communication, organization, thought, learning, and evolution – patterns operate according to an aesthetic responsive logic that is based on recognition and empathy rather than rationality, moving not teleological but recursive, that is a dance of interacting parts as part of a continuity between mind and nature as a meta pattern. One form of response is the process of aesthetic appreciation and depreciation that may use different criteria. Classical (order-oriented) “measures” may be related to being in balance and in harmony or being simple (paramorous), complete, or authentic. More dynamic renewal-oriented criteria and principles may consider that something aesthetically organized is exciting, adventurous, provoking, and challenging or that it is discontinuous, surprising, strange, or original and novel. These responses and appreciations or depreciations go together with aesthetic interpretations (e.g., intuition, implicit knowledge), aesthetic judgments (e.g., engaging in decision-making), and aesthetic communication (e.g., co-creating or sharing a vision). All of these processes are carrying tremendous transformational potential and possibly rendering various effects that are significant for leadership practices.

25

State of the Art on Aesthetics and Leadership

487

Leadership as Professional Artistry and the “Art of Living” Aesthetic experiences of art and aesthetic processes can be taken as an inspiring guide to fashion everyday experiences and lives of leaders and leadership differently. They can contribute to releasing and cultivating different kinds of orientations, capabilities, and competencies as well as practices that are much needed in the current and future lifeworld of contemporary leadership and organizations, economies, and societies. Aesthetically reflective and artistically oriented leaders enlarge their sense and practice of what is possible, imaginable, and doable in organizing to lead more creatively and sustainably. In addition to providing multiple ways of experiencing and knowing, integrating arts and aesthetics into leadership can help in practicing emotional intelligence and mindfulness and encourage critical thinking and visionary capacities as well as mediating social coherence and eco-sensitive conviviality. In particular, leadership inspired and guided by art and aesthetics manifests in learnable qualities of artful creating. Such orientation can enable and support social dreaming, collaboration, and play for dealing with complexity by embracing opacity and uncertainty. Art and aesthetics facilitate processing overlapping or multiple meanings, thereby contributing to toleration and embracing of ambiguities, paradoxes, and dilemmas. The role of art and aesthetics in leadership development is less about training but more about entering a process of (self-)cultivated formation and civic transformation, enacting e-ducere, that is, “to lead out,” leading out of limiting boundaries, and moving towards other ways of being and sensing, seeing, feeling, thinking, and acting or otherwise inaccessible potentials, unimagined options, or unrealized alternatives. As an aesthetic and artful leadership is processing embodied perception, sensing and noncognitive tacit knowing, implicit learnings, and critical reflections and actions, it is tied to what Schön calls professional artistry of practice (Schön 1983) operating in indeterminate zones. Accordingly, the art of organizing and managing aesthetically reveals itself both in crucially important situations of instability and uniqueness and in those dimensions of everyday practices that depend upon the spontaneous exercise of intuitive artistry (ibid.: 240). As a specific enactment within a shared tradition, such professional artistry involves a blend of practitioner qualities, attunement, knowledge, and creative imagination processes and implementation skills together with the ability to use them critically, intuitively, and practically. Integrally, a genuine integral aesthetic leadership as professional artistry embraces the body (embodied incorporated dimensions), mind (cognitive, logical, rational thought), heart (feelings, emotions, moods), and “spirit” of individuals and collectives. As a practically habitualized incorporated disposition, such artistry strives towards what makes a professional activity work at its best and ethically worthwhile. Thus, it refers to a mastery state or condition and enacted in a mature performance that is characterized by virtuosity and excellence. The latter one implies in particular the ability to make judgments about the feel and significance of the particular and corresponding execution. A judgment artistry allows artful professional practitioners to make highly skilled micro-, macro-, and meta-judgments that are optimal for the given circumstances (Paterson et al. 2006).

488

W. Ku¨pers

Bringing together sensing, feeling, knowing, and doing an artful judgment effectuates a proto-integral orientation towards a living integrity in organizations and beyond. On a systemic level, incorporating such integrative artistry of eco-aesthetic leadership mediates an autoecopoïesis that helps developing cultures of sustainability. These are realized and manifests as an exercise in applied ethically sensitive “artscience” (Kagan 2013) and practice that meets present and future needs, especially the well-be(com)ing (Küpers 2005) of members and stakeholders. Accordingly, a key area for present and future aesthetic leadership is to become involved in developing radical new possibilities in relation to sustainability, which calls for different ways of being and knowing compared to those with which most organizations still currently operate. Such sustainability-oriented aesthetic artful leadership can interconnect multiple patterns, needs, stakes, and interests, like industrial, biopolitical, governmental, scientific, local community, and environmental lifeworlds. To fully realize the potential of integrating context-sensitive aesthetic and artful ways of leading, the very understanding of leadership itself requires a transforming reinterpretation. What is needed is a kind of transformation of leadership towards an aesthetically responsive leader- and followership based on a relational understanding of those involved. With such processual interpretation, the individual persons of leader and follower and their situated context become the emergent “products” of relational processes. With an interrelational intelligibility in place of leadership, it will be possible to shift attention from what is “contained” within towards what transpires between people. This interrelational nexus of artful practice and aesthetic leading and following serves then as a source of genuine surplus value for organizations and stakeholders. In a way, integrating art and aesthetics into leader- and followership and stakeholders in and outside the organization is itself a work of art, unfolding as an openended lifelong process. Thus, the path towards integrating art and aesthetics into these relationships is more circuitous and spiral-like than linear, because the very nature of a lived artistry and aesthetics transcends the myopic, “one-best-way” approach that characterizes much of conventional leadership today. An aesthetic and/or artful leadership may mediate or create organizational lifeworlds as spheres of sustainable living that are more sublime in their “simplexity” and more colorful and vivacious in their diversity realized over the mid- and long term. For living this orientation, the guiding question will be: How can leadership help to render and co-create rich and satisfying aesthetic and artful experiences and structures as part of everyday lives and lifeworlds? Ultimately, embodied aesthetic leadership is a programmatic and an “enactable” art of living. Such an artful living of aesthetic leadership would follow Rumi’s wise advice: Let the beauty we love be what we do.

Cross-References ▶ Aesthetics and Leadership ▶ Curating Management Philosophy: Art and Aesthetics for Business Education ▶ The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action

25

State of the Art on Aesthetics and Leadership

489

References Adler N (2006) The arts and leadership: Now that we n do anything, what will we do? Academy of Management Learning and Education 5(4):466–499 Adler N (2011) Leading beautifully: the creative economy and beyond. J Manag Inq 20(3):208–221 Adler N (2015) Finding Beauty in a Fractured World: Art Inspires Leaders – Leaders Change the World. Academy of Management Review 40(3):480–494 Austin R, Devin L (2003) Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work. Upper Saddle River: Financial Times Prentice Hall Barnard C (1938) The functions of the executive. Harvard University Press, Boston Bateson G (1979) Mind and nature. A necessary unity. Dutton, New York Berleant A (2010) Sensibility and sense: the aesthetic transformation of the human world. Imprint Academic, Exeter Berleant A (2012) Aesthetics beyond the arts. Ashgate, Farnham Carol N (2001) Beyond aesthetics: philosophical essays. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Daly A (2018) Merleau-ponty’s aesthetic interworld: from primordial percipience to wild logos. Philos Today 62(3):847–867 Darsø L (2004) Artful creation: learning-tales of arts-in-business. Samfundslitteratur, Frederiksberg De Pree M (1989) Leadership is an art. Doubleday, New York Dobson J (1999) The art of management and the aesthetic manager. Quorum Books, Westport Duke DL (1986) The aesthetics of leadership. Educ Adm Q 22(1):7–27 Gagliardi P (1990) Symbols and Artifacts: Views of the corporate landscape. New York, NY: (de Gruyter) Gagliardi P (1996) Exploring the aesthetic side of organ-isational life. In: Clegg S, Hardy C and Nord WR (Eds) Handbook of Organisation Studies. (566–580), London: Sage Guillet de Monthoux P (2004) The art firm: aesthetic management and metaphysical marketing. Stanford Business Books, Stanford Guillet de Monthoux P, Gustafsson C, Sjostrand SE (eds) (2007) Aesthetic leadership: managing fields of flow in art and business. Palgrave Macmillan, London Hancock P, Tyler M (2009) It’s all too beautiful: emotion and organization in the aesthetic economy. In: Fineman S (ed) The emotional organization: passions and power. Wiley, Hoboken, pp 202–217 Hansen H, Ropo A, Sauer E (2007) Aesthetic leadership. Leadersh Q 18(6):544–560 Hatch MJ, Kostera M, Kozminski AK (2004) The three faces of leadership: manager, artist, priest. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford Heitz J (2013) Art et management: une métaphorique généralisée pour approcher l’œuvre d’art et développer la créativité. Rev Human Entrep 313:19–32 Howard VA (1996) The aesthetic face of leadership. J Aesthet Educ 30(4, Special Issue: The Aesthetic Face of Leadership):21–37 Kagan S (2013) Art and sustainability: connecting patterns for a culture of complexity. transcript, Bielefeld Katz-Buonincontro J (2011) How might aesthetic knowing relate to leadership? A review of the literature. Int J Educ Arts 12(SI 1.3):1–18 Küpers W (2020) States-of-the-arts in organization and leadership practices that “make sense – a poly-logue in three parts: com-and-implications, opening conclusion and perspectives”. Organisational Aesthetics (forthcoming) Kuhn J (1982) Managing as an art form: the aesthetics of management. In: Proceedings of the general education seminar, vol 11. Columbia University Press, New York Küpers W (2005) Vision of a refined existence between the sense of reality and the sense of possibility through a responsive encounter between art and commerce. In: Brellochs M, Schraat H (eds) Sophisticated survival techniques – strategies in art and economy. Kadmos, Berlin, pp 372–397 Küpers W (2011) Trans- + -Form -Leader- and followership as an embodied, emotional and aesthetic practice for creative transformation in organisations. Leadersh Org Dev J 32(1):20–40 Küpers W (2015) Phenomenology of the Embodied Organization – the contribution of MerleauPonty for organisation studies and practice. Palgrave Macmillan, London

490

W. Ku¨pers

Küpers W (2017) Embodied aesth-ethics for developing practical wisdom in management education/learning. In: Küpers W, Gunnlaugson O (eds) Wisdom learning: perspectives on wising-up management and business education. Routledge, London, pp 272–311 Küpers W (2018) States-of-the-Arts in Organization and Leadership Practices that make sense – A Poly-logue in Three Parts: Part II Status of art and aesthetics in organization and leadership, Organizational Aesthetics 7(1):46–66 Ladkin D (2008) Leading beautifully: how mastery, congruence and purpose create the aesthetic of embodied leadership practice. Leadersh Q 19(1):31–41 Ladkin D, Taylor S (2010) Leadership as art. Leadership 6(3):35–241 Levinson (2009) Philosophical aesthetics: an overview. In: The Oxford handbook of aesthetics. Oxford Univeristy Press, Oxford Linstead S, Höpfl H (2000) The Aesthetics of Organization. London: Sage Merleau-Ponty M (1995) The visible and the invisible. Northwestern, Evanston Merleau-Ponty M (2012) Phenomenology of perception. Routledge, London Merritt S, DeGraff J (1996) The revisionary visionary: leadership and the aesthetics of adaptability. J Aesthet Educ 30(4):69–85 Miles M (2014) Eco-aesthetics: art, literature and architecture in a period of climate change. Bloomsbury, London Paterson M, Higgs J, Wilcox S (2006) Developing expertise in judgement artistry in OT practice. Bri J OT 69(3):115–123 Polat S, Öztoprak-Kavak Z (2011) Aesthetic leadership (AL): development and implementation of aesthetic leadership scale (ALS) of school directors. Educ Res Rev 6(1):50–61 Ramirez R (1991) The beauty of social organisation. Accedo, München Ropo A, Parviainen J, Koivunen N (2002) Aesthetics in leadership. From absent bodies to social bodily presence. In: Parry KW, Meindl JR (eds) Grounding leadership theory and research: issues and perspectives. Information Age, Greenwich, pp 21–38 Ropo A, De Paoli D, Bathurst R (2017) Aesthetic leadership in the arts handbook of research on leadership and creativity. Elgar, Cheltenham, pp 445–457 Sandberg J, Dall’Alba G (2009) Returning to practice anew: a life-world perspective. Organ Stud 30:1349–1368 Sandelands E, Buckner GC (1989) Of art and work: aesthetic experience and the psychology of work feelings. Res Organ Behav 11:105–131 Scharmer CO (1991) Ästhetik als Kategorie strategischer Führung, Stuttgart, Urachhausverlag Schön D (1983) The reflective practitioner. Basic Books, New York Schroeder J (2008) In: Marturano A, Gosling J (eds) Aesthetic leadership key concepts in leadership studies. Routledge, London, pp 5–7 Schroeder JE, Fillis I (2010) Aesthetic leadership, research handbook on political and civic leadership Richard Couto. Sage, London Selznic P (1957) Leadership in Administration, Harper and Row, New York, NY Stolnitz J (1978) The aesthetic attitude in the rise of modern aesthetics. J Aesthet Art Critic 36(4):409–422 Strati A (1999) Organisation and aesthetics. Sage, London Strati A (2019) Organizational theory and aesthetic philosophies, Routledge studies in management, organizations and society. Routledge, New York Taylor S, Hansen H (2005) Finding form: looking at the field of organizational aesthetics. J Manag Stud 42(6):1211–1231 Welsch W (1996) Aestheticization processes. Phenomena, distinctions and prospects. Theory Cult Soc 13(1):1–24 White DA (1996) It’s working beautifully! Philosophical reflections on aesthetics and organization theory. Organization 3(2):195–208

Aesthetics and Leadership

26

Wendelin Ku¨pers

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical, Imaginative-Utopian, and Pragmatic Dimensions of Art and Aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Liberating Irritation of the “Sense of Reality” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exploration and Innovation Through the “Sense of the Possible” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sense of Designable and “Gestalt” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aesthetic Qualities and Dimensions of Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Dark Side and Limitations of Aesthetic Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aesthetic Leadership and (Aesth-)Ethics and Wisdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Practical Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theoretical and Methodological Implications: “ScholARTistry” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

492 493 493 494 495 496 498 500 502 502 502 505 505

Abstract

This chapter discusses how art and aesthetics are related to leadership experiences and events in organizations. Firstly critical, imaginative-utopian, and pragmatic roles, qualities, and dimensions of art and aesthetics for leadership practice are outlined. Then, the dark side and limitations of aesthetic leadership and its connection to ethics and practical wisdom are discussed critically. Finally, some practical and theoretical implications for leadership development and arts-based research on leadership are offered. Keywords

Aesthetics · Art · Arts-based research · Leadership · Management W. Küpers (*) Karlshochschule – International University, Karlsruhe, Germany ARTEM ICN, Nancy, Paris, Berlin, France e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_31

491

492

W. Ku¨pers

Introduction In frequent everyday use, management and leadership are often superficially declared an “art,” or, on the contrary, they are seen as not compatible with art at all. On the one hand, in the business of selling “the art of. . .management” in the form of books, concepts, recipes, etc., an often-shallow use is made of the term practice – meaning almost everything and anything – that deserves a deeper interpretation and reflection about the aesthetic qualities involved. On the other hand, conventionally art and aesthetics seem incompatible with organizational and especially corporate contexts. How can we approach and critically relate art and aesthetics to leadership in refined ways? And how is an aesthetic leadership placed, as complementing or contradicting, in relation to traditional forms of managing and/or leading? It seems that subjective experiences and the qualities of art and aesthetics do not fit with the economic imperatives of an objective-oriented and purpose-driven rationality. The position of sensual, open, and playful experiences, involved in art and aesthetics, appears to contrast with the utilitarian positioning of fixed sense-making and closured control in business practice. On a societal and economical level, the regime of neoliberalism seems to exclude the autonomy of free expressions in art and aesthetics. In this chapter, art refers to practice of creation, especially artifacts, and artistry is closely dependent on, yet distinct from, craft (Barry and Meisiek 2010). By contrast, aesthetics is related embodied sensation and perception of artistic meaning. It functions also as the branch and discourse of philosophy devoted to conceptual and theoretical inquiry into aesthetic and art-related experiences and phenomena. Confined to the paradigm of modernity, art and aesthetics have been excluded or placed in subordinate or economic and functional roles, e.g., investments in collections of works of art as assets or beautifying decoration of offices. Following utilitarian logic, potentials of art and aesthetics are seen as mere resources to be exploited for optimizing existing systems or generating marketable innovation. Viewing the two worlds of artists and leaders, in a superficial stereotypical manner, shows that they seem to have very little in common. According to such interpretation, the two spheres and actors differ radically in motivation and orientation, in methods of operation, and in responsibility and thus hardly interact with each other. However, below the surface of the seemingly opposite, there exist genuine similarities, complementarities, juxtapositionings, and potential conjunctions. With their focus on freedom and openness of purpose, in some ways art and aesthetics represent the other of functional and utility-oriented economic and managerial ways of purpose-driven and rationally organized operation. Considering such status of “being other,” what would it then imply entering the realm between the two spheres, thus venturing into this borderland? Moreover, what would it mean if art and aesthetics were related to economic institutions and organizational or leadership practices would mediate an “othering” of the business as usual? Can artful and aesthetic orientations serve as a contrasting folio for making more visible and evident the blind spots and impasses of economic, organizational, and managerial

26

Aesthetics and Leadership

493

practice? Furthermore, would relating to artful and aesthetic qualities and events allow experiencing differently and reflecting critically on the status of what it means to manage, lead, or organize – and how to understand and do this otherwise and perhaps even more wisely? The following will respond to these questions. Based on Chapter “Artful and Aesthetic Experiences and Processes in Relation to Leadership,” this chapter outlines critical, imaginative-utopian, and pragmatic qualities and dimensions as transformative potential in relation to leadership. The subsequent sections discusses the dark side and limitations of aesthetic leadership as well as its connection to ethics and practical wisdom. Finally, the chapter offers some practical and theoretical implications and arts-related research perspectives.

Critical, Imaginative-Utopian, and Pragmatic Dimensions of Art and Aesthetics Based on a differentiated understanding of artful and aesthetic experiences and processes in relation to leadership (see ▶ Chap. 25, “State of the Art on Aesthetics and Leadership”), critical, imaginative, and utopian as well as pragmatic roles, dimensions, and qualities of art and aesthetics can be discussed (see also Küpers 2018). The transformational potential of artistic and aesthetic processes refers to their capacity to question the “sense of the real” and yielding a “sense of the possible” – as described by Musil in his book The Man Without Qualities – supplemented by a “sense of the doable.” With its critical capacity to call into question the locked senses of what is “real” and offering imaginative, utopian, perspectives on what is or might be possible, creative qualities of art and aesthetics can function in a critical and liberating way. Both can be complemented with a more pragmatic sense of what can be done concretely differently and all together provide transformational qualities that are highly relevant for realities and practices of leadership and organizations.

The Liberating Irritation of the “Sense of Reality” By using the creative and imaginative qualities of art and aesthetics, members of organizations may reveal unrecognized assumptions and neglected visions. In this way, art and aesthetics help to see beyond your taken-for-granted meanings of things. Art’s critical dimension functions as a productive irritant that enables getting out of established, internalized principles and scopes of limited understanding and approaches toward reality. Thus, art and aesthetic experiences can serve as media for de-familiarization, displacing, disturbing, or even the disruption and de-automizing of habitual modes of perception. The attainment of a critical sense of reality through art enables the recognizing and possibly the overcoming of the dominance of the pure instrumentalization of economic one-sidedness. Thus, by way of constructive irritation, aesthetic processes

494

W. Ku¨pers

may contribute to a rethinking of prevailing patterns of thought, decision-making, and behavior in, for example, concrete investment plans, organizational tasks, and management practices. With critical resources attained in such a way, blind spots may be consciously identified, and the limits of an instrumental relationship to reality may be experienced and more effectively altered. Apparent insolubilities concerning the ways of looking at a problem become transparent, and alternative capabilities for identifying, interpreting, and solving problems may be activated. Precisely as a result of their relatively “functionless function” and orientation toward an undefined purpose, aesthetic processes hold within themselves a sensitizing and reflexive capability and critical potential. Aspects of aesthetics can serve as the basis for an early diagnosis and functions as a deviant or corrective interaction with reality. For example, strategic processes, restricted to a purpose-driven analysis of the appropriateness of the means, could be extended with aspects taken from a creative identification and evaluation of the ends. The more incalculable and imprecise the situations become, as characterized by the current economic context, the more important it is to go beyond the prevalent understanding of reality in order to maximize goals. In particular, an art-related or aesthetic approach may open up possibilities previously unrecognized or only vaguely recognized, e.g., personnel and organizational development. Artistic experience brings along creative processes of irritation that are capable of calling into question a supposedly secure self-understanding and certainties. Moreover, they are permeating an intransigence of established structures of emotions, thoughts, speech, and acting, thereby softening or even breaking down the barriers of everyday life against surprise. De-normalizing of perception – e.g., removal of context, fragmentation, recombining and modification of time modes – allows the emergence of different sights and insights, visions and understandings sometimes effectuated by an “estrangement-effect” (Brecht). Artfully or aesthetically mediated experiences and diffracting reflections help to challenge, scrutinize, and reorient established modes of perceiving reality. This altering of conventional modes makes it possible to move out and toward different frames of ideas and structural concepts or to redesign conceptual spaces. Enabled by this irritation, the gained leeway and windows of opportunities open the way to a different modelling and re-creation of formations of life-worlds and systems. Thereby, this irritation can lead to constructing other forms of interactions or “inter-passions” that are differently meaningful, especially when mediated by an explorative sense of the possible.

Exploration and Innovation Through the “Sense of the Possible” By irritating the sense of reality and breaking the habitual practices and routines of organized and managerial life-forms and systems, art and aesthetics can help develop a sense of new possibilities, particularly when old solutions are no longer effective. Artful and aesthetic experiences provide those involved with qualities of experience and processes that are typically not accessible or available in corporate or many

26

Aesthetics and Leadership

495

organizational contexts. This lack is even more given as many conventional organizations are dominated increasingly by an instrumental rationality and reductive performance principles following neoliberal regimes. By being seemingly “unreal,” art and aesthetics can awaken members of organizations to untapped potentials and contingencies, i.e., the possibility that things, encounters, actions, etc. could be otherwise, thus that realities could be different. Such a sense of awakened possibility indicates an explorative orientation and innovative potential that arises or can be rendered by artful and aesthetic processes. The latter ones are able to contribute to the development of sensory and meaningful differences and “surpluses” that go beyond added value in conventional economic sense of business as usual. With an artful and aesthetically attuned sense of possibilities, a reality-changing orientation can be attained that brings phenomena and unforeseeable emergent developments into play. The gained sense of possibilities allows phenomena to be perceived in their particular qualities, contemporariness, and differentness that are relatively independent of the monopolizing pocket effects of functionalizing and exploiting regimes. Cultivation a “sense of the possible” thus brings with it both an openness toward phenomenological peculiarity, in the sense of responsive experience to the immediacy of a situation, and an openness toward the imaginative and imaginaries for future directions. Artfully and aesthetically sensitive perceptions and imaginations are open to unknown qualities of phenomena while being able to learn from and interact with them creatively. An open and active sense of possibility facilitates not only to get out of a “realist” determined fixation. Rather, such “possibilizing” also permits bringing to mind means of accessing the inaccessible or unavailable “other.” By accepting the artful and aesthetic appearance in conjunction with the present processes of that appearance, the interplay between what and how something appears is intensified and existing reality transcended. Such sensitized sense of the possible and a capacity to create are both contributing something extraordinary in the ordinary and orderliness, something unusual in the usual, thereby producing genuine innovative realizations. While the critical “sense of the real” implies more of a political de-realizing, the imaginative, utopian “sense of the possible” moves creatively into the poetical “betweening” of the real and the “ir-real.”

Sense of Designable and “Gestalt” Complementary to the mentioned senses of the real and possible, the “sense of Gestalt(ung)” is a sense of the “shapable” or designable and doable, enacting aesthetic qualities and dimensions of and in organization and leadership. The German word “Gestaltung” offers connotation to both Gestalt (form) and Gestaltung (form giving, designing). Complementarily, this sense of the doable or agency in shifting formation is connecting to the other senses its principles of the real and the possible. Such orientation implies embracing and enacting interrelatedness: being sensitive to connecting patterns that move between redundancy and newness. At the same time, this sense is incorporating adaptability, ephemerality, and ambiguity,

496

W. Ku¨pers

when performing or improvising in concrete leadership situations, in particular in transformative practices of leadership. Transformation, understood as aesthetically responsive to the pattern that connects (Bateson 1979), guides toward co-creative emergences and “re-evolution,” integrating evolution and revolution. As co-creating respondents, leaders and followers provide something that they do not have alone, thus creating surplus answers. Accordingly, when relationships between leaders and followers are seen not only as ones of transactional calculated exchange but also as mutually responsive, a transformational practice can be realized. The aesthetic experience and process is transformative not only when new bodily states, feelings, thoughts, identities, and actions are actively developed but also as the experienced world reveals itself and acts upon one in new ways, when control is relinquished and receptivity allowed. As aesthetic transformations require active doing and receptive undergoing, both persons and their world are mutually transformed. Overall, this complementary function of a sense of “Gestalt(ung)” is important as a lost sense of the real and overemphasized sense of the possible are in danger of remaining an empty form, when no basis in or connection to materiality and what matters in a world of crisis. Situated between actual/real of a crisis-driven world in emergency and the possible/virtual (as emergence of be(com)ing), it leads “back forward” to a responsive and responsible “real-ization” that calls for a sense of shaping and “design(ing)” and prototyping of new types of proto-wise ways of living. Yes it is an affirmative, but in that not confirming firmly, thus reproducing the same, but operates subversive and avoids falling into a “practionalism” or “actionism.” Therefore, this sense and all the other senses need to be integrated into a nexus of praxis, phrónêsis, practices, and action. Bringing all the three senses together requires a dynamic integration and for example applied to unsustainable and sustainable dimensions, i.e.: • Capable of questioning unsustainable realities • Enabling of quest for sustainable possibilities • Able of “zest” of sustainable shaping/doing

Aesthetic Qualities and Dimensions of Leadership Considering the behavior of leaders from an aesthetic perspective (Brady 1986; Kersten 2008; Bouilloud and Deslandes 2015; Haden et al. 2014) involves, for example, the question of leading beautifully as part of an aesthetic of embodied leadership practice (Ladkin 2008) or as part of a creative economy and beyond (Adler 2011). Leaders perform aesthetic labor, expressing symbolic leadership. For example, the “beau geste” has been linked to critical behavior by leaders, who challenge organized orders and practices by generating various provocative effects, including gratuity, size, and surprise effects as well as impact on the common good (Bouilloud and Deslandes 2015). When leaders come to their senses, leadership can become an art (Springborg 2010). Another pattern discusses the role of leaders as artists, for example, as one of the faces of leadership (Hatch et al. 2004).

26

Aesthetics and Leadership

497

Furthermore, there are aesthetic interpretations of the art of the transformational leader and followership or the role of (neo-)charismatic and authentic leadership (Hansen et al. 2007, 549–550). On the other hand, the behavior of followers can also be seen from an aesthetic perspective. According to Hansen et al. (2007), aesthetic leadership is based on felt meaning generated from sensory perceptions and involves subjective, tacit knowledge rooted in feeling and emotion. Therefore, Hansen et al. explore how followers use aesthetic senses for assessing and judging leaders. The following lists some examples of perceived emotion-related aesthetic qualities that show their ambivalences. Both leaders and followers may experience pleasant delight or painful repulsiveness or hideousness with regard to the functioning or dysfunction of formal or informal rules. The boredom and dullness of unproductive work meetings or the empty rhetoric of symbolic management can be experienced as inauthentic, unexciting, or respectively awful. There are ambivalent perceptions and (dis-)appreciations involved during aesthetic labor (Witz et al. 2003). With regard to interpersonal relationships, there can be cynical attitudes, monstrous violence of gossip, or gruesome manipulation and hideous exploitation. The ugliness of prejudiced and unjust criticism and disgusting mobbing and intimidating or hostile bullying can be particularly hurtful. How dreadful, appalling, and humiliating is a leadership practice that – as “management by embarrassment” – criticizes employees in public? Pulling an employee up short or ridiculing a person in front of others often turns a potentially good worker into a sullen and bitter employed enemy. The blame game of scapegoating or playing favorites with work assignments and incentives can be experienced as tasteless and arouses resentment, as this can make non-favored employees feel dumped on or polarize team members into “haves” and “have-nots,” who may then carry on battling among themselves. During appraisal interviews, followers can interpret the kitsch-like manner of feedback as pretentiousness or discern the grotesqueness of hypocritical, staged praising, thus triggering feelings of contempt. The hypocrisy of leaders and followers can appear comical or tragic, being perceived as an inconsistency or a mismatch between rhetoric and deeds during staged inauthentic display. On the other hand, as part of a more fulfilling work-life, leaders, followers, and both together can realize an uplifting drive or playful flow of successful performance and experience the beauty of producing quality or creating added value for customers, resulting in an aesthetically fulfilling and authentic satisfaction, not only with the job but with life. Encountering commitment, trust, and shared pride as the result of a rewarding collaboration can be delightful. Leaders and followers can enjoy a befitting or properly enacted responsiveness or self-organized practice of distributed leadership as delicate or graceful. There can be an elegance perceived with regard to succinct and cogent presentations or parsimonious briefings. New ideas and creative suggestions leading to innovative and refining organizational developments can be recognized as genuine. Furthermore, there can be artistry and even sublimity experienced during the tackling of demanding challenges or the solving of seemingly unsolvable problems. These examples could be extended with further aesthetically relevant feelings and qualities such as fear, anger, shame, guilt, sadness or interest, surprise, and curiosity.

498

W. Ku¨pers

By perceiving the processes of organizing, leading, and following as sensitive and energetic and by accessing and evaluating these processes, organizational members respond aesthetically and can make ongoing aesthetical interpretations and judgments about them (Küpers 2002). Importantly, being embodied in temporal, non-verbal, or lingual forms, all of these rich, often ambiguous experiential qualities imply a potential transformation. Serving as a productive irritant, offering imaginative, utopian, and pragmatic dimensions and potentials, aesthetic experiences and processes mediate a genuinely transformational leadership practice and transformed understanding of leadership. Aesthetic qualities and dimensions can be linked to components of transformational leader- and followership (Küpers 2011) as listed in the following: • Idealized Influence – or the art of mutual auratic charisma – is referring to the ability and power to exert mutual influence, practicing respect, trust commitment, and high moral standards. • Inspirational motivation or the art of enthusiasm is offering reciprocal challenges and processes of sense-giving and making, developing common visions, and determining attractive goals as well as addressing higher-order needs. • Intellectual stimulation or the art of new creative perspectives is providing new ideas and different ways to tackle old problems. Developing creativity and interests (e.g., curiosity) and utilizing and assimilating emotions together. • Individualized consideration or the art of regarding the unique is recognizing individual differences concerning the requirements for encouragement. By co-coaching and co-counselling, emotional needs and responsibility are supported. Overall, aesthetic leadership can be understood as an effort by the leader to affect his/her followers in artful ways or as an effort to create aesthetic meaning and effects in and for the organization as well as its members and stakeholders. Envisioning, imagining, and symbolic performing and creative, improvising leadership and forms of valuing experimental processes have been discussed as examples for fields of aesthetic processes and practices of leadership that cannot be discussed here (e.g., Küpers 2018).

The Dark Side and Limitations of Aesthetic Leadership While considering all the outlined potentials, one also has to see the limitations, ambivalences, and problems of art and aesthetics in the context of leadership and aesthetic leadership itself. One limitation lies in the character of the artistic processes themselves: Artistry can be disruptive, deconstructive, deceptive, delusional, fabricating, and just plain boring or wrong. Furthermore, a problem with art and aesthetic processes is that they are often idiosyncratic and evanescent and tend to be non-calculative and unpredictable, which makes it difficult for them to be compatible with regimes in current organizations.

26

Aesthetics and Leadership

499

And this is also why leaders can block or foreclose art-related and aesthetic processes in organizations and the creative actions (genuine creativity) proposed by their subordinates. Following strong vested interests, reorientations toward integrating more aesthetic processes threaten their status and power positions. Moreover, they will be blamed if practices, strategies, and goals prove wrong. Thus, retaining their favored positions and approved practices, they block changes toward more artistic processes. Furthermore, in addition to the aforementioned innovative dimensions, art can also serve conservative interests. It can be used confirmingly in an affirmative way for validating and reinforcing already practiced actions, beliefs, and events. For example, Meisiek and Barry (2018) showed that instead of seeking and facilitating a collaborative sweet spot, the sense-giving practice by a leader or manager of interpreting situations and communicating his or her sense to subordinates to reduce uncertainty and ambiguity that allows the organization to adapt better and faster can lead to dominating the analogically mediated inquiry process, derailing the arts-based initiative, and having the stakeholders distance themselves from the process and aims. An aestheticization occupied with a functional appropriation can manipulate the means or replace genuine or authentic leadership. Aesthetic leadership is in danger of being instrumentalized or of being instrumentalizing, whereby aesthetics (qualities, processes, and events) are used as a manipulative tool camouflaged as an aesthetic outlet for the benefit of economic revenue or for organizing ideologies with vested interests. This would then be a part of the objectification and appropriation of art and aesthetics by the new spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, 37) and aesthetic leadership in the context of (trans-)artistic capitalism (Lipovetsky and Serroy 2013) or aesthetic capitalism (Böhme 2017), whereby creativity becomes a disposition related to social aestheticization (Reckwitz 2017). With an instrumentalist orientation, for example, the “atmosphere can be considered as a ‘controllable’ that managers can ‘manipulate’, as a tool to enhance the organizational performance” (Heide et al. 2009, 306). Considering the danger of being appropriated for economic and political gains, it remains important to consider ideological and control linkages between the ethics regarding wisdom and aesthetics or the anaesthetizing a(i)esthetic craving (of goodness) in organizations (Kersten 2008). One important constraint and systematic limitation of enacting a transformative aesthetic leadership is the dominating rationalistic objectifying forms and their “deformations” in conventional approaches and practices. The given purpose-driven, rational orientation in current organization and leadership research and practice stresses the specific understanding of form. These forms that still follow functions are often guided by neo-classical principles (Küpers 2009) and what Ropo et al. (2002) call the “beauty of geometry.” Associated with the ideals of standardization, formalization, and structure, this geometric orientation reflects Apollonian values such as harmony and the tendency toward formal coherence of parts. Correspondingly, formulaic, power-pointed presentations of strategies, policies, or projects are illustrated as charts, boxes, and formal graphics. As these geometrical forms abstract from embodied, emotional, and social qualities, they are habitually manifesting the need to measure and the will to control

500

W. Ku¨pers

in a system of standing order, hierarchical dominance, and top-down utilitarian rationality. Many conventional organizational and management processes are driven by this formal, cognitive, and objectifying orientation; they impose forms on materiality and members who are seen as passive objects to be observed, “aligned,” and assessed with economic criteria. This underlying geometrical form orientation has severe implications for the status of bodies and embodiment in organizing and leading in general and their aesthetic constraint in particular. Treating them as docile objects or resources to be used and controlled, such mainstream theorizing and practicing has no access to understanding the “living body” and its beauty (Ropo et al. 2002, 29), thus missing the aesthetically transformational potentials and senses of the possible.

Aesthetic Leadership and (Aesth-)Ethics and Wisdom One important aspect also for responding to the dark sides is the integrative connecting of aesthetic leadership to ethics and practical wisdom. Aesthetic leadership may be related to a moral orientation, especially the values of being just, fair, and truthful. With these qualities, aesthetic leadership can encourage employees to work together for the greater good (Katz-Buonincontro 2011). Bounded by a strong sense of ethics and morality, such aesthetic leadership focuses on building a positive work environment (Mannix et al. 2015b), which will in turn improve the morale of employees (Singh 2017). However, practicing aesthetic leadership in a concrete practice, such as clinical nursing, may imply “Grace under fire” (Mannix et al. 2015). Connecting aesthetics in general and aesthetic leadership in particular to wisdom is an old and complex nexus. One way of approaching this nexus is to understand that practical wisdom (phrónêsis) is developed, cultivated, and enacted through aesthetic and artful practices. Accordingly, an a(i)esthetic critical phrónêsis can be realized through specific responsive-responsible forms of poiêsis (Küpers 2013a, b). Aesthetically relevant, perceptive, sense-based, social, and creative acts and artistic processes and practices are proto-wise phrónêtic capacities. These serve to approach particular contingent situations and to process experiential knowing, complex deliberation, and articulating judgments. In particular, the development and exercise of wisdom involves an astute perception of (moral) situations, filtered through social interaction and imagination (Noel 1999) or the projection of imaginative interpretation of current realities into new possibilities. Phrónêsis requires and relates not only to perception and perspicacity but also to artful apperception. The latter capacity refers to the ability to relate new experiences to previous experiences, in other words, to recognize and reflect patterns in situations that facilitate understanding and resolution and to frame or reframe them emotionally. Both moral perceptions and moral imaginations of leadership require aesthetic and artful capabilities to sense and make sense of situations and alternatives beyond

26

Aesthetics and Leadership

501

what is available to be known with certainty or what is experienced as “reality” (Abowitz 2007, 288). Based on heightening awareness, enlivening aesthetic sensibilities provide and mediate somatic engagements and opportunities for individuals and collectives to sense and see “more” or differently. This implies envisioning envision more intensively, perceptively, and intersubjectively and to respond correspondingly. Learning from artists and through artistic practices and aesthetic experiences, such as staying with the senses (Springborg 2010), engaged detachment, and imaginative free play, makes it possible to develop “proto-wise” moral sensitivities for more sustainable and ethical organizations and leadership (Ladkin 2011). In poiêtic phrónêsis, the embodied aesthetics, feelings, knowledge, and judgment of leadership practices hold together and inform each other. It is through aesthetically refined embodied experiences, situational awareness, and bodily mediated passions and emotional capabilities of leaders and followers that intuition, mindfulness, and creative enactments of experimenting and amplifying experiences can be cultivated, all of which are required for realizing practical wisdom. Aesthetic phrónêsis also involves leaders and followers being open to further experience rather than resting content once he or she has achieved a satisfactory set of procedures. In this way, they can process their affective, perceiving, and responsive bodies and pathic, ecstatic, and emotional fleshly embodiments as media for becoming beautifully wise. An aesthetic phrónêsis as a social leadership practice interplays with means and ends in themselves, e.g., using means for creating narrative meaning (social creativity) that includes attention and recognition of others and otherness as well as social inclusivity as an end. “Phrónêsis is poetic in that it implies at its very core the endless re-creation of concrete social relations” (Wall 2003, 337), by involving the self’s dialectical capacity for “creating or innovating ever more responsively inclusive social meaning” (Wall 2003, 334). Such a view is analogous to art and artisanship not only in that it is practically wise in many respects as a poet but also in that poetic practical wisdom has an end other than itself and generates newly re(con)figured narrative relations. Importantly, these narrative relationships are qualified as advancing a “poetics of possibility” in action toward greater inclusivity and social participation on the basis of otherwise diverse and unrelated “materials,” that is, of narrative otherness. One challenge for future aesthetic and wiser leadership is to imaginatively and poetically create different and more inclusive narratives of life. Such more integrative narrating also engages with issues of power and conflicts as well as ambiguities, dilemmas, and paradoxes, as they appear in tragic differences and (moral) incommensurability in attempts to accomplish the common good. A(i)esthetic practices of leadership mediate or create organizational life-worlds that are more wisely recognized as complex, colorful, and vivacious but also as uncertain, questionable, and indeterminate and as being manifest in “negative capabilities” sensu Keats.

502

W. Ku¨pers

Implications Practical Implications As we have seen, art and aesthetic processes can beneficially contribute to the practice of leaders. But how can we through artistry practically enhance organizational and leadership aesthetic capacities to mediate or support its actualization? To practice artistic and aesthetic forms of leadership requires encouraging and fostering of specific attitudes and conditions. Part of these latter ones are orientations toward valuing creativity and risk-taking between leeway and limits, practicing operational flexibility, and tolerating ambiguity and uncertainty. Of course, there are no readymade recipes for artful and aesthetic leadership. However, leaders and leadership can be facilitators of artful and aesthetic processes and their creative and transformational potential in organizations. For this to happen, it will be essential to integrate art and aesthetics into leadership education and development (see for a recent mapping, e.g., Carroll and Smolović 2018). For further implications in relation to “art and leadership education and development,” see ▶ Chap. 22, “The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action,” by Ladkin in this handbook.

Theoretical and Methodological Implications: “ScholARTistry” The outlined ideas of embodied artful aesthetic leadership have various theoretical and methodological implications (Küpers 2015). Phenomenology can bring researchers in closer touch with life-worldly practicing leadership and its dynamic interactions while ascertaining the heterogeneous dimensions involved. As differentiated reminders of the life-worldly leadership design practice’s multifaceted dimensionalities, a phenomenology of embodied inter-practicing is likely to serve as a helpful antidote to reductionist or reifying approaches or one-sided analytical-rational methods. In particular, the post-Cartesian Merleau-Pontyian phenomenology and relational ontology (Merleau-Ponty 1995, 2012) contributes to the radically reflexive reworking of subject-object distinctions with their knowledge problematics. To further approach and interpret bodies and embodiment in relation to leadership design in an integral way, phenomenological research needs to become a more multi, inter-, and trans-disciplinary endeavor. As such, it is called to open up to using approaches and findings from or collaborating with other disciplines, such as social sciences and humanities, as well as natural sciences. Taking research itself as a form of embodied organizing and relational practice, cross-disciplinary bridging helps show the significance of bodily affection and various embodied issues, processes, and realities as entangled. However, being restricted to direct evident experience from a first-person perspective, the classical phenomenological approach needs to be extended and integrally advanced. Exploring the embodiment of organizing and inter-practicing requires an integral epistemology and methodological pluralism. Such a pluralistic approach requires

26

Aesthetics and Leadership

503

considering first-, second-, and third-person perspectives in singular or plural forms. This implies each of their specific, inherent methodologies or modes of inquiries as well as their complex interplay (Küpers and Weibler 2008). Following an integral methodological pluralism and epistemology, a more integral phenomenological research not only provides a shared language for addressing the basic patterns and problems of leadership design practices but can also be used as a guideline that is careful not to reduce, oversimplify, isolate, or fragment the aspired understanding and interpretation. Offering multidimensional perspectives and developmental orientations, an integral orientation is capable of illuminating blind spots, reductionistic pictures of reality, and mistaken or only partially true assumptions. Integral modelling helps generate sensitivity to contextual factors and innovative conceptual flexibility and leverages studying embodied leadership design to develop empirically supported new ideas and theories through in-depth and longitudinal explorations. Overall, phenomenologically mediated carnal leadership studies embrace a more sensorial and “fleshlier” stance in relation to bodies of all its members and the mediating embodiment at work as part of organizational everyday worlds. Developing such embodied research requires shifting from a theorizing about or of bodies, in a disembodied, objectifying, or subjectifying way, toward a mode of inquiry that is sensing and making sense while thinking from and with lived bodies and processual embodiment. Accordingly, future embodied phenomenologyinformed organizational research is invited to explore bodily mediated spatial, temporal, and cultural realities and transitory, often tacit experiences best by using a sensually oriented methodology and aesthetic ethnographies and interpretations (Warren 2008; Stoller 1997). Research is “fully alive and creative when wide-eyed and involved, when it sees, touches, hears, tastes, and feels” (Sandelands and Srivatsan 1993, 19), thus when it is using and refining embodied sensory faculties. Part of the emerging field of embodied research practice that can be related to studying artful leadership design is that of arts-based research (McNiff 2008). Arts-oriented research uses artistic processes and expressions in all of the different forms and media of the arts as a way of understanding and examining experience by both researchers and the people and phenomena involved in their studies. In Method Meets Art (Leavy 2009), researchers can include experimenting with performative, visual, musical, poetic, and narrative forms of inquiry or other forms of expression and audio-visual possibilities, such as image elicitation, photos, sounds, videos, scenes, stories, etc. Artful, inquiring researchers can become involved in creating new understandings by placing their issues, forms, and contents of study into aesthetic modes and artistic frames as well as alternative forms of gathering, interpretations, and expressions. Moreover, taking art practice itself as research supports that creative inquiry employed by artists can be a form of research (Sullivan 2005). Investigating artistic inquiry and their use of senses and imagination in and for creating may inspire social scientists to develop a community of artist researchers (Cole and Knowles 2008). In much the same way that artists do, responsive leadership researchers would then, for example, relate to and experiment with uncertainty, ambiguity, novelty, and complexity in various ways to open up and

504

W. Ku¨pers

reveal alternative possibilities of knowing. However, the arts-based approach also calls for reflecting the persistent conflicts and tensions in arts-oriented research (Eisner 2008). Although arts-informed research runs counter to more conventional research endeavors with their more linear, sequential, and compartmentalized forms and distancing of the researcher and participants, the challenge will be to keep an internal consistency, coherence, and communicability as well as to advance some kind of generative patterned insights and knowledge that reflects the multidimensional, complex, dynamic, intersubjective, and multi-contextual nature of experiences and realities in relation to leadership design(ing). Finally, the communication of research findings would also dare find more aesthetic forms such as experimental writing (Neilsen 2001), blurring the boundaries between science and art (Glesne 1997). Further forms of research along those spiralling lines outlined here can contribute to becoming sensible and sense-able about senses and sensations (Mills and Mills 2006) in a way that “makes sense.” Furthermore, research that incorporates art employs aesthetic judgment and blurs discipline boundaries, thus enabling an interplay of form and content and building layers and interconnection. Such orientation helps go beyond the confines of discursive communication to deliver new insights, findings, meanings, and values. Stimulated by art (Cole et al. 2004), old and new forms of research can inform, perform, reform, and transform what is thought, felt, and known about the world and the embodied beings within it. This kind of research requires embodied selfawareness, which involves researchers probing their own embodied (and others’) responses and including reflexive embodied empathy (Finlay 2005). In this sense, semi-guided and organic arts-based methods are reflective but experience-near methods of inquiry (Estrella and Forinash 2007, 382). Artful, inquiring researchers can become involved in creating new understandings by placing their issues, forms, and contents of study into aesthetic modes and artistic frames as well as alternative forms of gathering, interpretation, and expression, such as images, photos, stories, scenes, sounds, etc. Such approaches offer media that allow research to access and reveal that which would otherwise remain unseen or be silenced (Barone 2000). Investigating artistic inquiry and their use of senses and imagination in and for creating may inspire social scientists to develop a community of artist researchers (Cole and Knowles 2008) who explore “context(ure)s” and phenomena differently. In much the same way that artists do, responsive organizational researchers would then, for example, relate to and experiment with uncertainty, ambiguity, novelty, and complexity in ways to open up and reveal “alternative” possibilities of knowing, relating, and supporting more “response-able” practice developments. There remain many open questions and quests for research on the nexus of art/aesthetics and leadership as follows: What roles do aesthetic considerations play in present and future forms of leading and following? Are some organizations and leadership practices more artful and beautiful than others and, if so, why? Do aesthetically pleasing organizational and leadership processes lead to more successful or more sustainable organizations and stakeholder relationships? Is it possible to “determine” or specify conditions or necessary and sufficient “factors” that enable or hinder organizations and leadership in acting aesthetically?

26

Aesthetics and Leadership

505

One future avenue in our digital age would be to examine the role and implications of aesthetic (and) leadership in virtual cyber-space. In particular, how might the perspective of embodied, sensuous, aesthetic leadership enrich our understanding of digital and virtual work and e-leadership or of working in and with virtual teams?

Cross-References ▶ State of the Art on Aesthetics and Leadership ▶ The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action

References Abowitz KK (2007) Moral perception through aesthetics: Engaging imaginations in educational ethics. Journal of Teacher Education 58(4):287–298 Adler N (2011) Leading beautifully: the creative economy and beyond. J Manag Inq 20(3):208–221 Barone T (2000) Aesthetics, politics, and educational inquiry. Peter Lang, New York Barry D, Meisiek S (2010) The art of leadership and its fine art shadow. Leadership 6(2):331–349 Bateson G (1979) Mind and nature. A necessary unity. Dutton, New York Böhme G (2017) Critique of aesthetic capitalism. Mimesis, Milan Boltanski L, Chiapello E (2005) The new spirit of capitalism (trans: Elliott G). Verso, London/New York Bouilloud J, Deslandes G (2015) The aesthetics of leadership: Beau Geste as critical behaviour. Organ Stud 36(8):1095–1114 Brady FN (1986) Aesthetics components of management ethics. Acad Manag Rev 11(2):337–344 Carroll B, Smolović J (2018) Mapping the aesthetics of leadership development through participant perspectives. Manag Learn 49(2):187–203 Cole A, Knowles JG (2008) Making space, growing fire: creating a community of artist researchers. In: Samaras AP, Beck C, Freese AR, Kosnic C (eds) Learning communities in practice. Springer, New York Cole AL, Neilsen L, Knowles JG, Luciani T (eds) (2004) Provoked by art: theorizing arts-informed research. Backalong Books, Halifax/Toronto Eisner E (2008) Persistent tensions in art based research. In: Cahnmann M, Siegesmund R (eds) Arts-based research in education: foundations for practice. Routledge, New York, pp 16–27 Estrella K, Forinash M (2007) Narrative inquiry and arts-based inquiry: multinarrative perspectives. J Humanist Psychol 47(3):376–383 Finlay L (2005) Reflexive embodied empathy: a phenomenology of participant-researcher intersubjectivity. Humanist Psychol 33(4):271–292 Glesne C (1997) That rare feeling: re-presenting research through poetic transcription. Qual Inq 3:202–222 Haden SP, Diaz S, Humphreys JH, Hayek M (2014) Leading aesthetically: insights from the founders of the San Antonio Conservation Society. J Appl Manage Entrep 19(2):3 Hansen H, Ropo A, Sauer E (2007) Aesthetic leadership. Leadersh Q 18(6):544–560 Hatch MJ, Kostera M, Kozminski AK (2004) The three faces of leadership: manager, artist, priest. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford Heide M, Lærdal K, Kjell Grønhaug K (2009) Atmosphere as a tool for enhancing organizational performance: an exploratory study form the hospitality industry. Eur J Mark 43(3/4):305–319 Katz-Buonincontro J (2011) How might aesthetic knowing relate to leadership? A review of the literature. Int J Educ Arts 12(SI 1.3):1–18

506

W. Ku¨pers

Kersten A (2008) When craving goodness becomes bad: a critical conception of ethics and aesthetics in organizations. Cult Organ 15(2):187–202 Knowles JG, Cole AL, Promislow S (2007) Creating scholartistry: imagining the arts-informed thesis or dissertation. Arts-informed inquiry series, vol 4. Backalong, Halifax/Toronto Küpers W (2002) Phenomenology of Aesthetic Organising – Ways towards Aesthetically Responsive Organisations, Journal Consumption, Markets and Cultures 5(1):31–68 Küpers W (2009) Neo-classicism and the re-evolutionary trans-+-formation of organisations, aesthesis. Int J Art Aesthet Manage Org Life 3(1):38–59 Küpers W (2011) Trans-+-form – leader- and followership as an embodied, emotional and aesthetic practice for creative transformation in organisations. Leadersh Org Dev J 32(1):20–40 Küpers W (2013a) The sense-makings of the senses – perspectives on embodied aisthesis and aesthetics in organising and organisations. In: King I, Vickery J (eds) Experiencing organisations – new aesthetic perspectives, series: management, policy and education. Libri, Oxfordshire, pp 33–56 Küpers W (2013b) The art of practical wisdom ~ phenomenology of an embodied, wise interpractice in organisation and leadership. In: Küpers W, Pauleen D (eds) A handbook of practical wisdom. Leadership, organization and integral business practice. Ashgate Gower, London, pp 19–45 Küpers W (2015) Phenomenology of the embodied organization – the contribution of MerleauPonty for organisation studies and practice. Palgrave Macmillan, London Küpers W (2018) States-of-the-arts in organization and leadership practices that make sense – a poly-logue in three parts: part II status of art and aesthetics in organization and leadership. Org Aesthet 7(1):46–66 Küpers W, Weibler J (2008) Inter-leadership – why and how to think leader- and followership integrally. Leadership 4(4):443–447 Ladkin D (2008) Leading beautifully: how mastery, congruence and purpose create the aesthetic of embodied leadership practice. Leadersh Q 19(1):31–41 Ladkin D (2011) The art of ‘perceiving correctly’: what artists can teach us about moral perception. Tamara – J Crit Org Inq 9(3–4):91–101 Leavy P (2009) Method meets art: arts-based research practice. Guilford Press, New York Lipovetsky G, Serroy J (2013) L’estethisation du monde. Vivre a l’age du capitalisme artiste. Editura Gallimard, Paris Mannix J, Wilkes L, Daly J (2015) Aesthetic Leadership: Its Place in the Clinical Nursing World, Issues in Mental Health Nursing 36(5)357–361 Mannix J, Wilkes L, Daly J (2015b) Grace under fire: Aesthetic leadership in clinical nursing, Journal of Clinical Nursing 24:2649–2658 McNiff S (2008) Art-based research & the spectrum of possibilities. In: Knowles JG, Cole AL (eds) Handbook of the arts in qualitative research: perspectives, methodologies, examples, and issues. SAGE, Thousand Oaks, pp 29–40 Meisiek S, Barry D (2018) Finding the sweet spot between art and business in analogically mediated inquiry. J Bus Res 85:476–483 Merleau-Ponty M (1995) The visible and the invisible. Northwestern, Evanston Merleau-Ponty M (2012) Phenomenology of perception. Routledge, London Mills A J, Mills J (2006) Being Sensable about Sensation, Culture and Organization 12 12(3):199–206 Neilsen L, Cole A L, Knowles J G (Eds) (2001). The Art of Writing Inquiry. Halifax, NS: Backalong Books Noel J (1999) Phronesis and phantasia: teaching with wisdom and imagination. J Philos Educ 33(2):277–287 Reckwitz A (2017) The invention of creativity. On the process of social aestheticisation. Polity, Cambridge Ropo A, Parviainen J, Koivunen N (2002) Aesthetics in leadership. From absent bodies to social bodily presence. In: Parry KW, Meindl JR (eds) Grounding leadership theory and research: issues and perspectives. Information Age, Greenwich, pp 21–38

26

Aesthetics and Leadership

507

Sandelands E, Srivatsan V (1993) The problem of experience in the study of organizations. Organ Stud 14(January):1–22 Singh A (2017) How aesthetic leadership style might related to employee moral at workplace? An analytic study. Asia Pac J Res I(LV) Springborg C (2010) Leadership as art: leaders coming to their senses. Leadership 6(3):243–258 Stoller P (1997) Sensuous scholarship. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia Sullivan G (2005) Art practice as research: inquiry in the visual arts. SAGE, Thousand Oaks Wall J (2003) Phrónêsis, poetics, and moral creativity. Ethical Theory Moral Pract 6(3):317–341 Warren S (2008) Empirical challenges in organizational aesthetics research: towards a sensual methodology. Organ Stud 19(4):559–580 Witz A, Warhurst C, Nickson D (2003) The labour of aesthetics and the aesthetics of organization. Organization 10(1):33–54

Regionally Speaking: Cultural Leadership and Capacity Building in the Asia Pacific Region

27

Caitlin Byrne and Ruth Bereson

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Narrative Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Narrative Themes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reflecting on the Local and Personal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reflecting on the National . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reflecting on the Regional . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Multi-frame View of Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leadership in the Political Frame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leadership in the Structural Frame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leadership in the Social Frame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leadership in the Symbolic Frame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Implications of the Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

510 513 515 515 517 521 522 522 523 524 524 525 526 527 527

Abstract

The arts and cultural sectors are increasingly seen as holding out potential for new models of leaders and leadership. The discipline of leadership has thus become alive to the notion of drawing upon and learning from arts-based methodologies to improve practice and development. However, there remains a paucity of emphasis on leadership from and within the arts. This chapter provides an empirical account of how that can take place.

C. Byrne (*) Griffith University, Nathan, QLD, Australia e-mail: c.byrne@griffith.edu.au R. Bereson Griffith University, Mount Gravatt, QLD, Australia e-mail: r.bereson@griffith.edu.au © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_37

509

510

C. Byrne and R. Bereson

Using a narrative inquiry approach, the chapter explores the journey of a select cohort of arts practitioners from Southeast Asia and shows an emerging rich framework for leadership capacity building. In commenting on how the study evolved, the chapter provides insight into gaps in the theory and practice of leadership development within the arts. Keywords

Arts practice · Leadership · Narrative enquiry

Introduction Theories and practice of leadership are in need of imaginative restructuring if they are to deal with the complex events and challenges of today’s world. Forms of leadership that emphasize the aesthetic dimension – that is, how individuals might experience the world as a counterpoint to rational or formulaic processes – are likely to play a significant role. Furthermore, understanding the experience of leadership not just within an organizational context but within national and regional contexts is increasingly relevant to the new realities of a dynamic, transnational world. These challenges are particularly pertinent to the contemporary “arts practitioner,” often adept and increasingly expected to cross boundaries, operate within multiple domains, and engage diverse audiences in the quest for making meaning. In Arts Management studies this is described as an “Aesthetic Contract” (Pick 2009). The learnings drawn from arts practice and practitioners are of interest to contemporary leadership studies. Applying a narrative inquiry approach, we explore the journey of a select cohort of arts practitioners from Southeast Asia to understand their individual and collective experiences across multiple domains.1 What emerges is a rich framework for leadership capacity building; in which the participants became owners of the thematic journey, embodiments of their practice and narrators of their own stories, at a confluence of cultural and political discourse. It is a self-reflexive framework, which we hope might give rise to what Ladkin (▶ Chap. 22, “The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action”) calls “a different kind of wisdom, one that appreciates context, one that understands human engagement as something that cannot always be navigated with neat company policies.” The arts and cultural sectors are increasingly seen as holding out potential for new models of leaders and leadership (Asbjörnson 2007; Sutherland 2012). There is 1 The study at the center of this chapter, also known as Regionally Speaking is a unique model of engagement and capacity-building designed, developed, and led by Griffith University Professors Ruth Bereson (Dean Academic, Arts Education and Law Group) and Caitlin Byrne (Director, Griffith Asia Institute). Created in 2016 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the project focuses on building the critical capacity and connections of emerging arts practitioners from ASEAN to deepen regional understanding and connections, promote co-operative engagement, and strengthen their collective voice as cultural advocates and leaders across the region.

27

Regionally Speaking: Cultural Leadership and Capacity Building in the Asia. . .

511

a natural synergy between leadership and the arts as both seek to inspire, to bring people together, to reframe and change the way people think, and to invent possibilities not previously imagined (Asbjörnson 2007, p. 22). Business management and leadership studies have become increasingly aware of the synergies, prompted in part by what Sutherland (2012, p. 25) describes as “a growing disenchantment with the traditional (rational, instrumental, economically dominated, realist oriented and ‘objectively analytical) means of practice and development.” The resultant turn toward “self-reflexive scrutiny” of leadership practice, particularly within executive education circles has spurred an interest in the need to engage arts-based methodologies within leadership education (Koivunen 2003; Beuchel and Antunes 2007; Garvin 2007; Houde 2007; Kets de Vries and Korotov 2007). As Asbjörnson (2007, p. 23) observes: many personal and professional development programs emphasise the science of leadership. But the human aspect of leadership – the ability to create and sustain meaningful connections with an audience – is what really provides the foundation for effective leadership.

Ladkin and Taylor (2010) make a similar point: . . .we live in a complex world which cannot be fully understood solely by reference to scientific forms of logic and sense-making. The arts, and art-based practices, provide different ways of both describing and relating to that complexity, thereby offering novel ways of responding.

The discipline of leadership has thus become alive to the notion of drawing upon and learning from arts-based methodologies to improve practice and development. A “developing community of research and literature that situates arts-based methodologies as experiential learning to improve participants’ abilities in responsibly navigating the complexities of contemporary organisational contexts” has emerged alongside this emerging awareness (Sutherland 2012, p. 26; Ladkin 2010; Koivunen 2003). While there is an emerging emphasis on the role of the arts in improving leadership practice, there remains a paucity of emphasis on leadership from and within the arts. The underpinning narratives, relationships, and networks that are inherent to the arts and cultural sectors are not necessarily harnessed or developed beyond their immediate parameters. Yet little, if any, attention is paid to the leadership role or capacity of those practitioners – the artists, arts managers, producers, curators, and critics – who direct the sector. Indeed, the general view persists, particularly from those outside the sector, that the role of the arts practitioners is simply to attract and enthuse audiences. While there is useful discussion of organizational leadership relevant to arts bodies and institutions, in our view this is insufficient to meet the demands being placed on the arts and cultural sectors in a global policy context. The aim of this study is to explore gaps in the theory and practice of leadership development within the arts. It seeks to identify a new model for both studying and building leadership capacity through narrative inquiry. In the study, narrative inquiry

512

C. Byrne and R. Bereson

provided the primary tool for engaging the aesthetic dimension. Asking the participants to consider their journey in the arts from the personal or local, the national and regional views, allowed us to understand the leadership experience and capacity of arts practitioners from different perspectives. At the same time, the narrative process enabled a self-reflexive journey that fostered and developed the leadership capacity of the participants and offered some potential for strengthening their collective voice. This chapter centers on the journey of a study which involved participants from Southeast Asia, conducted across several workshops. It began as a mapping exercise, the original intent of which was to map the cultural profile of ASEAN. But it became clear to us as researchers, particularly as we engaged in conversation with our participants that there was a far more textured story to uncover. While we were originally focused on the role and relevance of arts and culture in engaging diverse nations across a region, it became apparent over time that the leadership capacity of the individual practitioners shaping and driving cultural and artistic practice was of central importance. Our research team was keen to understand the nature of this capacity and how it might be developed in a way that offered a best fit for the wider role and responsibility of arts and culture in effecting global policy impact. We had encountered a problem that Daigle (2016, p. 26) aptly captures when she notes, “Time after time, their individual perspectives, backstories, and vibrancies refused to map onto traditional scientific notions of data or results.” A cultural mapping exercise, or the plotting of data points on a map, could not reveal the cultural inflections or textures that we hoped to uncover. We then turned to narrative inquiry as our preferred method and leadership capacity as the focus. The geographic context of this study is of significance. Southeast Asia is a region marked by deep diversity and dynamism, reflected by almost every measure, including geography, biodiversity, language, political organization, economies, and religious beliefs. One might argue that leadership plays an essential role in maintaining stability and order within and between communities and nations of the region. This was a point we were keen to explore. Secondly, Southeast Asia’s regional institution, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), has placed significant emphasis on the role of arts and culture as a mechanism for regional order and integration. This is most evident through the establishment of ASEAN’s vision for a sociocultural community, and more recently through the launch of its Strategic Plan for Culture and the Arts (ASEAN Secretariat 2016a).2 Having celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2017, ASEAN offered, prima-facie, a relevant yet underexplored aspiration to develop leadership through arts and culture. The connection between individual leadership and regional institution building offered a compelling model for interrogation.

2

The ASEAN Strategic Plan for Culture and the Arts 2016–2025 identifies its vision as building, “an ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community that engages and benefits the people and is inclusive, sustainable, resilient and dynamic.”

27

Regionally Speaking: Cultural Leadership and Capacity Building in the Asia. . .

513

It is worth noting from the outset that the study of aesthetics reflects ensuring Western philosophical traditions and frames of reference (Beardsley 1991; Guillet de Monthoux 2004; Ladkin 2018). We recognize that this raises important questions about our own approach to the research, and whether such Western traditions are appropriate frames of reference when exploring non-Western contexts. We are sensitive in particular to claims of colonialist tendencies that might arise (Blocker 2001). In responding to such claims we note that this chapter is neither a study of the philosophy of aesthetics nor a comparative study of the tradition of aesthetics as constructed across Western and non-Western contexts. A further tension arises in the range of ways that the aesthetic is understood and applied, including across various business management disciplines. We lean toward a more pragmatic understanding of the aesthetic as “a way of knowing,” whereby “attending to one’s own experience and sense of the situation becomes paramount” (Ladkin 2018, p. 34; see also Bereson and Guillet de Monthoux 2017). The chapter is organized as follows. It begins with review of narrative inquiry as a tool for the qualitative study of leadership, noting its interdisciplinary relevance. The second section hones in on the common themes to emerge through participant narratives. It sheds light onto the core challenges each of the participating practitioners face as individuals within their own sector and national boundaries, and collectively within the regional construct of ASEAN, thus enabling “thick description” narrative to emerge. The third section then seeks to understand the leadership capacity of these participants as active practitioners and representatives of the Southeast Asian arts sector. Here we draw on Bolman and Deal’s (2003) well-established multi-frame leadership approach as the basis for analysis. Mapping the narrative themes against the four adapted frames of leadership: (i) political; (ii) structural; (iii) social; and (iv) symbolic reveals a more complex leadership role for arts practitioners than might have otherwise been recognized. Finally, the chapter explores the implications for leadership from the arts, and development of leadership capacity within the arts. While findings point to an intuitive capacity for arts practitioners to play a more significant leadership role in today’s complex environment, they also suggest that there appear to be fundamental gaps in leadership thinking, particularly when it comes to engaging beyond one’s self and sector through the political leadership frame. Nonetheless, the shared process of self-reflexive exploration of one’s own journey through narrative inquiry offers a pathway for fostering individual and collective leadership that holds relevance for the sector, the community, and the wider region.

Narrative Inquiry Narrative inquiry or “the study of the ways humans experience the world” (Connelly and Clandinin 1990) offered particular appeal for this research, and evokes the kind of critical reflexivity that is central to aesthetic understanding (Ladkin 2018, p. 44). As social beings, we find meaning and make sense of our own lives and the world we

514

C. Byrne and R. Bereson

live in through the stories people use, tell, and even live (Bruner 1986; 2004; Giddens 1991; McMullen and Braithwaite 2013). The fact that narrative inquiry has at its core a focus on the study of experience, as it is lived (McMullen and Braithwaite 2013), holds relevance to a wide range of disciplines from anthropology to cultural studies to communication to international relations and diplomacy (Mitchell 1981; Maynes et al. 2008; Daigle 2016). It is a form of inquiry that is familiar to the study of organizational leadership (Jackson and Parry 2018; Komolthiti 2016; Kempster and Stewart 2010; Fleming 2001). But it is less familiar to the study of leadership in a global policy context. Megan Daigle (2016, p. 26) makes this point when she notes that “storytelling presents a challenge to traditional ways of writing, thinking and knowing in the world of international politics.” Yet, it is an important challenge – particularly in a world where issues of representation, cultural and linguistic misunderstanding, reciprocity, and power relations loom large. Daigle observes, in addressing this challenge narrative “facilitates an understanding of the way that the international acts at the level of individual lives and bodies—and vice versa.” Qualitative narrative inquiry that allowed participants to write their own narrative addressing their journey through the arts from an individual, national, and regional perspective was pursued. We applied an auto-ethnographic approach whereby participants authored their own story. By engaging with “the storying experience” of ASEAN arts practitioners, we sought to explore and illuminate the perspective of these individuals, all of whom are engaged in artistic and cultural practice in their nation, the region, and the wider world. As researchers, our role was to ensure that the voices from within the arts and culture sectors of the ASEAN region were heard and to determine whether there is a commonality of discourse. We did not presume to change those individual voices or stories, but to allow them to stand in their original form. However, we were also keen to reveal the collective experience to emerge from their multiple voices. The contents of the narratives were analyzed to form a view of the individual and collective perspectives of this group. We sought to identify, understand, and perhaps interpret the common themes and to map these themes against frames of leadership to reveal the aspirations and inherent weaknesses in the leadership capacity of our group. In doing so, we hoped to bring greater understanding and visibility to the place and relevance of the arts and cultural sectors within the region as a broader landscape; ultimately to “give rise to a different kind of wisdom” (▶ Chap. 22, “The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action”) which might inform our understanding of leadership. We undertook this task, admittedly as outsiders to ASEAN ourselves, but as individuals with deep and enduring connections to the Asia Pacific region, and an interest in understanding the interplay between and potential for cultural understanding, advocacy, and diplomacy in a regional context – all themes of contemporary leadership. The significance of this work rests in the development of a culturally attuned model of regional leadership development that is responsive to the inflections of individual political and economic circumstances,

27

Regionally Speaking: Cultural Leadership and Capacity Building in the Asia. . .

515

sensitive to larger state action, and enabling points of dialogue, communication, and exchange.

Narrative Themes The narrative process allowed participants to share personal stories about their entry into the arts sector, the challenges they have faced in navigating the arts sector and structures of the region, and their sense of connectedness to the larger identity and structures of the region. At each level of narrative discussion common themes emerge. Participant statements are quoted through the next section to give emphasis to these themes.

Reflecting on the Local and Personal To begin, the narratives focus on the local and personal story, reflecting unique, individual experiences. However, across the collective, it is possible to identify common themes relating to opportunity, identity, voice, and impact. Taking the first of these themes, opportunity, each of the participants noted the significance of opportunity in bringing them into the arts. For some, the opportunity was structural, promoted through established programs or funding models aimed at fostering the arts. For others it was societal, a result of their community connections and networks. And for others yet, opportunity was symbolic: a “portal between two worlds.” Interestingly, opportunity was underpinned by a discernible pattern of curiosity and initiative. As one participant noted, “I put myself in every corner of the art scene and the subject of humanities; arts, literature, history, culture, etc. . . . because visual arts gave me [the opportunity] to explore.”

Identity The significance of identity, in terms belonging and acceptance within a diverse community was the second theme to emerge through the local story. The theme resides within all the narratives implicitly. One participant provided a more explicit description noting the relevance of identity in shaping strategic and societal engagement: “The condition of being an outsider is perhaps the most significant aspect of my identity.” The participant continues, “I sought spaces where the grip of ethnic identity was challenged and found it on the stage and in its art galleries. Plays, novels, art works, offered different imaginings of nationhood and identity than the narrow framing of citizenship offered by the state.” Going further this description also hints at the symbolic significance of identity in the arts “. . . in the local arts scene, across the language divides, I have seen acceptance of and advocacy for diversity – ethnic, class, gender, sexuality, abilities.” The theme resonates not only on the personal level but in the community, the nation, and across the region.

516

C. Byrne and R. Bereson

Voice The unique capacity to have and to give voice also emerged. For some, voice in the arts related to an ability to give recognition to “stories of hard work, boldness, experimentation, exploration and transformation” symbolizing not just the emergence of a new generation of artists but also the emergence of a new nation. Continuing on this theme some saw the arts as an important vehicle for bringing multiple voices into political discourse. One participant reflected on the fact that at the societal level “the arts community was united in the belief that questions must always be asked.” Whether it was “. . .through music, film, visual art, poetry, theatre, we were able to raise probing questions and engage in active citizenship.” For another bringing the voices of others to the fore of the personal narrative revealed an inherent discomfort with drawing attention to that participant’s own singular voice ahead of others. The narrative retold the stories of others, particularly those encountered in the field as a way to navigate these tensions. This issue of voice as representation is a familiar one – particularly within ASEAN, a region of vast diversity. As the well-known scholar of Southeast Asia, Farish Noor prompted: who are any of us to speak for anyone beyond ourselves?3 Voice and representation appear at both the intrinsically local and widely strategic levels of discussion. It was also noted by this participant that some within the region remain marginalized or invisible to the mainstream conversation. By bringing their voices to the fore, the participant mirrors the objective of this project, thereby breaking through in a discourse where the voices of government or the political elite tend to dominate. Impact Finally, the theme of impact emerges in discussion, described by one as the ability to “gently nudge the boundaries of our students’ minds, to encourage them to handle ambiguity and uncertainty in meaning-making and to develop some sort of empathetic imagination for others and for their world.” It is an organic interaction, whereby: “in observing each other, we catch glimpses of alternative ways of being that we might not have been able to envision if we stayed narrowly within the frame of our own experiences.” For one participant, the desire to have impact is strong: “I’m in the arts because I believe in its power to effect change, to speak where other channels are closed off, to inscribe multiplicity and difference where power seeks to flatten and homogenize.” For another, impact is aligned to the responsibility for enabling – through teaching and mentoring – the next generation of practitioners, bringing with it the opportunity to inspire the next generation. One participant talked of imbuing the sense of “responsibility to my students to have the true understanding of theatre arts, have a creative mind and full of imagination, have an excellent skill to deliver ideas, and have the right attitude as a human being.”

3

Dr. Farish Noor took part in a workshop discussion with the participants hosted by The Asia Europe Foundation in Singapore in 2017.

27

Regionally Speaking: Cultural Leadership and Capacity Building in the Asia. . .

517

Reflecting on the National When observing the patterns and themes to emerge beyond the personal or local, the narratives shift toward themes that hold relevance for the nation: these include the themes of tradition and memory; experimentation, exploration, and innovation; and advocacy through the arts. Here themes take on a national flavor highlighting points of similarity and difference embedded across the nations of Southeast Asia.

Tradition and Memory For all the participants, the sense that the past, embodied through tradition is embedded and visible in the present and the future provided a clear point of commonality. Yet these temporal dimensions are experienced and emphasized differently depending on the particular national experience and memory. For our Cambodian participant, the past is inescapable. The reaffirmation of temporal connections reveals a much deeper craving to overcome the disruptive and destructive effect of the genocide which occurred under Khmer rule in the 1970s. Cambodia’s artistic community was decimated through genocide, and the stories and traditions passed through artistic and cultural practice halted. As our Cambodian participant attested the legacy of genocide has meant that today, Cambodia’s arts practitioners are deeply aware of the “sense of urgency for reviving and preserving the traditional heritage.” The Vietnamese participant emphasizes a different view on the inescapable link between art, colonization, and the evolution of a Vietnamese nation. Indeed, the beginnings of Vietnamese modern art are found in the establishment of the French fine arts institution, l’Ecole Superieure des Beaux Arts, later becoming the Hanoi College of Fine Arts, which held responsibility for educating students from across French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), in the French traditions of modern art – an influence that remains visible today. And yet art, alongside language, also played a powerful role as one of the tools of the Vietnamese revolution, “linked to the higher goal of liberation” in Vietnam’s struggle against its colonial master. Later again, the same political and ideological factors that drove artistic practice as an underpinning of Vietnam’s revolutionary movement worked as a feature of the state to undermine and stifle it, whereby the artistic scene became “scarce, monotonous, and politically tamed.” Similarly, the past holds a similar significance in the themes and conversations borne out across Singapore’s contemporary arts and cultural landscape. In part, our participant suggests because the “historical narrative is so contested” whereby the markers of colonialism and independence both define and obscure the narrative of the nation’s past. Through their art, artists can interrogate and explore what exists in the contested spaces of history, beyond the political markers and agendas. But as the participant observes in a state bound by rules, “such exploration is not always easy or even possible.” Experimentation, Exploration, Innovation From the interplay between the past and memory emerge aspirations from each of the participants to contribute to contemporary ideas that connect the present and

518

C. Byrne and R. Bereson

the future. Our participants are all closely attuned to the need to strike a delicate balance between respecting, understanding, and learning from past traditions, and moving forward through growth, learning, and innovation. For example, the Laotian participant refers optimistically to himself as a part of the new generation of contemporary art and artists. Such a trajectory is essential, not only on the individual level, encouraging the development of artistic form and career opportunities, but also for the nation, contributing to the further opening up of Laos to the outside world. For others, the trajectory is less straightforward. While our Cambodian participant considers it vital that the country’s new generation of artists understand and respect the classical traditions in which they were trained, it is equally important that they are not bound by them. For that participant, there is a need for new artists to experiment, explore, and produce fresh arts practices, to “discover further artistic possibilities” and “actively and courageously” make their mark on “the social and cultural canvas” of Cambodia. To this end, it is a call for artists to lead and advocate for social and cultural change. Such comments are marked by the duality of caution and optimism. Caution on the one hand, because in Cambodia, as in other countries within the region, “there is also a deeply embedded sense of identity, patriotism, and nationalism” imposed as part of the nation-building agenda. For the arts practitioner, this raises concerns that official cultural policy and its resultant emphasis on traditional cultural practice imbued with the sentiments and interests of the nationstate may be at odds with or at least limit the extent to which authentic artistic creativity and innovation can occur. A further danger remained that new practices would extend so far beyond what was known, that they would either pose a “threat to the continuation of traditional culture” or no longer be “recognizable by the audience as Cambodian.” On the other hand, this participant offers optimism, because artistic exploration and experimentation provides a bridge for modern Cambodia and Cambodians in the wider region and world. Despite the “raised eyebrows” from “older artists and masters” these new practices are not an abandonment of tradition, but reflective of the artist’s transformative journey through which the nation might also find the potential for transformation. For all our participants, there appears to be a “tug of war between traditions and contemporary practice and creativity in the arts,” revealing deeper tensions about expressions and representations of the national cultural identity, which is not static or controlled, but subject to dynamic forces of change. Preserving the relevance of tradition in the contemporary is neither a simple nor always a possible prospect. The point was made by the Filipino participant, who reminds us through the story of the “old woman who was weaving her funerary blanket” that the real concern about “the traditional slowly dying,” remains, as those last remaining few that engage in the practice also die. While some of our participants are at the forefront of experimentation and innovation in their practice, others see their role in enabling it. One participant describes her role as “the gardener, tending to this tree and that, not without

27

Regionally Speaking: Cultural Leadership and Capacity Building in the Asia. . .

519

contentment.”4 It is a role that seeks to cultivate opportunities for artistic practice to generate new conversations. The participant observes that “more and more artists are discussing history or anchor their artwork in alternative findings of history.” It is this new sense of exploration that enables artistic/cultural producers to identify new works, to agree to build things together, and to “engage themselves and others in a larger, much needed discourse” on the contemporary nation. Importantly, it is creative interactions nurtured by an emerging arts scene that offers significant new opportunities for learning, exchange, and collaboration across Southeast Asia.

Advocacy Working within the arts sector also involves a degree of advocacy. In some cases, that means working within and across established structures and policies to promote and protect the interests of the diverse communities living within the bounds of the nation-state. In telling the stories of the Filipina women weavers and tattoo artists, one participant reaffirms the place for groups and institutions that recognize and support the continued practice of indigenous arts – including through the organization of the artists, product development, access to training and development, and sourcing of materials and equipment. The participant notes the important, though sometimes informal or ad hoc networks linking individuals and locales to each other and to a wider national community and market. While recognizing that there is “a system of coordination among cultural agencies,” the participant highlights the significance of established programs that support and help sustain traditional and contemporary arts. From this perspective, all participants recognized the national effort directed toward the preservation and recognition of traditional arts within their respective nations. Some noted that the national effort was further strengthened through well-recognized international programs, awards, and processes, such as UNESCO’s Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Yet while such programs and awards offer significant prestige and status to the nation-building project, there was also a sense of suspicion among participants that the very same programs might also fuel nationalistic tendencies, engendering rivalry and animosity between peoples, communities, and states of the region rather than contributing to understanding, respect, and trust. Their skepticism was palpable and signaled a reluctance to engage with the machinery of the state too closely. Arts practitioners are often cognizant of the various ways that the interests of power structures within the nation-state impact more broadly on parts of society. For example, as one participant observes, the “life and culture of the people, not only the indigenous communities in the highland and coastal areas, but also in the Here too we find a connection between the role of the arts practitioner the diplomat – the latter often referred to as a “constant gardener.” Donna Oglesby (2017) reminds diplomacy involves the caretaking “of an instinctual art wherein day-in day-out toil takes vision, commitment, technique, the right cultural material and time. To succeed they must cultivate feeling, because the personal is the ground in which the seeds they cast either germinate or fall fallow.” It is an enduring metaphor that recalls ancient philosophy of Socrates and Plato. Voltaire (1751) too famously urged that we must cultivate our gardens.

4

520

C. Byrne and R. Bereson

lowland” are affected by larger interests associated with rivalry and conflict, exploitation, mining, and commercialization. There exists then a call to “continue the advocacy – to be the voice, or deliver a platform and a venue for these people to be heard and participate in providing a better community [that might] grow, thrive and prosper.” The same participant raises the theme of struggle and resistance in ways that might hold meaning not just from a national perspective but also for the region. This time, she uses these themes implicitly firstly to remind us that all humans regardless their diversity are connected through art and culture in the “celebration of life and its struggles,” and secondly to challenge us to ensure that “the language, the politics and the engagement of art continue to become [and remain] a part of our daily lives.” Resistance, as she notes, then becomes a “struggle of memory against forgetting.” Others within the project take a more cautious approach to the role and relevance of national cultural policy – whereby art is merely the instrument for economic gain. For some, the “development model where growth is the end game for cultural producers,” where “funding is tied to production and presentation” and where “there is an expectation for arts events to hit ever-growing audience targets” reflect a worrying trend of national policy. It is a model that seeks out “mechanisms of control” in the form of funding structures, licensing requirements, ratings, or censorship; all of which work to constrain rather than promote artistic experimentation, exploration, and provocation; and “hamper artistic freedom and growth.” Themes of experimentation and exploration and a desire for arts to “remain responsive, open to improvisation and to avoid bureaucratic calcification” dominate the philosophy of the arts manager. These themes, familiar across the narratives, sit uncomfortably with the perspective of state involvement and control over the sector – driven by the “prevalent social, political and economic agendas embedded within the . . . cultural policy of the time.” The constraints and controls have in the view of one participant led to an era of “truthiness” where authenticity is contrived, and opinions reproduced and reaffirmed to conform with the dominant discourse. The net result, this participant suggests, “is a polarized world, where segments of society can cling to increasingly opposing positions on issues” and where the common space between those segments continues to diminish. Optimism about the arts providing that “common space, where issues could play out and discourse could happen” falters as “the arts have, increasingly, become yet another battleground and place of division.” But yet as participants note, “the arts and cultural sector needs to find a way to have conversations.” For several participants, responsibility of advocacy for and through the arts becomes a kind of “public service.” The view emerged that “art has a key role in encouraging reflexivity and further dialogue,” especially in airing difficult or taboo topics, critiquing societal systems and structures, and articulating alternatives. “Art, plays an important role in articulating these possibilities and alternatives in how else the world can be.”

27

Regionally Speaking: Cultural Leadership and Capacity Building in the Asia. . .

521

Reflecting on the Regional Participant narratives reveal broad similarities in the way that participants are connected to and engage with their regional identity. More specifically, some engaged positively with their Southeast Asian identity, yet resisted any notion of an ASEAN identity, noting a striking disconnect from the formal, political – even elite – construct of ASEAN. When prompted, participants reflected on the limited impact, on a personal level and as practitioners within the arts and cultural sectors of ASEAN’s member nations. It becomes clear through their reflections, while they may identify as Southeast Asian, that they do not know much about the people and nations of ASEAN. At the people-to-people level, one might conclude that ASEAN does not know itself. Furthermore, the narratives hone in on undercurrents of national rivalry and tension playing out within the respective arts and cultural sectors of the region. Whether related to cultural rivalries and even hostilities between Thailand and Cambodia, or Malaysia and Singapore, such issues contribute little to a mindset that is resistant to regionalism. The narrative reflections prompted several participants to highlight the opportunity that exists for ASEAN to consider, at political and community levels, how to better recognize and celebrate the traditional and contemporary arts and cultural practices that exist not within the member nations per se but within and across the region as a shared asset and resource of the people.

Connectivity and Networks To this end, all the narratives all speak in various ways about the aspiration and optimism that ASEAN might offer to them, particularly as a platform for connectivity and building networks. For some, ASEAN represents an opportunity to connect to the outside world, to engage in openness and advancement. For others, ASEAN might enable connections and collaborations with peers who are otherwise unknown. As one participant suggested the ASEAN institution might usefully work to “intensify a sense of translocality.” While reflecting on connections to the region, another participant returned to the facilitative role of ASEAN “focused on the plight of the traditional weavers in the region.” It is an example that reminds us that the commonalities that exist in the art form and tradition, alongside the issues that are faced by those who practice it, hold significance across the region, particularly “in the face of globalization.” Thus, ASEAN plays an important role as a forum for bringing individual practitioners together in dialogue about shared issues and interests. Furthermore, ASEAN must enable more than mere artistic appreciation, and instead allow artists to bring their collective voice to the fore on issues of significance to the region through artistic practice. One participant asks: “can the arts be a bridge, not just to cross for short-term individual goals but to experience the long-term collective beauty and productivity of cultural diversity to create shared narratives?”

522

C. Byrne and R. Bereson

A Multi-frame View of Leadership The themes emerging from the narrative process offer further insights for understanding and developing the leadership potential of arts practitioners operating within a complex global world. They reinforce the complex view of contemporary leadership, whereby leaders must operate within multiple contexts and across formal and informal structures, engaging diverse audiences in the process. Mapping the narrative themes against Bolman and Deal’s (2003, 2014) multi-frame leadership model5 provides general insights into the capacity of arts practitioners to lead within the political, structural, social, and symbolic spheres. Arts practitioners tend to engage, both consciously and intuitively across each of the frames; an approach which, in our study of Southeast Asian arts practitioners, demands and enables understanding of and engagement with issues at the local, national, and regional perspectives. And yet inherent weaknesses also come into view.

Leadership in the Political Frame Political leadership operates at a strategic level offering vision and direction. Bolman and Deal (2003, p. 359) suggest that successful political leaders “map the political terrain by thinking carefully about the key players, their interests and their power.” These leaders also understand that “influence begins with an understanding of others’ concerns and interests.” Political leadership requires a selfawareness of who you are and what you stand for as a community, and an ability to convey that story to your constituency, and external audiences as you move forward. Notably, the participants within our study do not view themselves as political leaders, but rather as individuals with the collective of the arts, representing different aspects of that sector and community. They do hold positions of authority within their communities, are aware of and attuned to local and national political dynamics impacting on their sector, and know how to interact with individual governments or funding agencies. However, at an individual level they have not fully understood how to strengthen their individual and collective agendas in a political and strategic frame. The themes to emerge from the collective narrative reveal a problematic tension. On the one hand, they highlight an acute wariness among arts practitioners of political institutions and processes, and a lack of trust in political motivations. This is understandable in a region where cultural policy may be wielded in

5

Bolman and Deal (2003) identify the four frames of organizational leadership in the following way and order: (i) structural leadership; (ii) human resource leadership; (iii) political leadership; and (iv) symbolic leadership. For the purpose of this study we have adapted the order to reflect a logic more suited to leaders and leadership in a global context. Similarly, we have renamed human resource leadership to social leadership to reflect a community-oriented approach.

27

Regionally Speaking: Cultural Leadership and Capacity Building in the Asia. . .

523

a heavy-handed fashion. Yet on the other hand, practitioners see themselves and their practice as playing a significant role in advocacy to improve outcomes within their local communities, to broaden horizons and challenge established thought. The advocacy role appears deeply embedded within their identity as individuals and as a sector. At the same time, despite their worldliness, the self-knowledge of our participants appeared confined, bounded by these localized perspectives. This lack of knowledge of each other’s context within Southeast Asia (i.e., not knowing themselves) obscured the potential for wider strategic thinking, and deflected the need to selfinitiate, further compounding their disconnect from a strategic political leadership frame. And, this was mirrored through their behaviors. During the early stages of our study, the participants were reluctant, if not unable to conceive of the supragovernmental constructs and causes of the wider region. The process of developing and sharing narratives helped to bridge this disconnect, opening the way for more purposeful discussion, and highlighting common experiences, concerns, and challenges. It provided the participants an opportunity to engage with a wider political frame and develop their confidence and advocacy skills from a sectoral rather than a national perspective, and within a safe platform of exchange and trust building, in a region where distrust between nations remains.

Leadership in the Structural Frame Structural leadership flows from and is the mechanism by which institutions seek to implement the vision and direction of strategic leadership. Effective structural leadership brings architecture and coordination to an otherwise diffuse network of people, activities, and institutions. Structural leaders are social architects who apply analytical and design skills to diagnose problems and develop solutions. While structure is important, it tends not to be confined by rigidity, and effective structural leaders find ways to experiment, innovate, and adapt. Our participants exhibited tendencies toward successful structural leadership, particularly within their own sectors, where the urge to coordinate and program, with an emphasis on experimentation was strong. Yet it became clear that structural leadership abilities of these participants are stymied by an otherwise deep wariness of structures and institutions, both at the national level – more notably when it came to discussion of ASEAN – as well as at the regional level. Indeed, the participants overwhelmingly resisted the language and the architecture of ASEAN, preferring instead to talk of informal connections they might foster as Southeast Asians. This was a particular point of interest for us, particularly given the investment made by ASEAN in recent years in cultivating a socio-cultural community based on the role of arts and culture. The narratives suggest that the structural leadership deficit exists at multi-levels. Firstly, and despite increased investment in community-building, ASEAN’s leadership has been unable to break through the barriers of bureaucracy to gain relevance and build discourse within communities. For example, even though it was launched in 2016, the ASEAN Strategy

524

C. Byrne and R. Bereson

for Arts and Culture is not well known, understood, or accessed by many practitioners across the sector. Secondly, from the arts practitioner perspective, there emerges a reluctance to engage with ASEAN’s regional architecture. The experiences of the arts sector would suggest that such wariness is warranted. Nations across Southeast Asia have endured and continue to witness the exploitation, control, or oppression of artists and arts practitioners for political ends. Indeed, the enduring argument from the arts sector suggests that artistic impulse transcends the state. However, the reality for today’s arts practitioners requires more cogent engagement with structure, and the development of a language and process for more appropriately dealing with structures of the state, and in the case of ASEAN, of the supra-state. Where policies exist that might enable improved engagement and understanding between and within nations through the arts, then arts practitioners must become sophisticated in accessing those policies and negotiating the terms. Navigating the structures is essential to realizing opportunity, and bringing the deep aspirations for voice and impact sought by each of our participants, to life.

Leadership in the Social Frame The social leadership frame is adapted here from Bolman and Deal’s (2003) “human resource leadership.” It reflects the community rather than organizational focus of our arts practitioners, but the qualities and skills associated with this frame remain the same. Effective social leaders use skill and artistry in helping people to accomplish extraordinary results; they empower others to engage. Successful social leadership extends from an authentic connection to audiences at grassroots – to understand, engage, and influence through interaction based on expression and dialogue. Arts practitioners excel in this dimension of leadership: understanding audience, significance of venue, and need to connect with meaning in a community setting. They also bring a nuanced view to their social leadership responsibility, recognizing the significance of identity and belonging, particularly at the local level and the potential role for the arts in bringing those on the outside in. Drawing on their national perspectives, these practitioners are highly attuned to the deep tensions that exist between tradition and modernity, and yet keen to continue to nudge the boundaries of innovation and experimentation (also a trait for successful structural leadership). From a wider even regional perspective they place emphasis on the importance of connectivity as a means of bringing commonalities to the fore, while also allowing for challenges and issues to be aired.

Leadership in the Symbolic Frame Symbols give meaning. They play a critical role in translating strategic vision and structural processes into expressions that make sense within the shared lived experience, values, and beliefs of a community. Symbolic leaders “interpret and

27

Regionally Speaking: Cultural Leadership and Capacity Building in the Asia. . .

525

reinterpret experience” (Bolman and Deal 2003, p. 360). They work on the basis that reality is socially constructed, where “meaning is created and maintained through behaviour and at the same time influences behaviour” (Winkler 2010). Effective symbolic leadership draw on symbols, in the form of material objects, behavior or language to capture attention, to inspire and even transform followers. The effectiveness of symbolic leadership resides in its authenticity. The participants in our study demonstrated an intuitive understanding of symbolic leadership. Unsurprising given their practice, yet illuminating for those outside it. At the local level, it sits with the notion of identity moving through portals between worlds, and the place and resonance of the voice as a symbol of chance and impact generated through glimpses of alternative ways of being. Viewed from the nation level, symbolism emerged from national tragedies, and lay in the responsibility of arts practitioners to encourage both revival and preservation of the past, in order to account for, remember, and reimagine what has been lost and what survives within a community. When speaking about their region, the participants called for connectivity that might intensify their sense of “translocality” that went beyond depictions of ASEAN as political leaders holding hands but engendered a real sense of knowing and understanding.

Implications of the Study Our research brought together arts practitioners from across this region to consider issues relating to leadership in the Asia-Pacific region, and within the regional construct of ASEAN. For this project, narrative inquiry offered us the chance to develop a process that is “alive”: an informed engagement and representation of the cultural sector’s role in the construction of the ASEAN region. By engaging with “the storying experience” of these arts practitioners, we sought to explore and illuminate the potential for nontraditional leaders to operate in their community, nation, and region. The aim was to engage in an evocative process, through which subjective voice might present a layered picture, which developed over time would provide insights into the leadership potential and development needs of arts practitioners. What emerged through the stories was a complex and textured account of how arts practitioners consider and engage intuitively with leadership opportunities at multi-levels: the local, national, and regional, and in multidimensions: strategic, structural, social, and symbolic. There is an unevenness in this engagement, and deficiencies are revealed through the process of narrative, particularly when considering the strategic and structural leadership tendencies. For example, the resistance exhibited by the arts practitioners in this study to formal political structures and language opens potential leadership gaps. It is a natural resistance, particularly when discussed in the context of their individual and collective national experiences. Yet without an awareness and an ability to engage with strategic or structural leadership frames, arts practitioners and the sector as a whole may never be invited to the table, and leadership in culture will only ever be a footnote.

526

C. Byrne and R. Bereson

On the other hand, through this process, the particular strengths of arts practitioners as social and symbolic leaders came to light. Their instinctive ability to connect at a very human level, to interpret experience and to empower audiences, offers significance for leadership studies and development. Yet these leadership traits appear, in the context of Southeast Asia, to occur in localized spaces and networks. Once again, the disconnect emerges between the local and the region. The challenge facing political leaders, including those within ASEAN regional structure, is to enable diverse local perspectives and cultural inflection at the local levels, rather than pursue a homogenized outcome. ASEAN leaders and officials have engaged in intense discourse about an ASEAN regional identity, particularly since the 50th anniversary of the institution itself. The creation of ASEAN’s Socio-Cultural Community, as part of ASEAN’s broader community building efforts from 2015, fed into this discourse and is developed through other initiatives including the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Blueprint 2025. Cultural cooperation is lauded through the Blueprint as a vehicle for establishing “a dynamic and harmonious community. . .aware and proud of its identity heritage and culture” (ASEAN Secretariat 2016b, p. 3). And yet, the leadership role for arts practitioners within the regional context remains elusive. Arts practitioners themselves remain disconnected from the political correctness and formality of ASEAN’s community building approaches, and skeptical of the deeper political intent. For them, the aspiration of an ASEAN community is far from being met. It is a long-standing issue, as former ASEAN Secretary General, Severino (2007, p. 369) observes that “the trouble, in the ASEAN context, is that these ‘people concerns’ are functions and responsibilities of individual states.” The nation-state which looms large in the ASEAN psyche gets in the way, and it would appear of broader community-mindedness. A deeper disconnect to emerge through the narratives is the disconnect that arts practitioners feel at times from each other within the imagined social construct of Southeast Asia – upon which the more formal structures of ASEAN have been constructed. Farish Noor (2017) proposes this view, noting that Southeast Asia remains an unknown from within, and calling for “a recognition of the Others within, and the acceptance of the fact that these Others are always our Others – the constitutive Other that makes us what we are.” If there is to be a leadership role for arts practitioners in the ASEAN context, surely it might be developed to address these internal divides across multiple identities, and to deliver awareness, understanding, and perhaps also tolerance for the “constitutive other.”

Conclusion Through this research the intention was to develop a rich framework for leadership capacity building; as the participants became owners of the thematic journey, embodiments of their practice and narrators of their own stories, at a confluence of cultural and political discourse. The narrative approach applied through this study

27

Regionally Speaking: Cultural Leadership and Capacity Building in the Asia. . .

527

underscores the aesthetic dimension of leadership and provides a novel framework for the individual and collective to actively and critically engage that dimension. The study also reinforces the connection between leadership and the arts. Yet with a deliberate emphasis on arts practitioners, it brings attention to the leadership from and within the arts sector. We discovered through this process that arts practitioners, generally at ease dealing in their social circles and sectors, remain ambivalent about their role in connecting through political mechanisms and structures. On the one hand, it appears that such ambivalence emerges through an inward focus on the self, while on the other it reflects intuitive skepticism of the political state – whether operating at the national or regional level. Our focus on arts practitioners from Southeast Asia therefore has further implications for the ASEAN regional framework. Ultimately, the development of leadership capacity that enables and empowers arts practitioners within the political domain on a sustained basis is required if arts practitioners are to play a more significant role in regional community building. At the same time, processes that enable arts practitioners to develop their voice and deliver sustained impact – beyond the personal, across identities and societies, while allowing for cultural inflection – may provide opportunities for much-needed forms of regional awareness and understanding generated from within.

Cross-References ▶ Aesthetics and Leadership ▶ State of the Art on Aesthetics and Leadership ▶ The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action

References Asbjörnson K (2007) Making the connection between art and leadership. Issues Observ 27(4):22–24 ASEAN Secretariat (2016a) Strategic plan for culture and the arts 2016–2020. ASEAN Secretariat, Jakarta ASEAN Secretariat (2016b) ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Blueprint 2025. ASEAN Secretariat, Jakarta Beardsley MC (1991) Aesthetics from classical Greece to the present, 8th edn. Macmillan, New York Bereson R, de Monthoux PG (2017) Special issue editorial: Poetic pragmatism and artful management. Philos Manag 16(3):191–196 Beuchel B, Antunes D (2007) Reflections on executive education: the user and provider perspectives. Acad Manag Learn Educ 6(3):401–411 Blocker HG (2001) Non-Western aesthetics as colonial invention. J Aesthet Educ 35(4):3–13 Bolman LG, Deal TE (2003) Reframing organizations: artistry, choice and leadership, 3rd edn. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco Bolman LE, Deal TE (2014) How Great Leaders Think: The Art of Reframing, Jossey-Bass: San Fransisco Bruner JS (1986) Actual minds, possible worlds. Harvard University Press, Cambridge

528

C. Byrne and R. Bereson

Bruner JS (2004) Life as narrative. Soc Res 71(3):691–710 Connelly FM, Clandinin D (1990) Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educ Res 19(5):2–14 Daigle M (2016) Writing the lives of others: storytelling and international politics. Millennium J Int Stud 45(1):25–42 Flemming D (2001) Narrative leadership: using the powers of story. Strateg Leadersh 29(4):34–36 Garvin DA (2007) Teaching executives and teaching MBAs: reflections on the case method. Acad Manag Learn Educ 6(3):364–374 Giddens A (1991) Modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. Stanford University Press, Stanford Guillet de Monthoux P (2004) The art firm: aesthetic management and metaphysical marketing. Stanford University Press, Stanford Houde J (2007) Analogically situated experiences: creating insight through novel contexts. Acad Manag Learn Educ 6(3):321–331 Jackson B, Parry K (2018) Studying leadership. Sage, Los Angeles Kempster S, Stewart J (2010) Becoming a leader: a co-produced, auto-ethnographic exploration of situated learning of leadership practice. Manag Learn 41(2):205–219 Kets de Vries M, Korotov K (2007) Creating transformational executive education programs. Acad Manag Learn Educ 6(3):375–387 Koivunen N (2003) Leadership in symphony orchestras: discursive and aesthetic practices. Tampere University Press, Finland Komolthiti M (2016) Leadership journeys: a narrative research study exploring women school superintendent’s meaning-making of leadership development experiences. Northeastern University, Boston Ladkin D (2018) The aesthetic and its relationship to business ethics: philosophical underpinnings and implications for future research. J Bus Ethics 147:35–51 Ladkin D, Taylor S (2010) Leadership as art: variations on a theme. Leadership 6(3):235–241 Maynes MJ, Pierce JL, Laslett B (2008) Telling stories: the use of personal narratives in the social sciences and history. Cornell University Press, London McMullen C, Braithwaite I (2013) Narrative inquiry and the study of collaborative branding activity. Electron J Bus Res Methods 11(2):92–104 Mitchell WJT (1981) On narrative. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Noor FA (2017) Where do we begin? Reclaiming and reviving Southeast Asia’s shared histories and geographies. In: Baviera A, Maramis L (eds) Building ASEAN community: political, economic and socio-cultural reflections. Jakarta, Economic Institute for ASEAN and East Asia Oglesby DM (2017) Sowing the seeds of diplomacy on hard American ground. Hague J Dipl 12(4):383–315 Pick J (2009) The aesthetic contract. Merrill Press, Kenmore Severino RC (2007) Southeast Asia: in search of an ASEAN community. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore Sutherland I (2012) Arts based methods in leadership development: affording aesthetic workspaces, reflexivity, and memories with momentum. Manag Learn 44(1):25–43 Voltaire (1781) The Age of Louis XIV.: To which is Added, an Abstract of the Age of Louis XV. United Kingdom: Fielding and Walker Winkler I (2010) Contemporary leadership theories. Contributions to Management Science, Berlin

Curating Management Philosophy: Art and Aesthetics for Business Education

28

Pierre Guillet de Monthoux

Contents Philosophizing by Curating Management Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Instrumental Critical Art Before 2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Invective Art: The 1980s and Dahl’s Frog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ironic Art: The 1990s and Bonk Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Imitation Art: 2000 and Masters of Business Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intervention Art: 2005 and the Product/Vision Show . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intentional Art After 2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curating as Philosophizing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curating Recognition of Aesthetic Autonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curating for Rematerializing Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curatorial Schwung: Philosophy as Aesthetic Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

530 532 532 534 535 537 538 538 539 541 543 546 546

Abstract

This chapter describes how art today is curated into management philosophy and how it came to be like that. A walk through the Stockholm School of Economics introduces the reader to the pedagogical and intellectual foundations of its art-based curriculum. Today, art and commerce naturally crisscross in an economy where aesthetics increasingly matters. The chapter historically traces the Stockholm School of Economics’ relation with art, to illustrate how art before the millennium was predominantly instrumentalized in critical management discourses as invectives, irony, imitations, and interventions. The chapter then discusses how intentional art has inspired post-2000 the approach of the Stockholm School of Economics to curate management knowledge and education. P. Guillet de Monthoux (*) Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_38

529

530

P. Guillet de Monthoux

Keywords

Curation · Education · Imitation · Invective · Irony · Intervention · Pragmatism

Why art here at the Stockholm School of Economics? The reason we focus on contemporary art is not that we want decoration. It is all connected to our educational model. Let’s take a look at some works and visit some of our new rooms. But before I will give you the background. We have a diverse, globalized, and digitalized world where you can get an online degree in anything from any top-ranking university without having ever met a single professor in person. We all know that we will be cognitively surpassed by machines. The business world gets robotified too. Given this, what is the purpose of higher education? When I talk to our partner companies, they ask for something else. They tell me they need employees with deep expertise, who can assume responsible leadership. People with good communication skills, [who] understand cultural differences and diverging values. They need self-confidence and courage. We like to support empathic sensitivity hand in hand with entrepreneurial skills. The SSE board recently approved our new educational model where contemporary art plays a key role in philosophizing management education. (Strannegård 2019)

Philosophizing by Curating Management Education After his welcoming speech, President Lars Strannegård of the Stockholm School of Economics took the group of alumni on a guided tour from room to room, where they drank in the different atmospheres. The alumni represented just one of many groups that included students, faculty, partner companies, other alumni, and also people from outside the school who had not even noticed the SSE before. In addition, art associations, neighboring college students, and all sorts of people from the community took the detour for arts’ sake. On this occasion Lars began in the atrium, the large hall that is the school’s central gathering space, populated with coffee-sipping students bent over their computers. In the center were two large installations by local Swedish artists as well as projections on a large screen of video works by Swiss artist Roman Signer. In the auditorium, four spectacular eyes painted by artist Ylva Snöfrid monitored teachers and students. This work leads Lars to evoke management as a Foucauldian Panopticon of self-discipline. In the Library he introduced an 80-min long video installation on loop, “Soli Deo Gloria” by Lina Selander, and next the group flocked around a strange wooden object: the sculpture “Banca Rotta” by Goldin+Senneby. The former is an elegant slow-moving video mosaic with pieces of monetary philosophy. We see classical citations from Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money to excerpts from essays by Walter Benjamin, each contributing to a visual symphony of the history, pathology, and eschatology of money from ancient numismatics over the official symbolic art on the paper notes of the industrial era with imagery from current mythologies of digital cryptocurrencies at the end. Lars then turned our attention to Goldin+Senneby’s “Banca Rotta,” a broken antique wooden bench that served a renaissance Italian banker as a money-changing desk. When a banker failed,

28

Curating Management Philosophy: Art and Aesthetics for Business Education

531

officials broke his bench; that’s what “bankruptcy” means, a broken bench. Lars called it a memento mori of capitalism and added that modern legislation has vaccinated capitalism by its foundational business institution of limited liability. Under Lars’ guidance, each piece in the business school collection became visual and even graspable and tactile. Together the group experienced art transcending abstract slick success stories illustrating the economic disembodied Hypes of frictionless functional capitalism. The tour became a skillful educational exercise, an “economic ekphrasis” having the encounter of visual art re-philosophizing the education of those running tomorrow’s capitalism – a very special take on something on the minds of all business school presidents. The presence of physical art objects helps embark on an aesthetic philosophy of phenomenological kind taking art, not texts in books or articles, as its starting point art. The hermeneutic approach has taught the social sciences, to which management and business administration studies belong, cannot be understood literally and they always need to be interpreted and reinterpreted. When art supplements texts in management education, time has also come to develop “ekphrasis,” i.e., how to describe a work of art using words. As educators art historians, for instance, usually reflect on images, not primarily texts, as their starting point. Analogous to this approach art enters business education through an “economic ekphrasis” (Guillet de Monthoux and Wikberg 2021). After the atrium, the auditorium, and the library, the tour group entered the new Heckscher-Ohlin Room and stood in a surprisingly sophisticated atmosphere of playfulness, randomness, and rational clarity. Lars’ ekphrasis started by presenting two famous economists Bertil Ohlin and Eli Heckscher, whose joint research was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1977. A number of well-known Swedish artists were commissioned to create a whole atmosphere celebrating research and theory around the portraits of these two former faculty members. Again the room curated as a complete installation had its specially edited catalog telling stories of economic research far from citation indexes, references to peer-reviewed journals, and classical monographs. The catalog carefully explained the material context of the HeckscherOhlin theorem, and we came to understand how the two economists tried to analyze a complex political-economic historical muddle by using their clear minds (Lundahl 2018). The message was that research was always a way to grasp experiences of a reality by focusing on some traits, by simplifying reality, and by overlooking its often-paralyzing complexity. This was the kind of simplification Lars recognized in each piece of artwork in the room. Being an artist and doing research have much in common, but forgetting the foundation in “reality,” theoretical abstractions tended to get hyped whereby they leave the realm of relevant experiences for a formalist exercise of little meaning to noneconomists. How then should one keep doing relevant research? How can you avoid the ivory tower of dematerialized theorizations? To indicate possible connections between art and a concrete philosophy of economy, the catalogue contained an interview with Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck (Guillet de Monthoux 2018), who served on the committee overseeing the Nobel Prize in economics. Lindbeck loves contemporary art, and he described how through his own hobby of painting he indulged in an automatic therapy to break out of the strict box of economic theorizing – by doodling. Through his own version

532

P. Guillet de Monthoux

of surrealist “automatic drawing,” he attempts to liberate his thinking from the straitjacket of methodology. Assigned to the ivory tower, you ignore the fact that research is also spontaneous intuition, with a bit of methodology on the side. If research is like art, how can we better explore the overlap of art and science? The atmosphere of this very room begged for and inspired such philosophical reflections. It seemed as students of the Stockholm School of Economics also encountered an adjunct faculty of artists lecturing them through their artwork. Videos on loan from the Moderna Museet project classics by Marcel Duchamp and Alexander Calder on the big atrium screen and even the cheering version of the steaming Soviet industrial utopia from the classic Man with a Movie Camera. Paul Strand’s Manhatta carried us back to old New York, cradle of managerial optimism. Each new work added to the school’s collection introduced a new voice to a great, disharmoniously, atonal, art chorale aesthetically treating and teasing a world of management. The pieces bore concrete testimony of the desires, dreams, beliefs, and doubts resonating with management students preparing a life navigating on the oceans of capitalism. What of all this would remain if philosophical reflections on management were reduced to drilling students in the normative doctrines of utilitarianism and pragmatism? We opened up citing an art tour by a business school president acting as a curator of his institution. To paraphrase philosopher John Dewey (2005), President Strannegård turns his main mission to make students and faculty appreciate experiences by encountering art. In doing so President Lars Strannegård offers a business education in tune with management of creative and experience economies that have taken over after the hegemony of industrial practices for business administration (Guillet de Monthoux 2004, 2015, King and Vickery 2013, Minahan and Wolfram Cox 2017, Raviola and Zackariasson 2017). Today it is a fact that art and commerce naturally crisscross in an economy where aesthetics increasingly matters. The educational microcosm curated by President Lars Strannegård constitutes one example of many when European management turns to art. It is important however to understand that the presence of art in today’s management education fulfills a philosophizing purpose. Today art is curated into management education in ways that differ from how art during the end of the last century was made instrumentally relevant to business. To better grasp how art today is curated into management philosophy, we will now by means of some cases recall how art before the millennium predominantly was instrumentalized in critical management discourses as invectives, irony, imitations, and interventions.

Instrumental Critical Art Before 2000 Invective Art: The 1980s and Dahl’s Frog It so happens that Stockholm School of Economics was my own school half a century ago. When management education today goes for art, it is of course done in a very different economic context. Both art and business were different half a century ago. My alma mater is still located in the middle of the city in the same grand

28

Curating Management Philosophy: Art and Aesthetics for Business Education

533

palace with its tall and heavy wooden portals. And though it enjoys immense popularity, this privately funded school has stubbornly refused to grow. President Lars Strannegård’s main concern today is socioeconomic diversity, to stop “daddy’s boys” from reproducing an obsolete old-time capitalism. Designed by Swedish architect Ivar Tengbom in 1925, the building resembles a bank palace. This was a time when business studies struggled for social recognition, and impressive architecture then well served that purpose. Behind his desk, the present vice president Lasse Ågren still keeps such a status piece, a beautiful old Flemish painting showing two bankers counting money. On the opposite wall however hangs an unmistakably sloppy, typically red winesoaked oil painting by Swedish artist Peter Dahl (b. 1934) from the 1980s, which recalls the style of Willi Sitte (1921–2013) of the former GDR, a quintessential Marxist social realist. Dahl’s canvas depicts three gentlemen in three-piece suits. One is submissively lighting the fat cigar of the second man while the third, unnoticed, grabs money out of the first man’s pocket: three cynical capitalists in the process of ripping each other off, an invective making its Brechtian impact in the business school. “Have you heard about the frog?”, Lasse asked, noticing my interest. Before I could answer, he went on, “If you look carefully at our large Peter Dahl painting in the terrace room, you can see a small black square, underneath which you can ‘sense’ the frog.” A little later, I inspected the little black box and checked out the Zeitgeist in Dahl’s memoirs (Dahl 1992, 1994). This was art versus capitalism after 1968, the year of the Paris student revolt and the beginning of the end of Sweden as a welfare state. In 1988 the Berlin Wall crumbled, the cold war ended, and in 1995 the Swedish economy opened up to international finance. Whether you were an artist or capitalist, there were two distinct parts cast in industrial capitalism. Dahl’s books revealed the identities in the welfare state, suburban living, syndicalism, a father’s embarrassing stories from a middle-class career, denying the petty bourgeoisie, living a bohemian life, and enjoying the invitation to the Baltic Sea Festival in East Germany. Dahl accounted for the reigning Zeitgeist in his satirical suite “Oh if the boss invited us home!”. Why such cynical scoffs at fragile middle-class dreams of a bit of success? At any costs the artist typical for that period posed as an outsider who insisted on not being part of capitalism. Now for the rest of the story revealing one of the previous roles of art in business, Peter Dahl, who had worked so hard not to paint in capitalism, nevertheless worked for the capitalists. At the end of the 1980s, the then president of the Stockholm School of Economics invited Dahl to draw portraits of the school’s entire board. Maybe Dahl was ashamed of the commission, for I found no mention of it in his memoirs. The painting however still hangs next to the hall where Stockholm students attempted their limited response to the Paris student revolt back in 1968. The canvas features disrespectful caricatures of long forgotten bank presidents, company founders, and professors of economics. Scrooge McDuck is there and a visibly inebriated Karl Marx, who looks suspiciously like Dahl himself. And yes, next to the portrait of banker Jacob Palmstierna, I spotted where the frog might have been: the black square.

534

P. Guillet de Monthoux

This was a puzzle with an interesting backstory. Dahl was there in 1989 when this private school dedicated the old student union building they had acquired from Stockholm University. In his inaugural address, Palmstierna arrogantly ridiculed the 1968 student revolt that took place right in the hall where he was speaking. Full of bluster, Palmstierna proclaimed the restoration of capitalist order when this privately funded school had bought this symbolic space of socialist revolt. Painter Dahl’s protest was immediate: he quickly painted a frog next to Palmstierna’s portrait. That was not the finale however. Today a black square fills the space, for after Dahl received an ultimatum from the president, he painted over the frog. The ultimatum: obliterate the frog or buy back his own picture for a million Swedish crowns.

Ironic Art: The 1990s and Bonk Business A decade later, the countercultural shock wave of 1968 had shifted to a general skepticism for art ¼ politics. This was a decade of the ironic Generation X reshaping criticism after the erosion of monumentally cemented ideological foundations. So how did art cope with capitalism in the postmodern condition? How did artists go from grand political anti-capitalist agitation to subversively smuggling in as irritations (Hutter 2015) into the economic discourse? My library includes a beautiful coffee table book on Corporate Mentality compiled by artist Alexandra Mir (2003). Today, however, we are deeply grateful to her for this detailed documentation of the 1990s art irony on capitalism. The genre has lived on, and many artists still work in the same spirit as the 50 cases compiled by Mir. She presents us with a number of ironic strategies appropriating the jargon of business corporations into, e.g., “hot air companies” like airlines without airplanes, “corporate happenings” like choreographing fake picketing lines outside company headquarters, and “brand busting,” punning company never-ending creativity for designing logos. A typical example in Mir’s book, which has the explanatory subtitle An Archive Documenting the Emergence of Recent Practices Within a Cultural Sphere Occupied by Both Business and Art, is a firm for providing fresh air to poor fish suffocating in oceans. Another typical piece is the imaginary Finnish company Bonk Business Inc., founded by artist Alvar Gullichsen and his brotherin-law, adman Richard Stanley. To fabricate his company, Gullichsen actually tapped into his own family history. He is the black sheep artist of a large Finnish industrial dynasty with a long and deep art patronage history as well. Using their insider insights into old industrial capitalism, Gullichsen and Stanley concocted their thick Bonk Business narrative. They injected time with fake sepia-aged photography and models of oddly beautiful and completely afunctional machines skillfully given an old patina. Counterfeiting a heritage, they dreamed up a family tree with standard capitalist characters depicted as overconfident, fat, and rich medal-decorated factory owners and uppity dowagers. This sophisticated simulation of corporate communication and capitalist rhetoric had its debut at a Finnish art museum: at its opening, members of the confused audience wondered whether it was real or just a big joke.

28

Curating Management Philosophy: Art and Aesthetics for Business Education

535

The clever irony of corporate communication in Bonk Business delivered international invitations, and the show was soon taken on the road under the sponsorship of a then superhot Swedish advertising agency. When Bonk Business came to town, it was a fun party time, with lots of action on the theme of the myths of capitalism. At that time I recall inviting them to be part of business education, and their artwork turned into hilarious classroom edutainment. Their ton of fake product prototypes, comical biographies, and convincingly stupid corporate videos always ended in our euphoric sing-along of the Bonk Company Song. In all its hollowness, this artwork was a total experience of corporate communication clichés. What happened to ironic art? It did not recover after the burst of the IT bubble at the turn of the century. When I met Alexandra Mir in New York after the crash of “the new economy,” her book had overnight gone from supercool to dated art history document. Before the crash, technology had been a hybridizing platform for art and capitalism; for example, the Wall Street offices of Ericsson and Nokia had employed artists to make super-technological cellphones fun and attractive. And what happened to Bonk Business? Alvar Gullichsen grew tired of Bonk Business and mysteriously disappeared without a trace, perhaps to Africa to return to painting, if you believe the rumors circulating in arty Helsinki bars. Only brother-inlaw adman Richard Stanley remained, attempting Bonk Business updates to spread stories of branding projects and takeover bids from Pepsi Cola. The fun really seemed over.

Imitation Art: 2000 and Masters of Business Art Running parallel to artists’ interest in corporate rhetoric, business schools were mimicking art. In her account of this art-in-business movement, Danish leadership expert Lotte Darsö argued that this trend peaked in 2004, when she ran a wellattended workshop at the Davos Economic Forum debating “What if an artist ran your business” (Darsö 2016). In their search for creativity and innovation, business educators sought to transform classrooms into business studios inspired by the so-called design thinking (Barry and Meisiek 2015). Some even took it to the point of teaching in the style of performance artists, and the end of the century saw many such edutainers in business schools. In 2002, Kjell A. Nordström, a rocking Swedish business school professor, came out with his bestseller Funky Business: Talent Makes Capital Dance (Nordström 2002). And at the art-aligned university in Witten-Herdecke and later at the Berlin University of the Arts, Franz Liebl, a cool German strategy professor, put on sublime DJ lectures on consumption trends as cultural hacking. I personally remember the Irish professor Stephen Brown, whose standup lectures on postmodern marketing received thunderous cheers at consumer research meetings. Newer management professors, such as Micael Dahlén at the Stockholm School of Economics, still perform their lectures. Are we all artists then, in business as well as in art? What is the difference between being an artist and acting as one? One obvious difference of course is that scholars who masquerade as

536

P. Guillet de Monthoux

artists no doubt fetch far more money at company kickoffs than artists do in museums or performance venues. And they have a professor’s salary as backup. Imitation is not new in business. In the past, while global management gurus like Tom Peters or Philip Kotler preferred the American classic evangelist tradition, cooler inspiration came from Marcel Duchamp or Laurie Anderson. Students also latched on to the imitation art trend. Courses in management culminated in “exhibitions” rigged in the classroom with “artworks” by creative students. The keyword for such educational experiments “playfulness” connected well to the ideas of an aesthetic in Immanuel Kant’s third critique. Even the Danish toy company LEGO saw this trend as a business opportunity and launched expensive kits for executive education in “serious play.” Until 2006 LEGO even ran its own research institute, the Imagination Lab in Lausanne, employing philosophers to develop playfulnessfocused management education. The fad of imitation art resonated in part with deeper ideas about improved ways to teach business that I initially came across at the first German private business university in Witten-Herdecke. By the 1980s, in this completely off-beat-with-othermanagement-schools school, economist Michael Hutter, management professor Ekkehard Kappler, and art historian Michael Bockemühl lectured on art and aesthetics to fascinated business students. Much later, Hutter headed a path-breaking research group at the renowned Wissenschaftszentrum in Berlin. They set out to investigate “innovation” not as a technological phenomenon but as an aesthetic one. Their investigation was not just done on a whim, for it hinged on connecting business studies to a long philosophical European tradition. The roots of this thinking lay bare at the private German management school in Witten-Herdecke. Symbolically situated in the middle of the industrial ruins of the Ruhr area, Witten wanted to present alternatives to old industrial capitalism. Its founding patrons were German capitalists with a weakness for neoromantic German philosophy known as anthroposophy. Shortly before his death in 1984, Joseph Beuys had himself contributed to the establishment of this Witten management school much in line with his idea Kunst ¼ Kapital which he undoubtedly saw as a more philosophical concrete alternative to hitherto dominating art trends of art ¼ politics. Beuys was also inspired by anthroposophy, which by way of Rudolf Steiner’s translations of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s writings is a product of the aesthetics of Kant and Schiller. In short, the students and faculty of Witten-Herdecke had elaborate philosophical reasons for linking business to art. Claus Otto Scharmer, a Witten student who in the mid-1980s invited me to join his Schiller reading group, is now a MIT professor with a successful consulting concept, which he calls “presencing” in his bestseller Theory U (Scharmer 2013) which references to Steiner. Schiller and Kant reveal his inspiration from philosophical aesthetics (Guillet de Monthoux and Statler 2014). I met Claus Otto in the 1990s when I taught at Witten in tune with art ¼ capital. With students, I playfully reformulated the MBA in a Beuysian spirit to a “Master of Business Art” later transferred into a film in two parts today accessible on YouTube (Guillet de Monthoux 2003). In spring of 2000 the Märkischen Museum

28

Curating Management Philosophy: Art and Aesthetics for Business Education

537

in Witten opened our curated exhibition baptized Oeconomenta after the big show in Kassel. Two of the participating students, Mark Markowski and Hergen Wöbken, later edited an ambitious volume about the event (Markowski and Wöbken 2007). “Oeconomenta” as a case however remained in the cases of imitation art, since a lack of philosophical confidence that might have deepened and harnessed the event remained an unarticulated backdrop to the vivid curatorial experience.

Intervention Art: 2005 and the Product/Vision Show Some claim the wet dream of business graduates is to become a McKinsey consultant, and some artists who are trying to cure society of capitalism have had similar thoughts. In 2005, a Berlin-based artist group acting as capitalism consultants took part in the large exhibition Product/Vision under the co-curation of artists Mari Brellochs and Henrik Schrat. Schrat had already participated in an earlier exhibition Art Works Consulting curated 2001 in the Berlin Gallery Haus am Lützowplatz. Both shows aimed at stimulating reflections on business and management through the lens of curating contemporary art. Henrik Schrat would be the first artist of a group engaged in capitalism art interventions to receive a PhD in business organization (Schrat 2011). When another Product/Vision artist Philippe Mairesse defended his Jacques Rancière-inspired thesis (Mairesse 2014), a decade later a cohort of artists had already received their PhDs from departments of management in Italy, Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands. Academic supervisors judging that artists having curated experiences with a bearing on the worlds of business might have something special to contribute facilitated this. When curating the Product/Vision show, Brellochs and Schrat were inspired by the British Artist Placement Group. APG rose in the spirit of Fluxus and were close to artists like Yoko Ono and Joseph Beuys. In the 1970s, the APG battle cry to industrial corporations and companies was “not to collect artists, but to use them.” Forget about the market for physical artworks and focus instead on hiring artists to work inside the economy. With this motto, APG had successfully negotiated artist projects in public administrations, health, and mining in the UK. Mind you, the APG access to organizations was far easier to negotiate before than after Thatcher’s privatizations. With the APG model in mind, the Berlin curators managed to convince a single company to open up to their large group of artists. For 1 month, the Berlin publisher Cornelsen got a whole brigade of artists crawling “under its company skin.” Performance artist Armin Chodzinski, also to be granted a PhD (Chodzinski 2007), had a top management background before opting for art. This is how he interpreted the motivation of the business firm to welcome artists: Some companies are looking, but they cannot find the intellectual potential [among artists to deal with the economy) (author’s alteration). The only people in the art world who approach topics in a complex way are leftist artists, but no one wants to talk to them because they think in boring categories and demonize their opponent. (Brellochs and Schrat 2005, p 11)

538

P. Guillet de Monthoux

Curating this encounter between a company hoping for interesting exchanges and artists programmed for curing society of capitalism did not prove to be an easy task for Brellochs and Schrat. In her study of Product/Vision, Anke Strauss (2017) analyzed the failed dialogue between artists and their model, the company. Barbara Steveni, APG’s archivist invited as keynote speaker to Berlin, made her position clear: artists should aim to solve business problems but also indicate new opportunities. This attitude clashed with that of some artists who intended that dialogue would only develop if it were taking concrete company problems as its starting points. The Product/Vision dilemma in a nutshell: how to curate capitalism if capitalism is considered the main problem. Strauss summarized the deadlock: Being accountable to the art sphere, the artists were fighting with their thoughts colonized by the existing segments of the art world, within which business organizations were seen as institutional forms of capitalism that dominate society by constantly colonizing and appropriating everything around them . . . this left very little space to develop an inner place where artists . . . and managers could talk to each other in ways that would not constantly reproduce dominant relationships . . . being exposed the art discourse nurtured their suspicion towards . . . the Publishing House’s commitment to the project. (Strauss 2017, 119)

At that time company people had very vague ideas of what artists do, expecting them to paint pictures that could be hung on the walls. In Berlin in 2005, there was almost no mutual understanding; it was as if the worlds of art and industry were still at pre-hybridization, incompatible with each other.

Intentional Art After 2000 Curating as Philosophizing We can now sense that President Lars Strannegård’s curating at the Stockholm School of Economics differed radically from earlier attempts to use art as instruments in capitalism. What makes it practical for a school president to propose art as a foundation for business education and to legitimize his curatorial turn as neither a decorative design nor subversive cures of instrumental art? Art now enters the scene of management for different and more philosophical reasons. The world in 2019 was certainly not the same as when I enrolled as a student at SSE half a century ago. When I was guided by president Strannegård – it had also been 50 years since students 1968 globally revolted against capitalism – how then has today’s capitalism conditioned the curatorial turn? In his new book (Holmqvist 2018), a critical management scholar has recently claimed that the Stockholm School of Economics custom-produced graduates to order for capitalism. He reasons that business education churns out well-oiled cogs to what Theodor Adorno in the 1950s defined as the capitalistic mechanism of the administrated world. But are the students of 2018 really just obedient servants of capitalism while the 1968 revolutionaries were truly critical? Were students in 1968 actively fighting to cure society of the same ugly capitalism that business students today may have pledged a passive allegiance to?

28

Curating Management Philosophy: Art and Aesthetics for Business Education

539

The reason why President Strannegård tosses in art in his school is however hardly to and embellish or celebrate business as usual in form of old industrial capitalism. He rather seems to have turned to curating in order to stimulate change and reflection. Business neither needs useful idiots, nor is capitalism so graspable and organized that it offers clear-cut models to which it collaborators might easily adapt. The purpose of education is rather to stimulate thinking than drilling professionals fit for predefined organizational functions. VUCA capitalism today is fluid and fuzzy; nothing you can easily target or overthrow. While students in 1968 wanted to seize their zero-sum share of the power of business organizations, their grandchildren today are busy creating new softer market power. The fact that the “art initiative” in the school emerged as a bottom-up and pragmatic student projects may have something to do with their interest in such political experiments. Recently the school now also officially welcomes students with an artistic background. Contemporary art seems today to rival with traditional sports as an extracurricular activity. This together with the top-down art passion of the schools president shapes an atmosphere favorable to curating business education. The strange new kind of fuzzy capitalism in which Lars Strannegård’s curating scores high on international top-school rankings opens up to new kinds of philosophical reflections. Paradoxically the capitalist realities emerging today seem to resonate surprisingly well with Guy Debord’s situationist program from the beginning of the 1950s: We have to multiply poetic subjects and objects – which are now unfortunately so rare that the slightest ones take on an exaggerated emotional importance – and we have to organize games for these poetic subjects to play with these poetic objects. This is our entire program, which is essentially transitory. Our situations will be ephemeral, without a future. Passageways. Our only concern is real life; we care nothing about the permanence of art or of anything else. Eternity is the grossest idea a person can conceive of in connection with his acts. (Debord 1957)

Curating Recognition of Aesthetic Autonomy Shortly after becoming president, Lars Strannegård publicly declared that “Art and culture make up the foundation for economic activities.” In other words, art is not just a useful instrument of trade, it is a necessary ontological platform for business. Turning away from instrumentality opened the way for a discussion of the intentionality of art, and Strannegård’s statement also immediately gave the school’s curatorial experiments a credibility in the art community. Soon the implication of leaving the realm of instrumental for that of intentional art became articulated in philosophical lectures arranged by the SSE Art Initiative. In 2015, for instance, philosopher Graham Harman (2011, 2015, 2018) known for his object-oriented speculative realism, visited the school. He emphasized how art should be approached as objects with immanent intentions beyond what he labels “overmining” or “undermining” (Nilson and Wikberg 2020). The purpose of curating art is not to embed it in clever interpretations or making of meaning. Familiarizing students with art encourages them to perform a phenomenological epoché by

540

P. Guillet de Monthoux

stripping them of theories in order to search for their very own intentions. To Harman the encounter with an object of art is an opportunity to make an experience. This teachable moment, where art opens to philosophizing, is lost if we maintain a distance to art by engaging in the history or sociology of art. This so-called object-oriented speculative realism seems to develop the classical Kantian position of aesthetics as a third realm of its own into a phenomenology recognizing the power of curated artful atmospheres. After Graham Harman philosopher Catherine Malabou (2017) was invited to reflect on the relevance of such a phenomenological perspective. She added reflections on how our age of the Anthropocene makes the dualisms between object and subject assumed in most social theory a highly questionable condition. Curated encounters with artists engaged in what we may call “atmospheric art” – Olafur Eliasson, Arthur Jafa, and Ann Lislegaard, to name a few – cultivate experiencing inside their works of art. Experiencing visits into exhibitions transforming outside spectators into inside participants plunged into curated moods can become the starting point for reflecting on phenomenological hospitality. Such direct experiences also point at the relevance of new aesthetics of atmospheres, for instance, that provided by philosopher Gernot Böhme’s (2017) rereading of Immanuel Kant’s third critic. This kind of philosophizing, as we know from Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics, cannot begin with concepts and theories. If texts are used, they will be relevant less as information and representations that are literary pieces of art. Philosophical reflections beyond positivistic perspectives on knowledge have, it seems, been rooted in concrete direct experiences, and that’s why curating has gained an important place in management education. As I walked through the Stockholm School of Economics, I realized that such phenomenologically tainted approaches to art would probably not have been possible in a business school before 2000. Art then was a decoration, status, critique, or simply illustrative representation and has taken both big changes in business and curating to change that narrow attitude. Just an example to understand this aesthetic turn! A couple of large pictures tucked away in a windowless classroom downstairs from the school atrium have been hanging there a long time. They are architectural sketches by Christo Javacheff for his and his wife Jeanne-Claude’s gigantic installations in Florida in 1982, Paris in 1985, Berlin in 1995, and New York in 2005. They were familiar to me from a time long before Lars Strannegård became president. In 1994, Christo had visited Stockholm before the German Bundestag in Bonn was to vote on whether to permit him to wrap up the Reichstag in Berlin in 1995. The interview Christo then gave at his Stockholm Gallery Flach shows just how the then deep-rooted prejudice of art as instrumental totally blocked his energetic attempts to reconsider art as intentional. Sound bites from Stina Dabrowski’s (SD) interview with Christo Javacheff (CJ) reveal the bias: SD: Why don’t you do something useful for people, such as building houses? CJ: What separates man from beast is that we make art. We need more artists on our globe. SD: Why don’t you have any sponsors?

28

Curating Management Philosophy: Art and Aesthetics for Business Education

541

CJ: We finance everything ourselves without subsidies and sponsors by selling sketches of future installations. We want full freedom, no compromises. What we want is “no strings attached.” And it’s important to understand that the drawings and paintings we sell are not our art, they are about our art. They are financial instruments for, and shares in, the works: the installations. SD: Why are you doing this? CJ: This is a completely irrational and fully aesthetic venture. No one needs our art. There are no reasons or moral grounds for why we do it. They originate from their own incredible urgency and internal necessity. Everyone is saying that the projects are so expensive, but what does a road, a bridge, or a tall building cost? SD: Are you seeking power or a life of luxury? CJ: Our installations are temporary; we do not create for eternity. We have lived in the same New York loft for decades and have no permanent employees. The prices for our paintings and drawings are quite normal in the art market. What we get out of it is a great feeling of upliftedness and almost ecstasy. SD: Do you ever fail? CJ: We prepare everything very carefully. Our “hardware work” concerns how to technically create our installations. But a lot of our work concerns negotiations to get to execute the projects; this is what we call our “software” work. An ordinary artist paints paintings by mixing pigments. Our pigments are politicians, the press. and other people we need to convince. If we fail, which we have done frequently, this is because we haven’t been sufficiently intelligent in the “software” phase. SD: But why? How would you pitch this to my grandmother? CJ: We make projects that, to be honest, are purely aesthetic. We work based on an internal necessity. We pay for all of this ourselves. Our entire production is sustainable, we recycle all of the material. We want to give the public a free experience of total freedom and beauty. (Transcribed from rush video materials in author’s archive)

Curating for Rematerializing Philosophy Lars Strannegård’s concerns about education in an era of programming, mechanization, and digitalization have made him interested in curating as approaching “knowledge you cannot Google.” In 2019 philosophers Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein published a thorough analysis of JeanFrancois Lyotard’s iconic 1985 Beaubourg show “Les Immatériaux” (Birnbaum and Wallenstein 2019). Before Lyotard, now remembered for minting the concept of “postmodernity,” was called in to curate the Paris show, it had actually been conceived as a pretty hands-on investigation of how new materials, especially connected to computing and communication, entered the processes of industrial design. He then realized that curating might support thinking thus being an integral part of the process of philosophizing. What thus happened in 1985 is today looked upon as the beginning of a new era when philosophers engage in curating to make points beyond what could achieved by writing only. “Les Immatériaux” is now

542

P. Guillet de Monthoux

interpreted as an iconic attempt to develop curating for philosophizing that also enticed social scientist to make art shows. This was, for instance, why Bruno Latour has engaged in making exhibitions by co-curating show, as, for instance, “Iconoclash” (2002), “Making Things Public” (2005), and “Gaia: Reset Modernity” (2016). Birnbaum and Wallenstein furthermore discovered that Lyotard had planned exploring the theme rematerialization in a never realized follow-up exhibition. It seems Lyotard intended to develop his “spacing” method, which according to Birnbaum and Wallenstein, “seeks out a common space, (for) a. . .profound and complex exchange. . .(that) eventually led him (Lyotard) to take on the role of the curator, if only for a brief moment, with the 1985 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, ‘Les Immatériaux’” (Broeckmann 2015). Not only can we now with Antonio Strati (1999, 2019) rediscover the relevance of classics of aesthetic philosophies for understanding the organizations of capitalism. We also see how, after the focus on the digital, virtual and informational creates a demand for rethinking the bodily and material (Kearney 2019). No doubt the quest for rematerialization in a robotized, algorithmic, and digitalized world might today also help explaining the success of Lars Strannegård’s art-based experiments in vitalizing business education by curating. In the history of capitalism, there has been curating before. Birnbaum and Wallenstein note how the nineteenth-century world exhibitions used theatrical enchantment as the marketing tool of commodification. Apposing curating as marketing the avantgarde engaged in Marxian curating of disenchantment aiming at carefully sorting out the commercial from the cultural. Curating then oscillated between enchanting value of exchange and disenchating the value of objects as back to their value in use. Today there is however a third way in which curating enters management philosophy; as an uptick in interest in how art may convey a truth-value. This seems to be the context making rematerialization central to philosophical reflection. To Lyotard, his planned second show would approach rematerialization as disturbances, noise, and interruptions in information, communication, and computerization. When asked “Why art?”, President Strannegård also talks of its role as material “irritations” and intellectual “itching powder” for business students. It is after such “irritation” that the need to philosophize is felt. We may see it as the phenomenological widening of the too-narrow perspective of subjective cognition that Herman Schmitz, philosopher of “new phenomenology,” scolds for it costing us “huge losses of normal life-experiences of both the world and the self” (author’s translation) (Schmitz 2016, 8). The curated irritations of art provide a platform of shared experience form where philosophizing in the management school classroom might take off. Curating then seems a strategy to introduce the immediate, visual, sensual, carnal, and material in places otherwise dominated by the cognitive, intellectual, textual, mediated, and immaterial. It might help both philosophers and economists to face the “particular,” “singular,” “uncanny,” and “special” otherwise obscured by research focusing on the “general,” “universal,” and “normal.” Curating renders a rematerialization that, in the words of Birnbaum and Wallenstein, makes “spacing philosophy” possible.

28

Curating Management Philosophy: Art and Aesthetics for Business Education

543

In 2016 the SSE Art Initiative arranged a lecture at the Moderna Museet, where artist Olafur Eliasson was just finishing a large exhibition. Olafur likes to refer to his installations as “reality machines,” (Guillet de Monthoux 2012) art as material wakeup calls, time to throw off thick and lukewarm theoretical blankets. Showing his art and its installations to an audience of business students led Olafur to also propose “teachable moments.” To him materialization refrains him to: . . .talk about art as if the rest of the world does not exist . . . the artwork otherwise becomes incredibly closed . . . So, when does the world become static? When do we become extremely self-obsessed with our own models of reality? When do we forget to realize that reality is dynamic, that it must constantly be re-negotiated? When do we forget that it is a reality machine? Hey, we must wake up . . . Like in many cities with new buildings. How do you cope with that change you want to be part of too? How does this new thing fit into a city otherwise closed and looked upon as a static museum. (transcription from lecture Moderna Museet 2016)

Curatorial Schwung: Philosophy as Aesthetic Action When students at the Stockholm School of Economics wondered why the school housed an increasing number of artworks and featured many artist talks, Lars asked them, “So what is the most fun: the school with or the school without art?”. This question of course reflects the Schillerian interpretation of the purpose of Kantian aesthetics, to liberate us from form and matter by inspiring our playfulness (Guillet de Monthoux 2004). Without exception, students in Stockholm got this point. What is on display might seem strange, odd, and irritating to you, but believe me, said Lars, it’s nothing compared to the VUCA, i.e., the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous capitalisms you will face upon graduating. This art initiative is indeed impacting the school’s entire pedagogical mission. By welcoming the intentionality of exhibited artwork, the school welcomed the hospitality of curated atmospheres in its quest for “knowledge you cannot Google.” The Swedish example is impressive and highly visible but is still hardly exceptional among business schools that seriously consider their futures. Visual art especially is seen as a fresh experimental way to rethink education for those preparing for a career working in and changing capitalisms. A non-scholastic playful way of stimulating philosophizing is by immediate contact with objects. To explore current experiments in curating at business schools, the SSE Art Initiative brought together representatives from eight top-ranked European business schools. The professor in charge of art at the University of St. Gallen, with its impressive permanent collection of works by Miró, Giacometti, Braque, Calder, Paladin, Disler, and Richter, explained: Our goal was never to build a grand collection; that such a collection still came into being is due to the fact that we received help from an active Harald Szeemann in the 1970s, who would eventually become a mentor to one of our students, Hans Ulrich Obrist. Everything is done with privately raised money, work by work. The most important thing for us is not the

544

P. Guillet de Monthoux

art hanging on the walls, but the meeting between artists and students in the sense that the artist gets to meet the student. (Transcribed interview with author)

The curator of HEC Paris visual art program concretized where a fruitful student/ artist encounter might lead: Since many students looking at contemporary installation art tend to say, “my little brother at home can do that kind of stuff,” we offered everyone who wanted to build their own installation in a workshop together with the artist. All I can say is that afterwards, they had a completely different picture of what the making of art entails. (Transcribed interview with author)

The growing interest in how artists work has inspired the Confederation of German Employers’ Association to fund the Bronnbacher program, a successful series of exclusive studio visits. Independent curator Konstantinos Adamopoulos handpicks students and researchers from the University of Mannheim to engage in intense dialogues with socially involved artists. Karen Vandenberg, professor of art theory and curating at the management school Zeppelin University, focuses on introducing students to how artists work. Before new capitalisms began replacing old industrialism after the millennium turn, management scholar Robert Austin (1996; Austin and Devin 2003; Devin and Austin 2012), who long instructed Harvard Business School students about how artists work, investigated its origins. Rob claimed that those working in the field of art do so in a freedom and trust that vanishes when jobs are managed by old industrial methods of control. Karen Vandenberg commented on the importance of analyzing the explicit role of today’s art in a business education: When we introduce art in higher education, we need to move between two discourses: art and science. But there is a third discourse: education . . .we need engage in research on what knowledge is provided by art. Intuitively we realize the educational value of art but today everything has to be evaluated and measured. . .. still I think when industrialization loses its grip over society, new possibilities open up to look at the creation of knowledge as less rationalistic, less methodical. Production in general, as well as art and science, is dependent on social relations, atmospheres and moods. . . (Transcribed interview with author)

So what is this “episteme” implicitly assumed by both Lars Strannegård’s curating and philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard’s curatorial experiment? Trying to articulate how curating opens up to new sort of knowledge seems fundamental to understanding both contemporary art and artists. An experienced curator running a course on “Tacit and Artistic Knowledge” at Zeppelin University explained: We know that business students’ ideas of art and artists are completely outmoded. When we have had photography workshops, they think that they will be able to learn photography and are surprised that we neither teach analog black and white photography nor work with digital selfies. It is quite pathetic when courses in painting are offered to business students or managers. The poor things are asked to smear oil paint onto canvases. This is not art. Artists we are currently working with are all interested in co-production. They are used to working

28

Curating Management Philosophy: Art and Aesthetics for Business Education

545

in projects. We avoid old-fashioned oil-smearing painter-divas who booze, party, and get their kicks out of conflict. (Transcribed interview with author)

Aalto University in Finland features a unique university-wide art program. The university president assigned its whole art school an overall mission to hybridize both the Aalto management and engineering schools with art: So we want to change the way we look upon art . . . we want to see art as platforms for transformation, social spaces for change . . . Although students are focused on their respective disciplines, they demand change, newness, and critical perspectives. We think that art as creative practices can give this . . . we develop new art-based models of education and pedagogy. (Transcribed interview with author)

President Lars Strannegård is hardly alone in his experimentation in curating. According to Birnbaum and Wallenstein, curating for Lyotard meant “spacing philosophy.” Maybe Lars and his peers will curate management knowledge away from being what David Graeber ironically calls a “shed full of broken tools. . .designed to solve another century’s problems” (Graeber 2019). Since the last millennium’s shift, curating capitalism undoubtedly has gained momentum. But even under favorable conditions, nothing can happen without individual action. It takes action for a philosopher or management scholar to engage in curating. A spark is needed to ignite a fire, and a project has to be launched and set in motion. Many have gathered sound intellectual reasons for making art a part of education, but it takes presidents like Strannegård to use their power and “just do it.” The much cited aesthetic poet Friedrich Schiller (1967) wrote about such energizing actions as Schwung. This German word translates into an “elegant and powerful gesture.” French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) also developed a philosophy of creative action around what he referred to as the “Elan Vital.” Business studies overflow with similar ideas with philosophical roots in anarchistic action ideas (Guillet de Monthoux). Recently entrepreneurship researcher Daniel Hjorth has explicitly coined his motto for business action as Where to Start? Start with Art. Schiller tries to understand the beauty of such artistic Schwungful action that makes us: . . .not prize noble conduct because it surpasses the nature of its subject – on the contrary, it must flow freely and without constraint – but because it surpasses the nature of its object (i.e. its physical end) and passes beyond this into the realm of spirit. In the first case, one might say, we marvel at the victory which the object achieves over man; in the latter we admire the elan (in German: Schwung) which man imparts to the object. (Schiller 1967, 167)

A simpler definition of Schwung as what triggers Schiller-style curating of capitalisms incorporates its challenge: A leap it must be called, since a completely new power now goes into action; for here . . . the imagination, in its attempts at a free form, finally makes the leap to aesthetic play. (Schiller 1967, 209)

546

P. Guillet de Monthoux

Cross-References ▶ Aesthetics, Management, and the Organization of Space

References Austin R (1996) Measuring and managing performance in organizations. Dorset House Publishing, New York Austin R, Devin L (2003) Artful making: what managers need to know about how artists work. FF Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River Barry D, Meisiek S (2015) Discovering the business studio. J Manag Educ 39(1):78–94 Birnbaum D, Wallenstein SO (2019) Spacing philosophy; Lyotard and the idea of the exhibition. Sternberg Press, Berlin Böhme G (2017) The aesthetics of atmospheres. Routledge, London Brellochs M, Schrat H (eds) (2005) Product/vision: sophisticated survival strategies, strategies in art and economy. Kadmos Kulturverlag, Berlin Broeckmann A (2015) Jean-Louis Boissier in conversation with Andreas Broeckmann; The Production of Les Immatériaux. In: Hui Y, Broeckmann A (eds) 30 Years after Les Immatériaux. Meson ess, Lüneburg Chodzinski A (2007) Peter Behrens, Emil Ratenau und der dm-drogerie markt. Kadmos Kulturverlag, Berlin Dahl P (1992) Rätt och fel. Norstedts, Stockholm Dahl P (1994) Ofullbordat. Norstedts, Stockholm Darsö L (2016) Art in business. In: Johansson-Sköldberg U et al (eds) Artistic interventions in organizations, research, theory and practice. Routledge, London Debord G (1957) Report on the construction of situations; and on the international situationist tendency’s conditions of organization and action. www: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/ report.html; Accessed 19 Jan 2020 Devin L, Austin R (2012) The soul of design: harnessing the power of plot to create extraordinary products. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto Dewey J (2005) Art as experience. Perigee Books, New York Graeber D (2019) Against economics, review of Money and Government; The past and future of economics by Robert Skidelsky. In The New York Review of Books LXVI. no. 19, 58 Guillet de Monthoux P (2003) Masters of business art 1 and 2. Videos on Youtube, Part 1 https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v¼6f698oKcXY0; Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch? v¼aGQM0i6b-T8; Accessed 19 Jan 2020 Guillet de Monthoux P (2004) The art firm, aesthetic management and metaphysical marketing. Stanford university press, Palo Alto Guillet de Monthoux P (2012) Organizing reality machines, artepreneurs and the new aesthetic enlightenment. In: Hjorth D (ed) Handbook of organizational entrepreneurship. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham Guillet de Monthoux P (2015) Art, philosophy and business: turns to speculative realism in European Management Scholarship. Eur Manag J 33(3):161–167 Guillet de Monthoux P (2018) Making art/doing research Assar Lindbeck reflecting on creativity in economics. In: Guillet de Monthoux P, Stasinski R (eds) The Heckscher-Ohlin room. Stockholm School of Economics Art Initiative, Stockholm Guillet de Monthoux P, Statler M (2014) Rethinking theory U as practical European philosophy. In: Gunnlaugasson O et al (eds) Perspectives on theory U: insights from the field. IGI Global, Hershey Guillet de Monthoux P, Wikberg E (2021) Economic Ekphrasis: Goldin+Senneby and art for economic education. Sternberg Press, Berlin

28

Curating Management Philosophy: Art and Aesthetics for Business Education

547

Harman G (2011) The quadruple object. Zero Books, Ropley Harman G (2015) Lecture: what is an object. Lecture Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v¼9eiv-rQw1lc; Accessed 19 Jan 2020 Harman G (2018) Art and object. Polity Press, Oxford Holmqvist M (2018) Handels: Maktelitens skola. Atlantis, Stockholm Hutter M (2015) The rise of the joyful economy. Routledge, London Kearney R (2019) The recovery of the flesh in Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty. In: Kearney et al (eds) Somatic desire, recovering corporeality in contemporary thought. Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham King I, Vickery J (eds) (2013) Experiencing organizations, new aesthetic perspectives. Libri Publishing, Faringdon Lundahl M (2018) The inspiration for the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem. In: Guillet de Monthoux P, Stasinski R (eds) The Heckscher-Ohlin room. Stockholm School of Economics Art Initiative, Stockholm Mairesse P (2014) Reversal. Le partage de la parole comme expérience sensible, esthétique et politique. Editions Access Local, Paris Malabou C (2017) The brain history of the mentality of the antropocene. Lecture Youtube: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v¼wJPLGEdRGGc; Accessed 19 Jan 2020 Markowski M, Wöbken H (eds) (2007) Oeconomenta. Kadmos Kulturverlag, Berlin Minahan S, Wolfram Cox J (2017) The aesthetic turn in management. Routledge, London Mir A (ed) (2003) Corporate mentality, an archive documenting the emergence of recent practices within the cultural sphere occupied by both business and art. Lukas & Sternberg, Berlin Nilson I, Wikberg E (eds) (2020) Artful objects: Graham Harman on art and the business of speculative realism. Stenberg Press, Berlin Nordström K (2002) Funky business, talent makes capital dance. Bookhouse, Stockholm Raviola E, Zackariasson P (eds) (2017) Arts and business, building a common ground for understanding society. Routledge, London Scharmer C (2013) Theory U: leading from the future as it emerges. McGraw-Hill Education, New York Schiller F (1967) On the aesthetic education of man in a series of letters. Oxford University Press, Oxford. p 209 Schmitz H (2016) Atmosphären. Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg. 8 Schrat H (2011) Meanwhile. . . Wham! Comic and its communication value in organizational context. PhD diss., University of Essex Strannegård L (2019) Citation from transcription of video of art tour in Stockholm School of Economics Strati A (1999) Organization and aesthetics. Sage, London Strati A (2019) Organizational theory and aesthetic philosophies. Routledge, London Strauss A (2017) Dialogues between art and business: collaborations, cooptations, and autonomy in a knowledge society. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Part IV Social and Political Philosophy of Management

Social and Political Philosophy of Management: An Introduction

29

Marian Eabrasu

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Elasticity and Permeability of Social and Political Spheres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Chapters in This Section: Illustrating the Permeability and Elasticity of the Social and Political Spheres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Avenues for a Philosophical Understanding of Social and Political Challenges for Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

552 553 555 557 560 560 560

Abstract

This chapter introduces the Social and Political Philosophy section of the Handbook of Philosophy of Management by pointing out the elasticity of the political and social spheres and the permeability of their frontier with management. The chapters selected for this section illustrate precisely that elasticity and permeability. Moreover, this introduction goes beyond mere observation of the current state of research in this area and indicates avenues for further research. It argues that a focus on the social and political challenges from a philosophical standpoint could better inform the current discussions in management studies about their impact on business. Keywords

Grand social challenges · Legitimacy · Political sphere · Political obligation · Social sphere

M. Eabrasu (*) EM Normandie Business School, Métis Lab, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_58

551

552

M. Eabrasu

Introduction The heterogeneity of political arrangements represents an obvious challenge for every type of business, especially for those who operate across several legal frameworks (Scherer and Palazzo 2011). Consider, for instance, the dilemma of a multinational company expected to protect human rights as formulated in liberal democracies while also having to abide by the law of countries where political regimes are illiberal or even authoritarian (White 2004; Brenkert 2009). Some companies explicitly disobey laws they deem immoral (Wasserstrom 1961), even within liberal democracies (Young 2019) or those who come under the pressure of various stakeholders such as NGOs or consumer groups to divest from countries or sectors considered immoral (Bond 1988). Furthermore, the magnitude of all these political challenges that businesses unavoidably must deal with is greatly amplified by their embeddedness within complex social contexts generating their own specific challenges. These social issues vary through time and place and thus have uneven impacts on business operations. However, global scholarly and media focus confirms the urgency of such grand social challenges, including poverty, immigration, various types of inequalities, and discrimination. Therefore, managers must eventually confront such challenges, even if they were to arise unexpectedly. Certainly, management scholars and practitioners are increasingly aware of these issues, and new research fields in political and social issues in management have emerged, enhancing scholarly understanding of and public attention to these matters. In a recent study, Erkal and Vandekerckhove (2021) found that 83 out of 358 (23.18%) of the total published articles in the Philosophy of Management journal were covering issues related to “social and political philosophy”; they also noted that this tendency is growing in the past years (Erkal and Vandekerckhove 2021, see Table 6). However, to better understand and explain the ubiquity of political and social issues in business, theorists must take a step back and engage with the long-standing philosophical conversations in these areas (Mir and Greenwood 2021). This is precisely the aim of this introductory chapter (and implicitly of the rest of this handbook section on ▶ “Social and Political Philosophy of Management”). More specifically, the chapter shows that the omnipresence of the social and political challenges stems from the permeability and extensibility of their respective spheres. Using a philosophical standpoint in studying political and social affairs (and the related issues they generate) offers a more ample view of their complex workings. Such a wide philosophical angle, hence, improves the understanding and assessment of social and political challenges for business (Eabrasu and Wilson 2022). This introductory chapter unfolds as follows. The first part highlights two critical features of the social and political spheres: permeability and extensibility. The second part shows how the chapters selected for this section illustrate these features precisely. The third part moves the discussion further by pointing out the fundamental philosophical questions that remain open and ready to inspire future research.

29

Social and Political Philosophy of Management: An Introduction

553

Elasticity and Permeability of Social and Political Spheres In Nicomachean Ethics (1984, Book 1, §2), Aristotle famously referred to the science of political matters as a “master science,” encompassing all other sciences. This claim (which nowadays might, admittedly, be considered conceited) is grounded in the observation that political issues are generated by various and complex individual and collective interactions that cannot be avoided when persons live together. Nonetheless, political matters are important not only because they concern interpersonal relations but because they refer to situations where individuals share or compete for scarce resources (broadly understood, i.e., both material and immaterial) to attain their own goals. The need to make a political decision about using common resources generates conflicts among society members, who have diverse interests and preferences – hence the crucial importance of political decisions that have significant consequences, positive or negative, on the persons and the groups they belong to. Political choices shape not only the welfare and the wellbeing of those who are concerned by them but also their aspirations and expectations, their objectives and opportunities. Furthermore, the political sphere partially overlaps the social sphere, thereby adding a supplementary degree of complexity to the collective decisions. While the political sphere revolves around the concepts of state and government (Eabrasu 2012), the social sphere is arguably broader, including a wider variety of institutions and organizations. As Bunge (1999, p. 62) famously put it, “society is a system of systems,” thereby including not only states but also families, firms, schools, etc. It is precisely within this broader perspective that “society provides opportunities to examine those largest of political questions-inequalities in political power and varying capacities to effect change in the social order which arise out of both private and governmental institutions and inextricably link society and politics” (Hays 1985, p. 499). The scarce collective resources are not only rationalized through political regulations, as alluded to above, but also through social norms and rules (Fleetwood 2021). On the one hand, social rules are habitually interpreted as socially constructed injunctions external to individuals who may or may not decide to abide by them. Not abiding by them leads to various forms of social punishment, such as the explicit exclusion from a group. On the other hand, social norms are deemed part of collective memories and cognitive systems and, thereby, are organically embedded within the individual agents (regardless of whether they act in their own name or on behalf of a larger group). While social norms can be learned, understood, and to a certain extent, knowingly assumed, the way they shape individual and collective action is mainly implicit, as is the punishment for not abiding by them (such as shunning). Because political decisions, social rules, and norms can influence the goals of any action, the social and political spheres are outstandingly permeable as they constantly irrigate human interactions and, more particularly, business interactions that involve exchanges. The political and social spheres are not only porous but also elastic since the regulations, rules, and norms can affect a significant number of interactions. The

554

M. Eabrasu

contemporary trend, however, is toward an extension of the social and political spheres. Outside the political and social spheres typically lie scientific controversies such as those regarding the verifiability of facts and natural events, the soundness of methodological protocols, habitually solved through epistemological considerations such as veracity, falsity, probability, or validity. However, many such scientific controversies have taken a political and social turn in the past decades. Consider, for instance, the politicization of the scientific conversations over climate change (Giddens 2009), which has opened a whole range of conversations about the tradeoffs, such as those between lowering greenhouse gas emissions by decarbonizing economic production, and the feared slowing of economic development through that very process of decarbonization (Bernauer 2013). Consider also the critiques of the politicization of scientific expertise, a process that Easterly (2014) famously denounces as the “tyranny of experts” when referring to the role of technocrats in dealing with social issues, such as poverty. As he points out, science is increasingly used to cover a political agenda. Another outstanding application of the tyranny of experts is the COVID-19 pandemic (Storr et al. 2021; Coyne et al. 2021; Candela and Geloso 2021). “This ‘tyranny of experts,’ and the knowledge problem from which it arises, has been in full exhibit amid this pandemic. A problem to be solved, with the avoidance of death as the top and, in fact, only political priority in most cases, politicians turned to expert immunologists and epidemiologists, the World Health Organization (WHO), and other public health experts for guidance. Unfortunately, these experts were faced with making policy recommendations based on very little data and scientific knowledge about the virus, its spread, or the illness that it causes” (Bylund and Packard 2021). In past decades, we can also note how various interactions, spanning from interracial or intergender relations to mass migration, acquired a growing political and social relevance. Certainly, the importance of the #Me Too (Fileborn and LoneyHowes 2019) and #Black Lives Matter (Clayton 2018) movements, or the magnitude of the migratory phenomenon (Portes 2010) signal that the racial, gender, or migratory issues must be interpreted through a political and social lens. All these phenomena refer not to anodyne interactions but to large-scale social and political events. Furthermore, they are now tagged with a normative connotation, thus inviting them to make crucial political and social decisions about allocating collective resources spanning from mere rights and privileges to redistributing wealth and natural goods. As Krugman recently put it, “in twenty-first-century America, everything is political” (Krugman 2020, p. 9). In short, a significant number of issues turn out to be political and social, with an increasing impact on business relations. As the firm and its stakeholders are operating within a political and social environment, the firm’s objectives and opportunities are modified by political decisions and social events and changes. When managers consider that business operations cannot benefit from political intervention or social change, they naturally want to disconnect their operations from the political and social contexts. So, they refrain from taking a stand on political and social matters. They also emphasize the pure technicity of business operations as a process, merely connecting “means” to “ends” without prejudging the “ends” that

29

Social and Political Philosophy of Management: An Introduction

555

should be chosen. For instance, within this perspective of normative neutrality of business, selling a product is meant to be a matter of market strategy (communication, negotiation, etc.) to find willing buyers. Yet, as noted above, it has become increasingly rare to commercialize a product that does not have social and political relevance or a normative issue tagged on. If the producer does not see it, the consumers or other stakeholders such as NGOs will notice and signal it, thereby implicitly compelling the producer to also take it into account. More recently, within the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the numerous calls of civil society for international companies to divest from Russia and/or to voice their opposition to the Russian political regime and its warfare are symptomatic of the fact that the habitual saying “business is business” does not hold anymore within this new international political context. Given its high degree of polarization, the claim of political neutrality of a firm pursuing its business activities in Russia is interpreted as an implicit political statement in support of the Russian regime. Instead of avoiding politicizing business relations by striving to plug the holes in the social and political spheres, management scholars and practitioners must acquire a more in-depth understanding of the social and political issues at stake in business. Only this way can they deliberately deal with these issues and thoughtfully understand the place of business in relation to contemporary political and social challenges.

The Chapters in This Section: Illustrating the Permeability and Elasticity of the Social and Political Spheres This section of the Handbook of the Philosophy of Management, which is dedicated to political and social issues, illustrates the two features of the social and political spheres described above: “permeability” and “elasticity.” Vincent Blok’s chapter not only offers the first exploration of Xenophon’s philosophy of management but also points out that since antiquity, the social sphere has permeated managerial thinking and practices (▶ Chap. 30, “Xenophon’s Philosophy of Management”). Xenophon’s book Oekonomikus offers a dialogue between Socrates and Critobulus (a wealthy young man, son of Crito); within the dialogue, Socrates relates another conversation between himself and Ischomachus, a noble and successful manager (kaloskagathos). While these dialogues are often depicted in economic history textbooks as a token of proto-economic theory, the originality of Blok’s approach is to show that there is also a managerial reading, one that is relevant for contemporary management theory and practice. Moreover, when pinning down Xenophon’s conception of management, Blok identifies nine dimensions that show Xenophon’s interpretation of management goes beyond the primary for-profit goal (first dimension) to include, for instance, “public admiration” (second dimension), “the integration of private and public interest” (third dimension), and “serving society” (ninth dimension). Xenophon’s “concept of management challenges not only contemporary conceptualizations of the differences between private and public management in political philosophical debates. It

556

M. Eabrasu

also challenges current business management practices that primarily aim at private interest and their redistribution via tax payment and philanthropic activities, and calls for the active engagement and integration of societal interests in the business operations in order to increase corporate social responsibility (CSR)” (▶ Chap. 30, “Xenophon’s Philosophy of Management”). From the same standpoint of ancient philosophy, the following two chapters focus on two essential virtues, “integrity” and “prudence,” which are often considered as personal virtues. Both chapters show that these personal virtues also have a social dimension as they enable an individual to function socially. The chapter by Philippe Jaquinot, entitled ▶ Chap. 32, “The Social Role of the Virtue of Integrity,” provides another example from antiquity where “integrity,” a classical virtue often considered a personal matter, also has a social role. The paper finds in Aristotelian political and social philosophy a conception of integrity as “the act, ingrained in the character, of honouring one’s promise to exercise the virtues of one’s social roles, in particular by controlling one’s appetite for gain.” Picturing integrity as either action or disposition, Jaquinot insists that there are promising avenues for research exploring the social dimensions of this virtue: A management researcher who takes an interest in integrity can now imagine it from another angle: that of a company that is gradually transformed into a working community where each member willingly provides assistance to the others, while exercising their role with determination. This offers new perspectives to the researcher in many different areas, such as the personal autonomy found in ‘liberated’ companies.

Pellisier-Tanon also explores the social dimension of personal virtue, focusing on phronesis (often translated as “prudence” or “practical wisdom”) in ▶ Chap. 31, “Wisdom Within the Firm: An Aristotelian-Hayekian Approach to the Managerial Process of Division and Coordination of Labor.” The author goes beyond Aristotle’s concept of phronesis in order to pin down the term’s social dimension with the help of a Hayekian perspective on division of labor. In doing so, the chapter connects the dots between conversations in economics about division of labor at the macro level and conversations in management about division of labor within the firm at the micro level. The chapter shows that, even at the micro level, there is a social dimension of phronesis comparable with the one often emphasized at the macro level: “Whether outside the company or within it, these individuals discover, in the flows of information they process, an opportunity for profitable intermediation between all involved parties.” Rather than focusing on the social dimension of a specific personal virtue, Delalieux, in ▶ Chap. 33, “A Critical Approach to Civil Society: The Case of Corporate Social Responsibility,” focuses on the permeability of political spheres and the way they influence areas that are habitually considered outside of it – such as civil society. He offers a critical view of the idealistic image of civil society as it was built during the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, an image that depicted civil society as a counterweight to the power of the government and as a haven from its misuses and abuses. In doing so, the chapter shows numerous connections within our contemporary society between government and civil society,

29

Social and Political Philosophy of Management: An Introduction

557

the way they influence each other and, especially, the way business activities influence both. An interesting point is that the permeability between politics and business works both ways. Politics can take over business, but also, business can take over politics. The chapter’s discussion of cases of governments manipulating companies and companies in more powerful positions than governments precisely illustrates this point: “In this context, the original liberal civil society utopia – conceived of as an autonomous counterweight to powerful political and economic institutions – could be transformed into the opposite: a neoliberal dystopia.” The last chapter presented in this section is authored by Paul Harper and ▶ Chap. 34, “Blackness as Dignity-in-Sacrifice: From Exploitation to Contribution.” It proposes to answer the fundamental and timely question: “On what grounds can Blackness be brought into dignity discourse given its historical success in barricading Blacks from consideration?” To answer it, the chapter points out the contemporary conversations on racial justice and offers a philosophical account of it. It further introduces “dignity discourse to a novel interpretation of the contributions enslaved Black people made to the American and global economy and, in so doing, re-orient our understanding of the conditions of slavery and the position occupied by enslaved people as having unexpected, invisible, and powerful forms of agency.” This chapter presents itself as a “prolegomenon” to a broader research stream on the “recognitionoriented organization.” It can also contribute to the field of political corporate social responsibility, which, at this point, is mainly concerned with redistributive forms of justice as articulated in the strategy literature (Scherer and Palazzo 2011; Scherer et al. 2014, 2016).

Avenues for a Philosophical Understanding of Social and Political Challenges for Business The impositions of the political and social spheres on management practice naturally catalyze the interest of management scholars in these issues. Indeed, the management literature of the past decades records an increasing number of papers, concepts, and theories explicitly dedicated to political and social issues. To bolster these research streams, various empirical research methods have been developed. Also, theories and conceptual grids of analysis specific to management studies have been developed internally or adapted from other related fields of study (Oswick et al. 2011; Cornelissen and Durand 2012). However, it is important to underline that most of these efforts were directed towards studying how these social and political issues were addressed within managerial thinking and less toward discussing and assessing them as self-standing issues worthy of consideration in themselves (Gray 1977) – a consideration that would eventually aid managers in assessing their impact on business activities (Windsor 2015). For instance, when social issues are taken into account in the management literature, they are mostly integrated within concepts and theories like “corporate social responsibility” (Matten and Moon 2004; Heli et al. 2016), “corporate social performance” (Margolis et al. 2007), or “social license to operate” (Gupta and Kumar 2018;

558

M. Eabrasu

Heffron et al. 2021). These approaches generally consist in discussing the social responsibilities that companies effectively assume, or ought to assume (Garriga and Melé 2004), in measuring their social impact (Ebrahim and Rangan 2014; Eabrasu 2015) or in imposing them as preconditions for legitimizing their business operations (Eabrasu et al. 2021). Hence, the predisposition when dealing with social issues is to apply management grids of analysis (Donaldson and Walsh 2015). Although this approach has merit, social performance or firms’ social license to operate does not suffice as a substitute for an accurate understanding of grand social challenges such as poverty, discrimination, or migration. Philosophy offers an ideal standpoint for adopting a large angle of analysis and obtaining an in-depth understanding of such macro issues and their implicit relevance for management (Davis 1958). Current discussions of the business strategies companies effectively deploy or should deploy for reducing poverty (Singer 2006), for instance, are better informed by a more accurate understanding of poverty (Miller 2010), of its meanings (Banerjee and Duflo 2012) and measurements (Duclos and Tiberti 2016). Hence, the dominant interest in the social impact of corporations could be complemented with a discussion of the effects of these grand social challenges on corporations. In parallel with the interest of management studies in the nature of the social responsibilities (in how companies should meet their social obligations and/or in how to measure them), we can also note a growing interest in political responsibilities and in integrating political issues within management thinking. “Political corporate social responsibility (CSR) involves businesses taking a political role to address ‘regulatory gaps’ caused by weak or insufficient social and environmental standards and norms” (Wickert 2014, p. 792). There are undoubtedly many reasons firms take political decisions, or ought to (Scherer et al. 2014; Scherer and Palazzo 2011), spanning from the moral obligation of doing good to merely strategic objectives (Jamali and Mirshak 2007). Also, depending on the firm’s size (Wickert 2016) or the specific political and social institutions and norms, there are also assuredly many ways a company can involve itself in public affairs: spanning from public and formal to merely informal interventions (Eabrasu and Ariss 2012). When looking, through the lens of political philosophy, at the political roles that private firms can or ought to play, we note that there are additional avenues to be explored. Besides filling the regulatory gaps, private firms could also be seen as a counterweight to political regimes. These political roles could consist in maintaining a pluralism of values and interests in society (Berlin and Williams 1994), in preserving individual and collective rights (Bertz 1998), in limiting the contemporary democratic backsliding (Haggard and Kaufman 2021), and/or in voicing opposition or disobeying (Pollman 2019). Philosophical theories of political obligation (Wellman and Simmons 2005) and legitimacy (Rosanvallon 2011) could, for instance, further fuel conversations on the conditions under which it becomes morally acceptable, or required, to disobey illegitimate laws and/or political regimes. Thus, an accurate assessment of the justifications and ways in which companies might assume a political role requires, in the first place, an understanding of the political issues at stake. Therefore, management studies on the political role of corporations also greatly benefit from philosophical inquiry into political challenges

29

Social and Political Philosophy of Management: An Introduction

559

(de Vaujany et al. 2019). A firm might willingly assume a political role when a government fails to meet social or environmental standards, yet this manifestly raises philosophical questions regarding its power (Melé and Rosanas 2003), legitimacy (Carson 2019; Lodge 2005), or representativity (Shadlen 2021) and, from the citizens’ point of view, it also raises questions of political obligation (Klosko 1994; Beran 1989; Simmons 1981). For instance, the philosophical perspective on representation is expected to inform the conditions under which it is acceptable for a private firm to assume a public role and eventually to address a regulatory gap. Consider as an example Pitkin’s (1967) conception of representation defined by the formula “making present again” and meant as a way of bringing the opinions, values, preferences of citizens to be “present” when their representatives are deciding public policies – and compare it with alternative conceptions of representation developed to take into account the contemporary transformations of democratic institutions (Estlund 2009), especially in international politics (Grant and Keohane 2005). More particularly, these discussions of how companies represent citizens when filling the regulatory gaps could be informed by Dryzek and Niemeyer (2008) concept of representation, which denotes discourses and not physical persons: “Discursive representation is one way to redeem the promise of deliberative democracy when the deliberative participation of all affected by a collective decision is infeasible” (Dryzek and Niemeyer 2008, p. 481). Furthermore, as alluded to above, if we look from the citizens’ perspective, a series of other philosophical questions regarding citizens’ political obligations must also be raised. When private exchanges are formalized through contracts, there is typically a proviso stipulating the conditions under which the parties can leave a contract (Hirschman 1970). Yet, the exit option becomes much rarer in a political relationship (Hirschman 1980). When private contracts are replaced with social contracts, the option to secede no longer exists for single individuals, and rarely for communities (Hofmeister 2010; Gauthier 1994). When private firms undertake a political role to address regulatory gaps, the questions about the type of contract and, especially, the exit options of citizens become crucial for assessing the very legitimacy of their actions (Ehrnström-Fuentes 2016). If citizens are left without a voice and exit options, it becomes difficult to measure their loyalty to the political institutions (Gauthier 1986). The more firms have to operate within illiberal political contexts, the more it becomes crucial to revise the social contract that binds the citizens to the political regime (Fort and Schipani 2004) in order to endow them with a voice and exit options. A social and political philosophy standpoint should allow scholars to investigate central questions of management studies, such as “How do individuals live, organize, produce together?” or “Which values best realize our natures and purposes in life, both as individual persons and social beings?.” More specifically, the interest in adopting a philosophical standpoint in management for the study of social and political challenges is also to disclose their normative features. Indeed, the philosophical toolkit does not only allow more accurate analysis and description but also facilitates inquiries into normative issues: “What should social and political

560

M. Eabrasu

institutions be?”; “What are the social and political structures a firm should be aiming for and/or contributing to?”; “Why are these structures more legitimate than others?”; and “How can the business accommodate diverse and even opposed moral perspectives, and especially the ensuing tensions?.”

Conclusion To sum up, the interaction between business activities on one hand and social and political issues on the other is widely acknowledged in management studies (Palazzo and Scherer 2008; Scherer et al. 2016). Once it is accepted that the political and social spheres are characterized by permeability and elasticity, and that management scholars and practitioners cannot plug the holes nor limit the expansion of those spheres, what remains to be understood is how management theory and practice could evolve within these political and social spheres. As shown in this introductory chapter, there is a tendency to focus on one facet of this interaction by prioritizing the discussions of how social and political challenges fit (or should fit) within managerial thinking. In this chapter, we argued for complementing this research stream by redirecting interest towards the social and political challenges themselves. The interest in doing so, from a philosophical perspective, is to benefit from the longstanding theoretical and conceptual toolkits that underpin the research on social and political challenges (Ledoux 2012). All things considered, this approach should facilitate a better understanding of social and political impact on business activities.

Cross-References ▶ A Critical Approach to Civil Society: the Case of Corporate Social Responsibility ▶ Blackness as Dignity-in-Sacrifice: From Exploitation to Contribution ▶ The Social Role of the Virtue of Integrity ▶ Wisdom Within the Firm: An Aristotelian-Hayekian Approach to the Managerial Process of Division and Coordination of Labor ▶ Xenophon’s Philosophy of Management

References Aristotle (1984) Nicomachean ethics. Princeton University Press, Princeton Banerjee AV, Duflo E (2012) Poor economics: a radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty. Public Affairs, New York Beran H (1989) The consent theory of political obligation. Croom Helm, London Berlin I, Williams B (1994) Pluralism and liberalism: a reply. Polit Stud 42(2):306–309 Bernauer T (2013) Climate change politics. Annu Rev Polit Sci 16:421–448 Bertz J (1998) Business ethics and politics. Bus Ethics Q 8(4):693–702 Bond KM (1988) To stay or to leave: the moral dilemma of divestment of South African assets. J Bus Ethics 7(1):9–18

29

Social and Political Philosophy of Management: An Introduction

561

Brenkert GG (2009) Google, human rights, and moral compromise. J Bus Ethics 85:453–478 Bunge M (1999) Social science under debate: a philosophical perspective. University of Toronto Press, Toronto Bylund PL, Packard MD (2021) Separation of power and expertise: evidence of the tyranny of experts in Sweden’s COVID-19 responses. South Econ J 87(4):1300–1319 Candela RA, Geloso V (2021) Economic freedom, pandemics, and robust political economy. South Econ J 87(4):1250–1266 Carson SG (2019) The corporate legitimacy matrix – a framework to analyze complex businesssociety relations. Philos Manag 18(2):169–187. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-018-0099-9 Clayton DM (2018) Black lives matter and the civil rights movement: a comparative analysis of two social movements in the United States. J Black Stud 49(5):448–480 Cornelissen JP, Durand R (2012) More than just novelty: conceptual blending and causality. Acad Manag Rev 37(1):152–154. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2011.0129 Coyne CJ, Duncan TK, Hall AR (2021) The political economy of state responses to infectious disease. South Econ J 87(4):1119–1137 Davis RC (1958) A philosophy of management. J Insur 25(3):1–7. https://doi.org/10.2307/ 250532 de Vaujany F-X, Aroles J, Laniray P (2019) Towards a political philosophy of management: performativity & visibility in management practices. Philos Manag 18(2):117–129. https://doi. org/10.1007/s40926-018-0091-4 Donaldson T, Walsh JP (2015) Toward a theory of business. Res Organ Behav 35:181–207 Dryzek JS, Niemeyer S (2008) Discursive representation. Am Polit Sci Rev 102(4):481–493 Duclos JY, Tiberti L (2016) Multidimensional poverty indices: a critical assessment. In: Adler M, Fleurbaey M (eds) Oxford handbook of Well-being and public policy. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK Eabrasu M (2012) Les états de la définition wébérienne de l’État. Raisons Polit 45(1):187–209 Eabrasu M (2015) Post hoc ergo propter hoc: methodological limits of performance-oriented studies in CSR. Bus Ethics 24(1):11–23 Eabrasu M, Ariss AA (2012) Socially responsible employee management: case studies from Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. In: Jamali D, Sidani Y (eds) CSR in the Middle East: fresh perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan UK, London, pp 93–113. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137266200_6 Eabrasu M, Wilson DC (2022) Management, political philosophy, and social justice. Philos Manag. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-022-00204-5 Eabrasu M, Brueckner M, Spencer R (2021) A social licence to operate legitimacy test: enhancing sustainability through contact quality. J Clean Prod 293. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021. 126080 Easterly W (2014) The tyranny of experts: economists, dictators, and the forgotten rights of the poor. Basic Books, New York Ebrahim A, Rangan VK (2014) What impact? A framework for measuring the scale and scope of social performance. Calif Manag Rev 56(3):118–141 Ehrnström-Fuentes M (2016) Delinking legitimacies: a pluriversal perspective on political CSR. J Manag Stud 53(3):433–462. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12173 Erkal H, Vandekerckhove W (2021) Twenty years of philosophy of management. How has it shaped the field? Philos Manag 20:471–483. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-021-00185-x Estlund DM (2009) Democratic authority: a philosophical framework. Princeton University Press, Princeton Fileborn B, Loney-Howes R (2019) # MeToo and the politics of social change. Springer, Cham Fleetwood S (2021) Re-visiting rules and norms. Rev Soc Econ 79(4):607–635. https://doi.org/10. 1080/00346764.2019.1623909 Fort TL, Schipani CA (2004) The role of business in fostering peaceful societies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Garriga E, Melé D (2004) Corporate social responsibility theories: mapping the territory. J Bus Ethics 53(1–2):51–71 Gauthier D (1986) Morals by agreement. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK

562

M. Eabrasu

Gauthier D (1994) Breaking up: an essay on secession. Can J Philos 24(3):357–371 Giddens A (2009) Politics of climate change. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK Grant RW, Keohane RO (2005) Accountability and abuses of power in world politics. Am Polit Sci Rev 99(1):29–43 Gray JN (1977) On the contestability of social and political concepts. Polit Theory 5(3):331–344 Gupta S, Kumar A (2018) Social licence to operate: a review of literature and a future research agenda. Soc Bus 8(2):187–203 Haggard S, Kaufman R (2021) Backsliding: democratic regress in the contemporary world. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Hays SP (1985) Society and politics: politics and society. J Interdiscip Hist 15(3):481–499 Heffron RJ, Downes L, Ramirez Rodriguez OM, McCauley D (2021) The emergence of the “social licence to operate” in the extractive industries? Resour Policy 74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. resourpol.2018.09.012 Heli W, Li T, Takeuchi R, George G (2016) Corporate social responsibility: an overview and new research directions. Acad Manag J 59(2):534–544. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2016.5001 Hirschman AO (1970) Exit, voice, and loyalty: responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Hirschman AO (1980) “Exit, voice, and loyalty”: further reflections and a survey of recent contributions. Milbank Mem Fund Q Health Soc 58(3):430–453. https://doi.org/10.2307/ 3349733 Hofmeister H (2010) “Should I stay or should I go?” – a critical analysis of the right to withdraw from the EU. Eur Law J 16(5):589–603 Jamali D, Mirshak R (2007) Corporate social responsibility (CSR): theory and practice in a developing country context. J Bus Ethics 72(3):243–262 Klosko G (1994) Political obligation and the natural duties of justice. Philos Public Aff 23(3): 251–270 Krugman P (2020) Arguing with zombies: economics, politics, and the fight for a better future. W. W. Norton & Company, New York Ledoux L (2012) Philosophy: today’s manager’s best friend? Philos Manag 11(3):11–26. https:// doi.org/10.5840/pom201211317 Lodge GC (2005) The legitimacy of business. Philos Manag 5(3):3–21. https://doi.org/10.5840/ pom2005532 Margolis JD, Elfenbein HA, Walsh JP (2007) Does it pay to be good? A meta-analysis and redirection of research on the relationship between corporate social and financial performance. Ann Arbor, 1–68. 1001 48109-1234 Matten D, Moon J (2004) Corporate social responsibility. J Bus Ethics 54(4):323–337 Melé D, Rosanas JM (2003) Power, freedom and authority in management: Mary Parker Follett’s “power-with”. Philos Manag 3(2):35–46. https://doi.org/10.5840/pom20033221 Miller RW (2010) Globalizing justice: the ethics of poverty and power. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK Mir R, Greenwood M (2021) Philosophy and management studies: a research overview. Routledge, New York Oswick C, Fleming P, Hanlon G (2011) From borrowing to blending: rethinking the processes of organizational theory building. Acad Manag Rev 36(2):318–337. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr. 2009.0155 Palazzo G, Scherer AG (2008) Corporate social responsibility, democracy, and the politicization of the corporation. Acad Manag Rev 33(3):773–775 Pitkin FH (1967) The concept of representation. University of California Press, Berkley Pollman E (2019) Corporate disobedience. Duke Law J 68:709–765 Portes A (2010) Migration and social change: some conceptual reflections. J Ethn Migr Stud 36(10): 1537–1563 Rosanvallon P (2011) Democratic legitimacy: impartiality, reflexivity, proximity. Princeton University Press, Princeton

29

Social and Political Philosophy of Management: An Introduction

563

Scherer AG, Palazzo G (2011) The new political role of business in a globalized world: a review of a new perspective on CSR and its implications for the firm, governance, and democracy. J Manag Stud 48(4):899–931. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2010.00950.x Scherer AG, Palazzo G, Matten D (2014) The business firm as a political actor: a new theory of the firm for a globalized world. Bus Soc 53(2):143–156 Scherer AG, Rasche A, Palazzo G, Spicer A (2016) Managing for political corporate social responsibility: new challenges and directions for PCSR 2.0. J Manag Stud 53(3):273–298. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12203 Shadlen KC (2021) Democratization without representation. Penn State University Press, University Park Simmons AJ (1981) Moral principles and political obligations. Princeton University Press, Princeton Singer AE (2006) Business strategy and poverty alleviation. J Bus Ethics 66(2):225–231. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s10551-005-5587-x Storr VH, Haeffele S, Lofthouse JK, Grube LE (2021) Essential or not? Knowledge problems and COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. South Econ J 87(4):1229–1249 Wasserstrom RA (1961) Disobeying the law. J Philos 58(21):641–653 Wellman C, Simmons J (2005) Is there a duty to obey the law? Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK White JA (2004) Globalisation, divestment and human rights in Burma. J Corp Citizensh 14:47–65 Wickert C (2014) “Political” corporate social responsibility in small- and medium-sized enterprises: a conceptual framework. Bus Soc 55(6):792–824. https://doi.org/10.1177/0007650314537021 Wickert C (2016) “Political” corporate social responsibility in small-and medium-sized enterprises: a conceptual framework. Bus Soc 55(6):792–824 Windsor D (2015) Philosophy for managers and philosophy of managers: turf, reputation, coalition. Philos Manag 14(1):17–28. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-015-0004-8 Young C (2019) Putting the law in its place: business ethics and the assumption that illegal implies unethical. J Bus Ethics 160:35–51. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-3904-4

Xenophon’s Philosophy of Management

30

Vincent Blok

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nine Dimensions of Business Management According to Xenophon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Key Requirements of Business Managers According to Xenophon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Knowledge Involved in Management Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Skills Involved in Management Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Virtues Involved in Business Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discussion and Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

566 567 574 576 577 578 579 582 582

Abstract

In this chapter, we explore Xenophon’s philosophy of management and identify nine dimensions of business management, as well as the competencies (the knowledge, skills, and virtues) that good management requires. The scientific contribution of this chapter does not only consist in the fact that this is the first publications in which Xenophon’s philosophy of management is systematically analyzed. Historical analysis can also help to question the self-evidence of our contemporary conceptualization of management. Xenophon’s philosophy of management enables us to criticize the contemporary focus on profit maximization and to articulate an intrinsic relation between business and society; to criticize the contemporary disconnectedness of business management and to develop a broader set of individual competencies and know-how that is required for business managers; to criticize the contemporary focus on management and control; and to rehabilitate the role of business management as ability and capacity that involves know-how, actual engagement, and virtuous competencies. V. Blok (*) Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_27

565

566

V. Blok

Finally, this concept of management challenges contemporary conceptualizations of the differences between private and public management in political philosophical debates. Keywords

Xenophon · Philosophy of management · Management · Virtue · Control

Introduction In philosophy of management, there is a relative lack of interest in the history of the concept. For instance, in the first volume of the Philosophy of management journal, Alan Bray raised the provocative question “Why is it that management seems to have no history?” indicating that the practice of management as a corpus of knowledge and skills received only little attention in the literature (Bray 2001). While in the second volume, Fontrodona and Melé propose Aristotelian philosophy as a theoretical foundation of management (Fontrodona and Melé 2002), the history of philosophies of management is relatively absent in subsequent volumes.1 With this, I do not mean that philosophers are not explored to reflect on issues in management. On the contrary, philosophy of management has a strong tradition in applying ideas of philosophers to management issues, like Stoic ideas on ethics of management (Bowden 2012), Aristotle’s ideas on corporate responsibility and management practice (Gimbel 2005; Hartman 2015), Dewey’s ideas on innovation management (Bordum 2007), Levinas’ ideas on whistleblowing (Loumansky and Lewis 2013), or Heidegger’s ideas on leadership (Krentz and Malloy 2005). But these ideas of the big names of the philosophical tradition are often not further developed into a full fletched philosophy of management of Aristotle, Heidegger, or Levinas. This seems to be legitimate, as these philosophers themselves often did not develop an explicit philosophy of management themselves. There seems to be at least one exception in the history of philosophy, namely Xenophon, who can be seen as the first philosopher that reflected systematically on the concept of business management. In Oeconomicus, published around 385 B.C., Xenophon introduces a dialogue between Socrates and Critobulus, a wealthy young man, and Ischomachus, a noble and successful manager, about economy.2 Oikonomia, as Xenophon understood it, is far removed from our contemporary

1

In fact, interest in the history of the concept of management is more often found outside the particular subdomain of philosophy of management, for instance, Mondzain (2005) and Agamben (2007). 2 At first sight, it seems to be strange to consult Socrates’ vision on business management, as he is normally seen as very negative about profit making and business (Plato 2013). Because the historical comparison between the Socrates of Plato and Xenophon is beyond the scope of this chapter, we purely focus on Socrates contribution to the question what is (business) management as it appears in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus in this chapter.

30

Xenophon’s Philosophy of Management

567

understanding of economics and is primarily concerned with household management (Deslandes 2018). The fact that oikonomia originally concerns household management, rather than economics, may also explain why economists are often hesitant to read Xenophon as an economist (Lowry 1979). The domain of the household is not limited to the private sphere of the house in which we live but extents to all property that enables the owner of the household to make a living. This legitimizes us to take Xenophon’s philosophical reflections on household management as a philosophy of business management. In this chapter, we explore Xenophon’s philosophy of management and identify nine dimensions of management (1) and the knowledge, skills, and virtues that good management requires (2). While general philosophical studies of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus provided already insightful interpretations of his work (Strauss 1989), the scientific contribution of this chapter consists in the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, this is the first publication in which Xenophon’s philosophy of management is systematically analyzed from the perspective of business management. Historical analysis can also help to question the self-evidence of our contemporary conceptualization of management, and to explore new directions in our conceptualization of management, as we will explore in section three. It also challenges contemporary conceptualizations of the differences between private and public management in political philosophical debates. This is the second scientific contribution of this chapter.

Nine Dimensions of Business Management According to Xenophon One of the first philosophical conceptualizations of management occurred in the work of Xenophon. In the Oeconomicus, business management concerns the totality of the assets of the owner. Although these assets are a necessary condition to make a living, it is not a sufficient condition as these assets have to be managed in order to become profitable and generate wealth for the owner (Xenophon 2013: 1.15; 3.1–3.3). What are the main dimensions of business management that can be found in Xenophon’s work? In our reflections on the nature of business management, we have to abandon the contextual factors that can be found in Xenophon’s work, as he lived in an agricultural society and in a period where management mainly concerned the management of slaves. Business management concerns the functional order and ordered arrangement of the business that is led by a superintendent (episkopos) that is in control of the business, even in case of accidents and unforeseen situations, so that it’s ordered functioning is guaranteed and maintained. This control of the manager is compared with a ship: Now I saw this man in his spare time inspecting everything that is needed as a matter of course on the ship. I was surprised to see him looking them over and asked what he was doing. ‘Sir’, he answered, ‘I am looking to see how the ship’s equipment is stored, in case of

568

V. Blok

any accident, or whether anything is missing or mixed up with other equipment’. (Xenophon 2013: 8.15–16)

Business management is understood here as the establishment of a functioning order in which all natural resources have their proper place, all human resources have their proper task and role3, and the business manager regulates and governs the proper use of these natural and human resources in order to make profit. This involves the structuring of the business and the assignment of an appropriate place to each part of the business. Xenophon speaks about grain that has to remain dry and wine that has to remain cool, but we can extent this to the appropriate design of the production and distribution process of a business, the structure of business units, etc. Next, it concerns the placement of employees in this functioning order. The first dimension of business management that we can discern is the establishment and maintenance of a functioning order of the business in order to make profit. A second dimension of business management occurs if we consider the ordered functioning of the ship we encountered before. In first instance, the establishment and maintenance of a functioning order of the business enables the manager to act appropriately in times of setback or unforeseen circumstances that threaten the survival of the ship in stormy weather. But another aspect of this functioning order is that it constitutes a “paradise” of beauty that evokes admiration (Xenophon 2013: 4.13; 4.21). We can think of Xenophon’s example of the ship in which all equipment is well stored – e.g., rope is not lying around but well-ordered and organized – and that provides peace of mind and energy to work in, but we can easily extend this example to well-established organization structures in which all disparate tasks and roles work together as one (Xenophon 2013: 8.7). Xenophon provides the example of a chorus: A chorus is a combination of people; but when its members do as they please, it becomes mere confusion, and there is no pleasure in watching it; but when they move and sing in an orderly fashion, then those same people at once seem worth watching and worth hearing. (Xenophon 2013: 8.3)

This order is not only a functional order but evokes admiration because of its beauty – everything is more beautiful when set out in order according to Xenophon (2013: 8.20) – and nothing is so good for human beings as order (Xenophon 2013: 8.3). It is important to acknowledge that for the Greeks, the beautiful does not only has aesthetic but also moral significance. The second dimension of business management that we discern is that the manager establishes and maintains the functioning

3

Although Xenophon himself explicitly talks about slaves, we conceive the term in more neutral terms as subordinates. On the one hand, Xenophon’s description of the role and treatment of slaves resonates with modern ways of treating employees as we will see. On the other, both slaves and employees can be formally seen as subordinates of the business manager who is the owner of the assets.

30

Xenophon’s Philosophy of Management

569

order of the business in such a way that its (beautiful) order evokes public admiration. A third dimension of business management is that the ordered functioning of the business does not only serve the private interests of the owner of the business – e.g., a grand harvest – but also the public interest of society. A farm does not only provide food and luxury by which people live and enjoy their live but also the environment in which public services can be practiced. Xenophon provides the example of agriculture that enables man to work on the land and prepare them to defend the state: She gives increased strength through exercise to those who labour with their own hands, and hardens the overseers of the work by rousing them early and forcing them to move about briskly. For on a farm no less than in the city the most important operations have their fixed time. Again, if a man wants to defend his city by serving in the cavalry, farming is his most efficient partner in furnishing upkeep for this horse; if in the infantry, it energizes his body. (Xenophon 2013: 5.4–5; 11.17)

We can easily abstract from this particular context and argue that management establishes a functioning order that serves simultaneously private – sales of food products – and public purposes – serving a healthy society by promoting a healthy lifestyle. In the end, business management is not a goal in itself but should enable the business manager to serve the interests of his friends and the state according to Xenophon (2013: 6.9).4 Only those who serve the state and are loyal to society are held in the highest esteem by the state (Xenophon 2013: 6.10). The third dimension of business management that we can discern is that the business manager establishes and maintains the functioning order of the business in such a way that it integrates public and private interests. In order to establish and maintain the functioning order of the business, the manager has to engage in the business operations himself via direct labor according to Xenophon. This seems to be strange for a business owner in the Greek context, as labor is scorned and held in low regard in ancient Greece (Xenophon 2013: 4.2). But Xenophon is more positive about direct engagement in the business operations of the business manager via direct labor – planting, for instance (Xenophon 2013: 4.22–24) – as it contributes to their happiness as purpose of life (eudaimonia) (Xenophon 2013: 4.25). The joy of direct labor provides satisfaction and self-confidence, as their mastery in the production of the products and services that the business provides matures.5 Another aspect of the positive assessment of direct labor may be the double purpose of business operations that we encountered before, for instance, 4

Throughout this chapter, he or his can be replaced by she or her. While historically, direct labour is primarily associated with pain and suffering, Xenophon associates it with joy and pleasure. This may be explained by the fact that he, as business manager, is free to engage in direct labour while his employees are necessitated to engage in direct labour in order to survive. This may also explain why Karl Marx criticized Xenophon’s “characteristic, bourgeois instinct” (cited in Strauss 1989: 203). At the same time, we could argue that Xenophon’s appreciation of direct labour helps us to criticize the disconnection between the workforce and the management level that can often be observed in contemporary bureaucratic organizations (see §3). 5

570

V. Blok

farming (private interest) and preparing to defend the state (public interest). One other important reason for direct involvement in labor is that an important task of managers is to teach their employees, which requires know-how as we will see. Here, direct labor is not a goal in itself but serves the manager’s aim to fulfil his role as business manager and his role as public servant. The fourth dimension of business management is the involvement of the manager in the business operations via direct labor. The fifth dimension of business management concerns the manager’s engagement in the business operations via the work of other people, i.e., the management of his subordinates to perform all roles and tasks in a proper way. His task is to give subordinates a proper role and task and manage them in such a way that they are not imprisoned and enforced to perform their task in a proper way, but that they are free and willing to work for the business manager (Xenophon 2013: 3.4). At a first level, he has to cooperate with his wife in order to become successful according to Xenophon. Although Xenophon argues that the business manager has to instruct his wife in the right way of doing things (Xenophon 2013: 3.11), and with this, may make the impression that he sees his wife merely as subordinate like Aristotle6, it is clear that Xenophon is in fact very positive about the role of the wife in business management and that he stresses cooperation and partnership with her in growing the business: I think that the wife who is a good partner in the household contributes just as much as her husband to its good; because the income for the most part is the result of the husband’s exertions, but the expenses are controlled mostly by the wife’s management. If both do their part well, the estate is increased; if they act incompetently, it is diminished. (Xenophon 2013: 3.15)

If we abstract from classical role models, we can argue that Xenophon highlights here that the business manager cannot maintain the functioning order of the business all by himself.7 Because he is focusing on sales, for instance, he needs first of all to cooperate and partner up with other managers who manage expenses. The maintenance of the functioning order of a profitable business requires a team of managers that “mutually service” (Xenophon 2013: 7.19) each other and form a partnership, balancing income and expenses, external and internal affairs, etc. As it is clear that for Xenophon, the wife contributes equally to the success of the business, we can abandon his literal connection of males as manager of the external affairs and females as managers of the internal affairs (Xenophon 2013: 7.20–7.26) and highlight the functional difference between the management of income, for instance, marketing and sales, and the management of expenses, for instance, procurement. Next to performing his or her own specific role as manager of income or expenses, for instance, the manager has to manage a

6

According to Aristotle, females are naturally subordinate because of their limited rationality (Aristotle 1944: 1260a9-15). 7 In this, Xenophon deviates from the classical idea that in economic affairs, “the rule by many is not good; one should be master, one be king,” which can be found in Homer’s Illias and is cited and confirmed by Aristotle Metaphysics (Aristotle, 1933: 1076a3ff).

30

Xenophon’s Philosophy of Management

571

management team together with other managers in order to make the business profitable. The management of a management team is the first level of engagement of the business manager with business operations via the work of other people. At a second level, the business manager has to establish a management system because he cannot control everything himself, for instance, in case of other branches of the business that are not under his direct control. One way to maintain the functioning order of the business is by establishing internal rules and regulations that all employees have to comply with, for instance, maxims and governance procedures that safeguard right behavior. Xenophon provides examples like “thieves shall be punished for their thefts” (Xenophon 2013: 14.5), but we can easily abstract from these examples and extent it to other and also more positive core values of a company like honesty and integrity. It is interesting to observe that Xenophon focusses on the content of these rules, for instance, that the maxim we just mentioned makes greed unprofitable to the offender and benefits the upright employee (Xenophon 2013: 14.6). At a third level, the business manager maintains the functioning order of the business by assigning proper roles to trusted middle managers that send him reports about their business performance, and that can perform the management tasks in the name of the business manager. This middle manager should have the same personal characteristics as the business manager as owner of the assets, for instance, self-control and eagerness to improve the business (Xenophon 2013: 9.11–12; 14.1)) (see §2 for the further discussion of the competencies of the manager). The business manager is the superintendent that oversees and governs the middle managers so that they adhere to the arrangement of tasks and roles, and inspects the performance of the business (Xenophon 2013: 9.14–15; 14.1). Like the business manager oversees and governs the middle managers, the middle managers oversee and govern the employees. Also these middle managers are seen as partners of the business manager: We also taught her to be loyal to us by making her a partner in all our joys and, if we had any trouble, inviting her to share that too. We trained her to be eager for the improvement of our estate by making her familiar with it and by allowing her to share in our success. And we developed in her a sense of justice by giving more honour to the just than to the unjust, and by showing her that the just live in greater wealth and freedom than the unjust. (Xenophon 2013: 9.12)

A key task of the business manager is to select the middle managers who are attentive to the business affairs. He selects those who have a passion for making money and have a desire to win the approbation of the business manager (Xenophon 2013:14.9) and avoids those who are hard drinkers, sluggards, fall desperately in love (Xenophon 2013: 12.11–15), and remain dishonest even though they are well treated. He has also to review the performance of the middle managers and to reward high performance and to honor them, and to punish low performance. It is important to see that for Xenophon, reward does not only consist in the provision of monetary rewards but also in the promotion of good performing middle managers in the scale of honors (Xenophon 2013: 4.7). This can be done formally via promotions in rank, but also informally by giving trust, by entrusting an important task, and by providing honor to particular employees.

572

V. Blok

This does not mean however that the business manager can delegate all roles and tasks to the middle management. According to Xenophon, as the business manager experiences best the profits of good management and the losses of bad management, some management tasks can only be performed properly by the business manager himself or another member of the management team, and cannot be delegated to the middle managers or employees. Although Xenophon does not provide examples, we can think of management decisions that can have a major impact on the profit and loss of the business. One can negatively argue that the principle-agent problem explains why the business manager cannot delegate all management tasks to the middle managers, e.g., that the business manager as owner of the assets (principle) can never be sure whether the middle manager (agent) will act in his best interest or will be tempted to serve his own interests instead. More positively formulated, however, one can also argue that the business manager cannot delegate all management tasks to the middle managers because of the considerable importance of teaching and training, as we have seen. This requires his leading by example and therefore, his direct engagement in the business operations anyway. This brings a fourth level of engagement with the business operation via the work of other people to light, namely people management of the employees of the branches that are under his direct control. At this level, management consists in leading subordinates in such a way that they obey willingly and contribute to the profitability of the business, instead of running away in times of setback (Xenophon 2013: 3.4; 4.19). This requires not only the ability to manage inflowing and outflowing streams of resources, to superintend the value adding process performed by employees, but also rewarding good behavior and punishment of employees who are misbehaving (Xenophon 2013: 7.42). Rewarding employees does not only consist in monetary rewards, but also in showing that being obedient is more advantageous for the employees, and by providing particular rewards that are valuable for the individual employees; the one who loves nice cloth is more rewarded by a nice robe according Xenophon (2013: 13.6–9). Furthermore, it also involves a differentiation in rewarding, by providing the better employee with superior gifts. Direct people management also involves the skill to care for the employees (Xenophon, 7.37), as those who are cared for feel grateful and more loyal. As a consequence, the employees will follow the business manager and serve his interests. And according to Xenophon, this ability to lead employees that are willing to follow constitutes a good manager8: Those you may justly call high-minded who have many followers of like mind; and with reason may he be said to march ‘with a strong arm’ whose will many an arm is ready to

8

Xenophon wrote another book on leadership, based on his experience of a military campaign in which the Greeks fled for the Persians by fighting their way back to Greece (Xenophon 1989). Although there are several overlaps between Xenophon’s Oeconomicus and Anabalis, a further comparison between the two works is beyond the scope of this chapter, which focusses on business management in general and not on leadership only. See for an analysis of Xenophon’s concept of leadership, Humphreys (2002).

30

Xenophon’s Philosophy of Management

573

serve; and truly great is he who can do great deeds by will rather than by strength. So too in private enterprises, the man in authority – foreman or manager – who can make the workers eager, industrious, and persevering – he is the man who gives a lift to the business and swell the surplus. . .. But if at the sight of him they stir themselves and a spirit of determination and rivalry and eagerness to excel falls on every workman, then I should say: this man has a touch of the kingly nature in him. (Xenophon 2013: 21.8–10)

As said, the direct engagement in people management is not a purpose in itself but establishes the know-how of the business manager that enables him to teach the middle management. The middle manager cannot learn to be a good superintendent if the teacher (the business manager) himself models inattentiveness according to Xenophon (2013: 12.18–19). It is primarily “the master’s eye” that makes the middle manager good (Xenophon 2013: 12.20), and this requires at least some direct engagement in the actual business operations of the business manager. With this, a sixth dimension of business management emerges, namely training and teaching of employees and middle managers. The business manager has to manage his subordinates by teaching them how to perform particular skills well, such as producing a grand harvest, making bread out of grain, cloth out of wool, to superintend and take care of the business. We can easily abstract from Xenophon’s examples of the agricultural sector and extent it to any value adding process in business life. By teaching an employee how to make cloth from wool, for instance, the manager doubles the value of the employee because he is able to add more value by making cloth from wool, than only the production of wool, for instance (Xenophon 2013: 7.41). Teaching also concern teaching of loyalty to the business manager, although loyalty is best learned by rewarding those who contribute to the prosperity of the business. Although the business manager establishes and maintains a functioning order of the business, Xenophon acknowledges the fundamental role of risk and misfortune. However well the functioning order of the business is established and managed, foresight of future affairs is fundamentally limited, and it is always possible that unforeseen circumstances occur. On the one hand, the emergence of unforeseen circumstances explains why a business needs a well-managed functioning order, in which all employees blindly know where to find equipment and resources to adequately address challenges, like a ship that is assaulted by a hailstorm. We can easily abstract from Xenophon’s examples of hailstorms and frosts that impact agricultural practice, and argue that managers have to deal with imperfect foresight and contingency. On the other hand, although the establishment of a functioning order helps to manage the business well in case of an accident, Xenophon acknowledges the fundamental limitation of the role of management. In the context of Greek society, this acknowledgment leads to management practices to propitiate the Gods and to ask the blessing of the Gods before engaging in business operations (Xenophon, 5.19–20). This acknowledgment of the fundamental limitation of the role of management of the functioning order of a business is the seventh dimension of business management. The eighth dimension of business management concerns the extension of the business by proper asset management. Proper asset management, on the one hand, prevents that all assets are fixed in buildings, etc. and are therefore not available and usable to make a profit or that these assets are out of direct control (for instance, in

574

V. Blok

foreign countries) but instead are arranged carefully in the proper place and managed to make profit (Xenophon 2013: 3.3). On the other, asset management consists in the acquisition of new low performing sites and to make them profitable in order to sell them later on for a higher price, next to autonomous growth of the business via good management practices. It is important to notice that the purpose of these acquisitions is not only to make profit but also for reasons of pleasure: ‘Well farmed land’, he would say, ‘costs a lot and can’t be improved;’ and he said that where there is no room for improvement there is not much pleasure to be got from the land: landed estate and livestock must be continually improving to give the fullest measure of satisfaction. (Xenophon 2013: 20.23)

But the aim of business management is not to increase property as such. The aim of business is to satisfy the wants of the business manager (Xenophon 2013: 2.4) and to serve his friends and the state: “Surely those who can maintain their own estate and yet have enough left to adorn the city and relieve their friends may well be thought affluent and powerful man” (Xenophon 2013: 11.10). And even when Xenophon seems to suggest that the increase of property is a purpose in itself, this increase is limited by the condition of self-control, which prevents greed and impulsive behavior, by the condition of fairness and honorability (Xenophon 2013: 7.15; 11.8), and by the condition of providing pleasure. The ninth and last dimension of business management is therefore that management is conditioned by the human needs of the business manager as owner of the assets on the one hand, which may be different for each individual manager (Xenophon 2013: 2.4), and by his service to society on the other.9 Xenophon provides examples like the entertainment of foreign guests, playing the benefactor to the citizens and contributing to the defense of the state (Xenophon 2013: 3.6), but we can easily generalize these examples toward a serving role of business to society. According to Xenophon, those business managers who cannot afford these services will be punished by the public (Xenophon 2013: 2.7). In the table below, we summarize the nine dimensions of business management that we encountered in Xenophon’s work in this section (Table 1).

Key Requirements of Business Managers According to Xenophon After having identified the key dimensions of business management according to Xenophon, we can also identify the key personal characteristics of the business manager. Although management is a branch of knowledge (episteme) according to Xenophon (2013: 1.1), it in fact concerns the practice to employ the assets – arable land, for instance – in a particular spatial-temporal context and in such a way that they become profitable – provide a rich harvest, for instance. Business management then does not 9

Xenophon is against profit maximization as such and his notion of the limitation of the economic sphere by the political sphere resembles Aristotle’s conceptualization in this respect (Aristotle 1944). The further comparison between Aristotle and Xenophon is beyond the scope of this chapter.

30

Xenophon’s Philosophy of Management

575

Table 1 Nine dimensions of management that can be found in Xenophon 1. Management concerns the establishment and maintenance of a functioning order of the business in order to make profit. 2. Management concerns the establishment and maintenance of a functioning order of the business in order to evoke public admiration. 3. The establishment and maintenance of a functioning order of the business serves both private and public interests in an integrated way 4. Management consists in the engagement of the business manager in the business operations via direct labor. 5. Management consists in the engagement of the business manager in the business operations via the work done by other people (a) Collaboration and partnership with other business managers in a management team (b) Establishment of a management system with internal rules and regulations that employees have to comply with (c) Assigning proper roles to trusted middle managers (d) Direct people management of employees and/or middle managers 6. Management consists in training and teaching of employees and/or middle managers 7. Management acknowledges the fundamental limitations of the establishment and maintenance of the functioning order of the business, and acknowledges the fundamental role of risk and misfortune 8. Management consists in proper asset management in order to increase profit and pleasure. 9. Management consists in proper asset management in order to serve society

only involve knowledge – e.g., understanding the “what” of farming – but also skills – e.g., understanding the “how” and “when” of farming (Xenophon 2013:15.8) – as well as the right virtues to successfully operate as a farmer and produce a grand harvest – e.g., being attentive and able to govern employees, for instance (Xenophon 2013: 15.5). Just like knowledge and skills, also these virtues are a necessary condition of successful business management according to Xenophon. He identified various virtues of the business manager, for instance, eagerness (in opposition with unwillingness), diligence (in opposite to idleness), moral courage (in opposite to moral cowardice) care (in opposite to negligence), and self-control (in opposite to gambling and consorting with bad companions) (Xenophon 2013: 1.16–1.20). In modern language, we can frame these three components of knowledge, skills, and virtues in terms of the individual competencies to use the assets of the business in a particular context and situation (cf. Blok et al. 2016), so the combination of knowledge (episteme), virtue (arête), and skills (technè) that enables an individual business manager to fulfil his tasks successfully.10 We will discuss now the three

10

Framing the particular episteme involved in business management in terms of individual competency solves an interpretation problem (Bragues 2007), as Xenophon calls management an episteme and a technè in this book, and is actually consulting a good practitioner in management in the second half of the book, and is not only looking for universals or ideas that can be applied in different cases of business management. Although Agamben is right in his observation that management is less epistemic and more a way of being (Agamben 2007: 17), he misses this threefold notion of competency as a combination of episteme, arête and technè.

576

V. Blok

components of these individual competencies of business managers as we can find them in Xenophon’s work.

Knowledge Involved in Management Practices Xenophon argues that business management concerns a branch of knowledge by which business managers can increase their business (Xenophon 2013: 6.4). A first part of this knowledge concerns the knowledge as described by the nine dimensions how to establish and maintain the functioning order of the business. Business management builds in this respect a field of knowledge as the manager has to understand the job and how and when to do it. Otherwise, a doctor could do the job of a manager as well (Xenophon 2013: 13.2). This knowledge of business management is required for three reasons: first, this knowledge enables the business manager to engage in various dimensions of business operations himself (dimensions 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9). Second, this knowledge enables the business manager to manage the middle managers and employees (dimension 5). Only a manager who has knowledge about the what, how, and when can govern his middle managers and employees in a proper way according to Xenophon: “The greatest lesson to learn is how each job ought to be done; and you added that if a man doesn’t know what to do and how to do it, no good can come of his management” (Xenophon 2013: 15.2). Third, this knowledge is required to enable the business manager to teach and train the middle managers: Of course I try to train them myself, Socrates. For the man has to be capable of taking charge in my absence; so why need he know anything but what I know myself? For if I am fit to manage the farm, I presume I can teach another man what I know myself. (Xenophon 2013: 12.4)

A second layer of knowledge concerns the sector-specific expert knowledge of the domain in which the business manager is operating, e.g., the what, how, and when of farming (Xenophon 2013: 15.6). This is required for two reasons. First, this knowledge enables him to engage in the business operations via direct labor himself (dimension 4). Secondly, a large part of the work of the business manager consists in teaching, for instance, teaching how to generate a grand harvest in farming. This requires the business manager to have particular expert knowledge about farming, for instance (Xenophon 2013: 7.41). Only if the manager knows what, how, and when to do farming, i.e., when his mastery of farming is established and matured, he is able to teach and manage employees that are involved in farming practices (dimension 6). In this respect, his mastery of the products and services that are produced by the business comes first and is primary, while his mastery of his employees is secondary. At the same time, the manager should be open to learn from others as well, even his employees: “Stand before the loom and be ready to instruct those who know less than you, and to learn from those who know more” (Xenophon 2013: 10.10).

30

Xenophon’s Philosophy of Management

577

Xenophon explores the knowledge that is required for farming, for instance, knowledge about the nature of the soil as fertile soil for the produce, the particular plants that can grow properly in a particular region, the right time for sowing and reaping, given the nature of the soil and the local climate. This indicates that the knowledge that is required is not only the knowledge of the what (theoretical knowledge) but also knowledge of the when and how (practical knowledge) that is developed through practice. This sector-specific expert knowledge holds for the what, how, and when of farming but is different in each specific sector. Another aspect of this practical knowledge is that it is combined with action. Xenophon indicates that many people may know, for instance, the best way of marching in formation through an enemy’s country, but that only a few carry it out accordingly. The good manager does not only have knowledge about what ought to be done in a specific situation but also takes care that it is actually done this way (Xenophon 2013: 20.14). Xenophon calls this attentiveness (Xenophon 2013: 20.6), a competency that clearly resonates with the modern competency of action competence, i.e., the ability to actually take responsibility (Blok et al. 2016). Attentiveness is characterized by the ability to oversee the work that has to be done and by taking care that the business operations are actually effectuated according to the planning, by planning the work and by effectuating it accordingly (Xenophon 2013: 20.18). A further cognitive aspect is the ability of the business manager to acknowledge the limitations of his individual competencies, and the acknowledgment of roles and tasks of other members of the management team that have to be balanced in order to maintain the functioning order of the business. There are different roles that have to be played in the business and the perfect balance and partnership can be threatened if one of the managers is only focusing on his own role or task, neglecting the importance of the others. “But because both must give and take,” good managers are characterized by “memory and attention” (Xenophon 2013: 7.26). Why? Just because they are not equally well endowed with all the same aptitudes, they have the more need of each other, and each member of the pair is the more useful to the other, the one being competent where the other is deficient. (Xenophon 2013: 7.28)

Memory (mneme) is the retention of the managers’ own role and task, for instance, production, and attention (epimeleian) is the ability to acknowledge the importance of the role and task of other managers to maintain a profitable business, for instance, sales. This idea is confirmed by Xenophon’s argument that the good manager requires the power to practice self-control to acknowledge the necessary balance and partnership between the different roles and tasks to maintain a profitable business (Xenophon 2013: 7.26).

Skills Involved in Management Practices Xenophon repeatedly indicate particular skills of the business manager, like the ability to train middle man and employees (Xenophon 2013: 5.14); the ability to

578

V. Blok

govern man by rewarding those subordinates who act properly and punish those who are disobedient; the ability to motivate and encourage his subordinates (Xenophon 2013: 5.16); a large part of management concerns the skill to maintain the functioning order of the business. Xenophon speaks about the manager as superintendent that guards the rules and regulations of the company, inspects the business and the task performance of the employees. This skill overlaps with practical knowledge and constitutes manager’s attentiveness.

Virtues Involved in Business Management Throughout Xenophon’s work, several virtues of the business manager are discussed. Business management requires self-control in general (Xenophon 2013: 7.15) and particular control like eagerness (in opposition with unwillingness), diligence (in opposite to idleness), moral courage (in opposite to moral cowardice), and care (in opposite of negligence) (Xenophon 2013:1.18–19). The (middle) manager should be loyal (Xenophon 2013: 12.5), avoid gambling and consorting with bad companion (Xenophon 2013: 1.20). According to Xenophon, the good manager is characterized by the practice of specific virtues, as a virtuous manager will be honored by his employees, and better manages the business (Xenophon 2013: 7.43). Xenophon identifies particular virtues, like high-mindedness. Further, the manager should act in an integer way by showing himself as he is and without finery because otherwise he could deceive people (Xenophon 2013: 9–10). It is not a problem and even desirable if the manager looks healthy because he is doing physical exercises – Xenophon refers to management by walking around, which also strengthen the health of the manager (Xenophon 2013: 10.11–12) – but it should be real health and no finery like makeup, high heels, etc. to make a better impression or to pretend to be something more than he actually is. A final aspect of the manager’s virtues is his acknowledgment that his success is not only dependent on his own performance but dependent on the Gods that grant prosperity to the one who knows his duties and is thoughtful and careful accordingly (Xenophon 2013: 11.8). The business manager prays for health, esteem in the city and wealth, for instance, and acts and behaves according to these prayers (Xenophon 2013: 11.8), e.g., he acts as the best possible version of himself. He honors the Gods by helping his friends if they need anything and supply what the state lacks (Xenophon 2013: 11.9–10). In short, the business manager acts according to the way he wants to be seen by the Gods. We can frame these virtues in terms of integrity, sincerity, and modesty. In describing the individual competencies of business managers, we do not distinguish between knowledge, skills, and virtues of business managers and middle managers but provide a complete list of possible knowledge, skills, and virtues that are needed. Although one could expect that knowledge how to establish the functioning order of the business is more important for the business manager than for the middle manager, both require people management skills, attentiveness, and virtues

30

Xenophon’s Philosophy of Management

579

like self-control. Xenophon is rather explicit in this, when he argues that in case a business manager assigns a middle manager to perform part of the tasks in his name, the same characteristics of self-control, memory, and attention are applied to the middle managers (Xenophon 2013: 9.11). Another issue that has to be taken into account is that according to Xenophon, nonetheless the important role of teaching and training, this does not imply that he believes that all knowledge, skills, and virtues can be learned. People management skills, for instance, are partly a gift that is required next to teaching: Mind you, I don’t go so far as to say that this can be learned at sight or at a single hearing. On the contrary, to acquire these powers a man needs education: he must be possessed of great natural gifts; above all, he must be inspired. For I regard this gift as not altogether human but divine – this power to win willing obedience: it is manifestly a gift of the gods to the true votaries of self-control. (Xenophon 2013: 21.11–12)

Finally, according to Xenophon, the competencies of the business manager that are identified in the Oeconomicus are not only applicable to business management but also to military management and political management.11 On the one hand, this shows already that business or economic management is integral part of the political management of the state (Blok 2019). On the other hand, it raises the question which of these competencies are particularly applicable on business management only. In the table below, the various knowledge, skills, and virtues that can be found in Xenophon’s work are summarized.

Discussion and Conclusion It is striking that this early conceptualization of management resonates pretty much with the insights provided by Henry Fayol, who can be seen as the founder of management theory. According to Fayol’s management theory, which is still taught today at business schools, management has five functions: planning, organizing, instruction, coordination, and control (Fayol 1949). While the first, second, and fifth function of management corresponds with the first dimension of business management that we found in Xenophon’s work, the third and fourth function of management corresponds with the fifth dimension we found in Xenophon’s work. We can even argue that Xenophon’s conception of management already moves beyond the mechanistic perspective of management that is often associated with scientific management and prefigures the people-oriented perspective that is introduced by the human relations school (Mayo 2003) (Table 2). Xenophon’s insights also resonate pretty much with contemporary definitions of management, for instance, the one that can be found in the Oxford Dictionary of 11

The question whether political and economic management can be reduced to each other in a general concept of management that holds for both domains, or whether the two remain separate aspects of steering is beyond the scope of this chapter (see Blok 2019).

580

V. Blok

Table 2 Knowledge, skills, and virtues (competencies) of business managers that can be found in Xenophon Knowledge

Skills

Virtues

Knowledge how to establish the functioning order of the business, how to manage people, etc. Sector-specific expert knowledge, e.g., the what, how, and when of farming. Practical knowledge to effectuate and to actually engage in the business operations. Self-knowledge of the limitations of the knowledge and skills of the business manager. Training skills People management skills (e.g., reward and punishing, motivation and encouragement, taking care) Maintenance skills (e.g., guarding rules and regulations, inspection) Self-control, eagerness, diligence, moral courage, care, loyal, high-mindedness. Integrity, sincerity and modesty

Business and Management. Management in the verbal sense concerns the act of managing an organization or a part of it in order to make most effective use of available resources, and management in the substantive sense concerns the people involved in these type of management activities, i.e., the directing, planning, and running of the business operations (Law 2009; Statt 2004). According to this dictionary, management has three main components: (1) it concerns an organizational skill that is taught at business schools, which corresponds with the first dimension of business management that we found in Xenophon’s work; (2) it concerns the ability to motivate subordinates, which corresponds with the fifth dimension of business management that we found in Xenophon’ work; (3) it has an entrepreneurial sense and concerns the recognition and exploitation of new business opportunities, which corresponds with the eighth dimension of business management that we found in Xenophon’s work. Another similarity is that management is generally seen as something that can be learned by training, which corresponds with the sixth dimension of business management that we found in Xenophon’s work, although the extent to which people management can be taught remains disputable, both in Xenophon and in contemporary debates (Law 2009). At the same time, Xenophon’s philosophy of management provides a new perspective on business in society. While currently, business management is mainly focused on the establishment and maintenance of a functioning order of the business in order to make profit (first dimension of Xenophon’s concept of business management), Xenophon shows the intrinsic relation between business and society. The aim of business management is not only to evoke public admiration (second dimension of Xenophon’s concept of business management), which requires that the business operations both serve private and public interests in an integrated way (third dimension of Xenophon’s concept of business management), and that private profits are partly spend to serve society (ninth dimension of Xenophon’s concept of business management). This concept of management challenges not only contemporary conceptualizations of the differences between private and public management in political philosophical debates. It also challenges current business management

30

Xenophon’s Philosophy of Management

581

practices that primarily aim at private interest, and their redistribution via tax payment and philanthropic activities, and calls for the active engagement and integration of societal interests in the business operations in order to increase corporate social responsibility (CSR). CSR, seen from Xenophon’s perspective, should be an integral part of business management in order to evoke public admiration. We could frame public admiration in modern terms as being responsive to societal needs in order to receive a social license to operate by the public. It also requires that business managers integrate both private and public interests in their business operations and solve tensions between economic and societal values. While private interests often prevail over public interests in contemporary business management – think of the example of the food industry that often contribute to public health problems (e.g., obesity, type 2 diabetes) (Tempels et al. 2017) – Xenophon challenges us to integrate private and public interests in business management – think, for example, of food companies that engage in food innovations for public health and serve the common good (Garst et al. 2017). Xenophon’s concept of business management challenges contemporary conceptualizations of management also, because it highlights the necessity of sectorspecific expert knowledge and skills, and the necessity of the involvement of business managers in the business operations via direct labor. This challenges contemporary ideas of business management which is often characterized by a strict division of labor between management as superintendent of the business operations and the workforce, and by a strict division of labor between the management knowledge and skills of the business manager, and sector specific or disciplinary knowledge and skills of the workforce. On the one hand, this strict division of labor may explain the instrumentalization of management in contemporary business management, and the disconnection and distance between business management and the business operations at the work floor. On the other hand, Xenophon’s concept of business management can help to reconnect and integrate business management and execution. In this, the particular knowledge, skills, and virtues that Xenophon propose may help to develop a broader set of individual competencies and know-how that is required for business managers. Finally, Xenophon’s concept of business management challenges contemporary conceptualizations of the manager as efficient and clean power, as it is proposed by traditional management science and scientific management in particular (Fayol 1949; Taylor 1911). Xenophon helps to acknowledge the limitations and vulnerability of business management, i.e., the fundamental role of risk and misfortune and the impossibility to establish full control. There is no such thing as Taylor’s “one best way” to operate the business that the manager establishes and maintains. In similar vein, the exploitation of new entrepreneurial business opportunities, which is integral part of business management (Law 2009), may always turn out to fail (Blok 2018). This possibility fundamentally limits the ambition of business managers to establish and maintain a functioning order of the business. On the one hand, this idea challenges contemporary “strong” business management practices that primarily aim to increase power and control (Deslandes 2018) and substantiate the so-called “control societies” in the industrial age (Deleuze 1992, 1997). On the other hand,

582

V. Blok

the acknowledgment of failure, risk, and misfortune moves beyond the depiction of the manager as the one who has full power to control, and rehabilitates the role of business management as ability and capacity that involves know-how, actual engagement (action), and virtuous competence.12 In future research, these aspects of business management have to be further explored in order to develop a full philosophy of management.13

Cross-References ▶ Creating an Effective Business Ethics ▶ Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics ▶ The Role of Virtue in Good Management

References Agamben G (2007) The kingdom and the glory. Stanford University Press, Stanford Aristotle (1933) Metaphysics. In: Loeb classical library. Harvard University Press, Harvard Aristotle (1944) Politics. In: Loeb classical library. Harvard University Press, Harvard Blok V (2018) Information asymmetries and the paradox of sustainable business models: toward an integrated theory of sustainable entrepreneurship. In: Idowu SO et al (eds) Sustainable business models: principles, promise, and practice. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 203–225 Blok V (2019) Sovereignty versus economics: philosophical reflections on the nature of corporate governance in the age of global warming. Working Paper Blok V, Gremmen B, Wesselink R (2016) Dealing with the wicked problem of sustainable development: the role of individual virtuous competence. Bus Prof Ethics J 23(3):297–328 Bordum A (2007) Managing innovation potential: revisiting Plato and reading John Dewey as a philosopher of innovation management. Phil Manag 6(1):63–79 Bowden H (2012) The ethics of management: a stoic perspective. Phil Manag 11(2):29–48 Bragues G (2007) Socrates on management: an analysis of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus. Working paper. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=997057. Accessed 11 Mar 2019 Bray A (2001) Why is it that management seems to have no history? Phil Manag 1(1):21–25 Deleuze G (1992) Postscript on the societies of control. October 59:3–7 Deleuze G (1997) Negotiations. Columbia University Press, Columbia Deslandes G (2018) Weak theology and organization studies. Organ Stud:1–18 Fayol H (1949) General and industrial management. Pitman & Sons, London Fiedler FE, Garcia JE (1987) New approaches to leadership, cognitive resources and organizational performance. Wiley, New York Fontrodona J, Melé D (2002) Philosophy as a base for management: an Aristotelian integrative proposal. Phil Manag 2(2):3–9 Garst J, Blok V, Jansen L, Omta O (2017) Responsibility versus profit: the motives of food firms for healthy product innovation. Sustainability 9(12):2286 12

In this respect, Xenophon can be seen as predecessor of Fiedler’s contingency management theory, especially its acknowledgment that there is no absolute best way to manage the business, and the situational character of the management style of the manager (cf. Fiedler and Garcia 1987). 13 I would like to thank Cristina Neesham and Marian Eabrasu for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

30

Xenophon’s Philosophy of Management

583

Gimbel S (2005) Can corporations be morally responsible? Aristotle, stakeholders and the non-sale of Hershey. Phil Manag 5(3):23–30 Hartman EM (2015) Rationality in management theory and practice: an Aristotelian perspective. Phil Manag 14(1):5–16 Humphreys JH (2002) The Anabasis and lessons in leadership: Xenophon as a prototypical transformational leader. J Manag Res 2(3):136–146 Krentz AA, Malloy DC (2005) Opening people to possibilities: a Heideggerian approach to leadership. Phil Manag 5(1):25–44 Law E (2009) Oxford dictionary of business and management. Oxford University Press, Oxford Loumansky A, Lewis D (2013) A Levinasian approach to whistleblowing. Phil Manag 12(3):27–48 Lowry ST (1979) Recent literature on Ancient Greek economic thought. J Econ Lit 17(1):65–86 Mayo GE (2003) The human problems of an industrial civilization. Routledge, London Mondzain MJ (2005) Image, icon, economy: the Byzantine origins of the contemporary imaginary. Stanford University Press, Stanford Plato (2013) Republic, Loeb classical library. Harvard University Press, Harvard Statt DA (2004) The Routledge dictionary of business management. Routledge, London/New York Strauss L (1989) Xenophon’s Socratic discourse. An interpretation of the Oeconomicus. St. Augustine Press, Sound Bend Taylor FW (1911) The principles of scientific management. Harper & Brothers, New York Tempels T, Verweij M, Blok V (2017) Big food’s ambivalence: seeking profit and responsibility for health. Am J Public Health 107(3):402–406 Xenophon (1989) Anabasis. Loeb classical library. Harvard University Press, Harvard Xenophon (2013) Memorabilia, Oeconomicus, symposium, apology. Loeb classical library. Harvard University Press, Harvard

Wisdom Within the Firm: An Aristotelian-Hayekian Approach to the Managerial Process of Division and Coordination of Labor

31

Arnaud Pellissier-Tanon

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Origin and Evolution of the Division of Labor Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Market: A Process of Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Entrepreneur: An Exemplary Prudent Agent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Division of Labor: An Effect of Entrepreneurial Prudence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

586 587 590 592 594 596 599 599

Abstract

Throughout history, scholars have set the division of labor in manufacturing in opposition to the division of labor in society. They have focused on the centralized decision-making that precedes the former and the market influence on the latter. However, conversations on the division of labor tend to overlook delegation of responsibility within the firm – particularly its ability to respond to market change. This chapter shows how employees’ wisdom can shape the decisions that have been delegated to them. To do so, it draws on the Aristotelian concept of phronesis (often translated as “prudence” or “practical wisdom”) and mobilizes the analysis of the market process developed by the Austrian school of economics. Instead of juxtaposing the two types of division of labor, it shows that both processes share a common point: the prudence of the individual, who divides and coordinates tasks that were initially centralized. The managerial process of division and coordination of labor is not different by its nature from the entrepreneurial process since both can be interpreted as forms of intermediation between producer and consumer. A. Pellissier-Tanon (*) Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_59

585

586

A. Pellissier-Tanon

While both are examples of spontaneous order, however, the latter must only be supplemented by management practices that foster the empowerment of employees. Keywords

Division of labor · Prudence · Practical wisdom · Phronesis · Entrepreneurship · Empowerment

Introduction The analysis of the division of labor has been a point of departure for the social sciences. It has been used to describe, since Adam Smith, the wealth of nations or the emergence of social roles. It has been used to highlight innovation, entrepreneurship, social recognition for specialized trades, which have supplanted the local economy of farmers and artisans as the division of labor has become increasingly globalized. This specialization of tasks is made possible through increasingly impersonal processes of coordination and is now based less on local relationships and more on market processes. At the very core of the division and coordination of labor is entrepreneurial activity, as praised by the Austrian school of economics: entrepreneurs use price information to detect opportunities for mutually beneficial trade and, as intermediaries, provide incentives for interacting parties to specialize even more in the most productive activity. In contrast to this analysis of the market – as a decentralized process for coordinating labor that is inherently subject to division – stands Taylor (1911), who focuses on the physical strength of workers and leaves it up to the managers to determine the tasks that specialized workers should perform. A new social role emerges – that of the manager, as theorized by Fayol (1918) and other scholars, who interpret the role as a centralized supervisor of the task coordination and division processes (Kanigel 1997). The managerial coordination of work within the company is thus set against the entrepreneurial coordination of the market, to the point that two complementary processes for the division of labor exist: one from societas, the other from universitas. In other words, to use Oakeshott’s (1975) terms, one is from teleocracy and the other from nomocracy; or to use Hayek’s (1979, 1988) expressions, one is of designed order and the other of spontaneous order. As persuasive as it may be, this juxtaposition is not straightforward. The idea that employees are void of reason and incapable of governing themselves is questionable. It should be recognized that each agent participates in decision-making and, more particularly, in the conception of his or her tasks, to the extent that the long-term success of the company requires flexibility and innovation more than simply output. This is evidenced by self-managed teams, participatory management, and the so-called “liberated” company. To put it in Durkheim’s (1947, p. 298) terms, in the company as in society:

31

Wisdom Within the Firm: An Aristotelian-Hayekian Approach to. . .

587

the sharing of functions ... cannot be executed according to a preconceived plan. We cannot tell in advance where the line of demarcation between tasks will be found once they are separated, for it is not marked so evidently in the nature of things, but depends, on the contrary, upon a multitude of circumstances. The division of labour, then, must come about of itself and progressively.

This chapter provides an analysis of the process through which the division of labor in a company comes about of itself and progressively. It explores the role employees play in this process, in conjunction with their managers, and emphasizes their wisdom in decisions about those matters that concern them. The analysis draws on the Aristotelian concept of phronesis – more commonly referred to as prudence or practical wisdom – and the analysis of market processes developed by the Austrian school of economics. It shows that the concept of “alertness,” which underlies the vision of the entrepreneur, sheds new light on the writings of Aristotle. This analysis demonstrates that it is through the most exemplary use of prudence that entrepreneurs coordinate the divided labor tasks resulting from their intermediation. They do so in the market as they do at the firm: they manage to seize opportunities. Inside the company, entrepreneurs might allow their employees to use their own initiative to accomplish tasks successfully and even to go beyond their initial project. However, entrepreneurs must make sure that their prudence is adequately focused on serving consumers and must be able to count on local managers to guarantee that employees demonstrate prudence. The management process for the division and coordination of labor is no different from the entrepreneurial process: both are spontaneous orders. The latter must only be supplemented by management practices that foster the empowerment of employees. The argument will unfold as follows. The first part of the chapter summarizes the history of managerial practices of division and coordination of labor. The second part discusses the Austrian school analysis of the market process. The third part shows how entrepreneurs are distinguished by their prudence, thus allowing us to establish, in the fourth part, that the division of labor is, indeed, an effect of their prudence. The chapter concludes with a summary of the nature of the managerial process of division and coordination of labor, and underlines the relevance of empowerment practices.

The Origin and Evolution of the Division of Labor Concept The expression “Division of labour” itself was forged in the social sciences early on by Bernard Mandeville (1714), who, in the third dialogue of his famous Fable of The Bees, spoke of trades and manufactures “divided in many branches.” But the reality underlying this concept would appear to be as old as the hills, and the discipline has followed in the footsteps of its illustrious predecessors in examining the division of labor: Plato’s thoughts on weaving in The Statesman (281-b-283) would appear to be just as pertinent today as the many studies on “the manufacture of pins” and “the fabrication of pocket watches” so dear to eighteenth-century authors (see Séris 1994).

588

A. Pellissier-Tanon

Aristotle puts in his own words Plato’s ideas of the foundation of the City (Republic, 369-b-372-c), illustrated in the first book of Politics through the example of the diversification of trade and the expansion of exchange relations. Adam Smith based The Wealth of Nations on the same phenomenon that was central to the History of Civil Society of Adam Ferguson (1767). The division of labor – both in the narrow sense of how specialized tasks are divided up in a workshop and in the broader sense of specialization and coordination of human production – has thus been addressed by Western social science since the concept came into existence. Durkheim (1893) made it one of the founding concepts of when he developed The Division of Labour in Society, which Marx (1867) had already distinguished from the division of labor in manufacturing. The industrial revolution had arrived, renewing the organization of manufacturing (Peaucelle 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012) and introducing many innovations in the processes of division and coordination of labor that Taylor (1911) systematized in the Principles of Scientific Management of Factories. Taylor claimed that his innovation was to make his experiments scientific and not empirical – i.e., each individual task was systematically measured in order to establish his productivity calculations. A distinction could now be made between design and production tasks, between office and shop work, between white-collar and blue-collar workers. These distinctions would be embodied in the figure of the specialized worker (Durand 1978), who came to symbolize a social category lacking any specific trade, unlike the craftsmen of former days, and who was only hired for his or her labor power. These specialized workers had no specific skills and were lumped together in a professional identity by default: that of the proletarian. The legal doctrine of the times set out the concept of “relationship of subordination” to justify the new contractual forms of the work relationship – namely, the work contract, which enabled employers to assert their authority and foremen to impose discipline (Cottereau 2002; Lefebvre 2009). Marxist thought then renewed its attacks on the alienation of labor from capital and rooted the revolutionary movement in a class struggle freed of any aspirations for self-rule still surviving from the corporations of the Ancien Régime (Sewell 1980). Work organization techniques such as piecework and production lines caused alienation (Coriat 1979). The sociology of work has noted how “piecemeal” labor can strip work of any meaning for proletarians (Friedmann 1956) until they become incapable of governing their own lives (Weil 1951). The entire history of labor organization can be understood as a reaction to Taylorism – as the struggle of workers against the depersonalization of work and employers’ ever-increasing use of workers’ capacity beyond physical strength alone (Durand 1978). A brief outline of this history can be broken down into four periods. 1. In response to absenteeism and high turnover in times of mass production during the interwar and postwar reconstruction periods, the school of human relations recommended that greater emphasis be placed on employee motivation, asking questions like “Are workers only interested in better wages?” and “What other factors could induce employees to be more committed to their work?” The

31

Wisdom Within the Firm: An Aristotelian-Hayekian Approach to. . .

589

conclusions of experiments by Hawthorne (Gillespie 1991) in the 1920s stressed the importance of the managerial relationship and of showing consideration for employees. In this way, employees whose profession was not held in high regard could still feel social esteem (Durand 1978). 2. As a result, recommendations were made concerning management styles such as the participative team management formalized by Rensis Likert (1967), which, together with the Blake and Mouton grid (1964), prefigured leadership research. Also of importance was the focus on group dynamics, following the work of Kurt Lewin (1947). The social engineering school of the Tavistock Institute then proposed an organization based on semiautonomous workshops, in which more fulfilling work increased motivation (Trist et al. 1963). Such work requires qualifications, which the employer can acknowledge by offering workers career advancement opportunities. The qualified laborer had now been recognized (Durand 1974). 3. When the first oil crises came on the heels of the postwar reconstruction period, companies needed to increase employee awareness about satisfying customer requirements and improving quality. Manufacturers were guided by Japanese carmakers – in particular their “quality circles” – in their efforts to foster continuous improvement. With the arrival of globalization in the final decades of the twentieth century, the focus would shift to the flexibility of the production tool, upstream of the diversification of production. Employees could contribute to this flexibility by demonstrating adaptability and multifunctional capabilities (Coriat 1990). The Japanese model would prove to be a vector to drive employee skills well beyond physical capabilities. Employees were now asked to show independence, initiative, and the ability to assume responsibility. 4. When the need for flexibility called into question the organizational structure of the company, the main obstacle was no longer the limits of the employees but instead became the burden imposed by hierarchy, technostructures, and support functions. To better organize the company into autonomous teams, company leaders knocked down office walls, introduced a flatter management structure, and fostered employee empowerment. Of course, certain functions were retained, as the company would no longer exist in their absence: marketing, finance, and in some cases research and development. The idea of the liberated company now carried the day (Carney and Getz 2009; Laloux 2016). History has shown, 100 years after the publication of the Principles of Scientific Management of Factories, not only how the brains of the factory cannot be limited to its management functions but also how it cannot be run properly without relying on the superior faculties of operators who demonstrate independence, initiative, and the ability to assume responsibility. Simply put, it is up to each employee – and not the employer – to decide on their tasks as part of an autonomous team: in other words, to divide and coordinate their work on her own. This raises the question of what exactly the division and coordination of work within the company is. When employees decide on their tasks, are they simply acting through delegation of power that, by its very nature, remains centralized? The division and coordination of labor in the

590

A. Pellissier-Tanon

company would then result from societas. If employees act on their own authority, however, they are entrepreneurs of their own work, and the division and coordination of labor in the company results from universitas. This overview of the practices of division and coordination of labor in the firm invites us to look more deeply into the market process and the role played within it by the entrepreneur.

The Market: A Process of Discovery The Austrian school of economics developed an analysis of the market as a process for discovering trade opportunities. Hayek (1937, p. 50) shows the importance, in a division of labor economy, of each agent knowing “how the different commodities can be obtained and used,” especially considering “the unavoidable imperfection of man’s knowledge and the consequent need for a process by which knowledge is constantly communicated and acquired” (Hayek 1945, p. 530). Kirzner (1973, 1979, 1989) maintains that it is the entrepreneurs who, thanks to their alertness, make such discoveries and increase competition. The concept of market analysis as a process of discovery is based on the fact that, in most cases, agents are unaware of the many different courses of action that might be profitable. According to Hayek (1937, p. 50, footnote 17), market agents must have “the knowledge of alternative possibilities of action” – i.e., of the ends that could be reached with the same amount of means. Within this method for accurately forecasting the actions of other agents, what Hayek calls a “plan” is essential because “knowledge ... is identical with foresight only in the sense in which all knowledge is capacity to predict.” In other words, because economic agents are not fully aware of the plans of other agents, markets are rife with foregone opportunities, implying a lack of coordination between the agents’ actions. The Austrian school economists distinguished themselves from other neoclassical economists by emphasizing the patent and perpetual absence of equilibrium. Since homo economicus is fatally fallible, market equilibrium is merely a theoretical fiction with no real existence beyond economics textbooks and no practical usefulness beyond pedagogical explanation. However, the simple act of carefully considering current prices may indicate that someone’s profit opportunities are someone else’s foregone opportunities. Prices provide information about the attitudes and plans of other stakeholders. Once this information has been obtained, attitudes can be adjusted following the positions of other agents, thereby engendering a particular variation in prices and new opportunities for profit. Hayek (1945, p. 526) states that “the price system [must be looked] as such a mechanism for communicating information.” He adds that, in such a case, the price system covers “the span of our utilization of resources beyond the span of control of any one mind” (Hayek 1945, p. 527). Although all agents may benefit from the information revealed by the price system, not all will make the same use of it. Kirzner (1973) draws on von Mises (1949) to describe the behavior of the entrepreneur, using the model of the arbitrageur who seizes opportunities for profit as they arise. The entrepreneur is

31

Wisdom Within the Firm: An Aristotelian-Hayekian Approach to. . .

591

“a decision-maker whose entire role arises out of his alertness to hitherto unnoticed opportunities” (Kirzner 1973, p. 39). “The pure entrepreneur ... proceeds by his alertness to discover and exploit situations in which he is able to sell for high prices that which he can buy for low prices” (Kirzner 1973, p. 48). If one set aside the role they may play in the combination of production factors, producers may also be seen as entrepreneurs as they are “seen displaying nothing but alertness to the existence of price differences between inputs and outputs” (p. 46). But entrepreneurs must also recognize these profit opportunities. Kirzner (1979, 1989) explains that they “discover” them – i.e., they realize that the circumstances they have observed offer them an opportunity for a profitable action, which may consist of a specific organization they set up to introduce specific innovation or technique. In a nutshell, the entrepreneur that Kirzner describes, based on the model of the arbitrageur seeking profit, is characterized by the exemplary manner in which he employs his alertness. In this manner, entrepreneurs increase competition and reveal new opportunities for profit that went unnoticed until then. Once they have discovered a profitable action, entrepreneurs act as buyers or sellers in competition with the agents who had been buying or selling up until then, with no knowledge of the newly discovered action. The greater the liberty to penetrate the market, the more players to effectively compete in the market, the more entrepreneurs open to seizing new opportunities for profit that were previously unknown, and the more occasions that are effectively discovered. The competition between stakeholders in the market will, by itself, generate an influx of discoveries by entrepreneurs. Hayek thus considers “competition as a procedure for the discovery of such facts as, without resort to it, would not be known to anyone, or at least would not be utilised” (1978, p. 179). The distinguishing characteristic of entrepreneurs is, therefore, their alertness: it is this faculty that enables them to discover, in the price system, opportunities for profitable actions that they were unaware of until then, thereby increasing competition. The Austrian school’s view of the market as a process of discovery is, in essence, based on its conception of this intellectual capability. This concept needs to be clarified. The difficulty resides in the fact that the adherents of the Austrian school did not themselves tackle this question as such, and their differences of opinion on this point only make the matter more muddled. The question concerns Kirzner’s fidelity to the Misesian theory (Rothbard 1985). It also concerns the relationship between knowledge and rationality – precisely the nature of the “subjectivism” that many authors of the Austrian school inherited from G. Shackle (Langlois 1985). For example, White (1990) criticized him for having minimized the role of the imagination. Kirzner (1982, 1992) eventually clarified his position in response to criticisms of his definition of the entrepreneur from within the Austrian school itself. It is thus the task of the researcher to return to the source and find the meaning of the vocabulary employed in these discussions – namely, the work of Aristotle. The Aristotelianism of Carl Menger (1950) is no longer disputed (Kauder 1957; Smith 1990; Alter 1990; Gordon 1993): in his seminal work Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, he refers to Aristotle’s analysis of economic questions (trade, prices, currency) and quotes extensively from the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. (It is not certain, however,

592

A. Pellissier-Tanon

that he fully understood them, at least in the light of the current understanding of these works and not in relation to the general understanding of his time.) Menger’s successors do not seem to have drawn directly from Aristotle’s work, especially when he speaks of prudence – the phronesis introduced by Aristotle and further developed by Thomas Aquinas in particular, or the virtue of intelligence employed by man to take action, commonly referred to as prudence or practical wisdom. But, following Solomon (1992), many authors in business ethics refer to the ethics of virtues – i.e., Aristotelian moral philosophy – to underline how the GrecoRoman perspective specifies the content of virtues (Small 2011), to describe the virtues required by business today (Harris 2007), to discuss moral reasoning itself and better understand the concept of prudence (Queiroz 2012), or to analyze professional practices using Aristotelian moral philosophy (Arjoon 2010). The argument of this chapter situates itself in this last approach and uses the Aristotelian-Thomistic concept of prudence to draw up an ethology of entrepreneurs (Facchini 2007), which makes it possible to account for all the dimensions of their activity – both the innovation at the source of economic development (Schumpeter 1934) and the timely arbitration, on which Kirzner insists on following von Mises, as alluded to above. The fundamental question is how economic agents behave in the face of uncertainty (Bylund and Manish 2016). Some assume uncertainty better than others and will be risk-takers (Knight 1921); among them, some calculate risk more finely and will be speculators (as shown when referring to Kirzner), while others consider different possible and even opposite alternatives and become hedgers (Eabrasu 2021). Recent work emphasizes the extent to which the firm is the result of the behavior of entrepreneurs in the face of uncertainty, rather than being designed as a means of managing it (Bylund 2011; Bylund and Manish 2016).

The Entrepreneur: An Exemplary Prudent Agent Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, and Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, IIa IIae Q. 47–56, both proposed an ethical conception of action. For both thinkers, the idea is not to impose imperatives on an action to ensure that it is moral but rather to seek internal rectitude that procures lasting happiness for the individual who performs the action. Such happiness stems from how the individuals employ their faculties to perform the action. In more concrete terms, the question is how they ultimately measure the use of their faculties to procure the desired advantages, such as wealth, pleasures, or honors. Knowledge of such moderation, according to classical philosophers, is a form of intellect specific to action – to be distinguished, in this case, from intellect governing abstract knowledge – which they refer to as practical intellect or prudence (Aubenque 1963). The idea goes back to the emphasis placed by ancient Greek myths on Metis, the goddess of a type of cunning intelligence that enables one to emerge victorious from a seemingly hopeless situation by being alert to signals that indicate the correct path (Détienne and Vernant 1974). While metis may at first glance simply resemble cleverness – the ability to perform actions that achieve the goal (see Nicomachean

31

Wisdom Within the Firm: An Aristotelian-Hayekian Approach to. . .

593

Ethics 1144-a 24), which Aristotle distinguishes it from prudence because cleverness can serve both noble and base aims. But, just as prudence implies cleverness, metis is not inherently immoral: agents do not employ their cleverness to sidestep the rectitude inherent in the end goal; they take those detours that will better enable them to obtain their goal. In this context, their happiness results not from the enjoyment of what they seek to obtain, but rather from the moderation they demonstrate when using their faculties to obtain it, and their knowledge of such moderation – in a word, the prudence they employ. The Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition states that individuals strive for happiness, employ their faculties to govern their actions, and use prudence to achieve their aims (Aubenque 1963; Gilson 1989a, b). In more practical terms, market agents seek to obtain various goals that, in their opinion, will procure them happiness and employ the necessary means to do so, to the point that human action can be analyzed as a means-end relationship. Thomas Aquinas develops his conception of prudence in the Summa Theologica, IIa IIae Q. 47–56, specifying the roles of the faculties of imagination (eubulia), foresight (synesis), and vigilance (sollicitudo) in the acts of deliberation, judgment, and command that make up prudence. Prudence can be seen as the knowledge of the means-end relationship: prudence imagines the different possible means and ponders them; prudence foresees the future events upon which these means are contingent and determines which means to implement; prudence watches with vigilance the occurrence of these future events and resolutely engages in action by choosing the appropriate means. To be more specific, it is important to add that according to Aquinas, only vigilance is directly related to prudence because the command is the primary act of prudence (IIa IIae Q. 47, a. 8). The two other acts – deliberation and judgment – prepare the command so that the first two virtues of imagination and foresight are integral parts of prudence but not prudence itself. Prudent individuals, therefore, demonstrate imagination, foresight, and vigilance as they ponder the consequences and repercussions of their action, decide on the most appropriate means under the given circumstances, and resolutely perform the action at the appropriate time. But this brief outline of the Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of prudence should not lead us to infer that all intelligent actions follow the same rigid pattern, in which the decision to act is preceded by judgment, and judgment by deliberation. Through habit or imitation, the means-end relationship inherent in the action need only be sufficiently imaginative, farsighted, and vigilant to enable the agent to procure the expected happiness. Let us consider entrepreneurs once again. Always alert, they seek the wealth, pleasures, or honors that may be procured by someone who discovers profitable opportunities in price variations that had gone unnoticed until then. They procure happiness from the very act of using their alertness, together with moderation, to procure from their activity the pleasures, wealth, or honors that they expect. For example, stock market speculators, always on the lookout for opportunities, are more interested in increasing the value of their portfolio than in each particular company they invest in, unlike captains of industry who, concerned with the mark they leave on the world, remain committed to their business to make sure it is successful, to the point where they may neglect the performance of their investments.

594

A. Pellissier-Tanon

The former live more in the present moment, while the latter is concerned more for the long term. One category would appear to be more alert than imaginative: do they simply amass a portfolio of companies that were built by others? The other would appear to be more imaginative than alert: do they risk losing all or part of their investments to ensure the long-term viability of their most treasured possession? In fact, both categories demonstrate imagination and alertness even if, in reality, one appears to be more alert than imaginative and the other more imaginative than alert: one implements their plans at the precise instant they detect a favorable opportunity to do so, while the other waits for the most opportune moment to implement the means they have long been preparing. It is still a question of imagining the means required to obtain a desirable end and of demonstrating alertness in order to seize a favorable opportunity to implement them. The image of entrepreneurs as arbitrageurs, as advanced by Kirzner, should not lead us to misconstrue their alertness as simply the rapidity with which they build and execute their plan: it resides more in the quality of their discovery of profitable opportunities for action. It matters little whether entrepreneurs wait patiently for favorable price variations before implementing the plans they have carefully nurtured or whether they put together their plan at the exact moment they discover a price variation offering a favorable opportunity. What seems essential and what truly matters to entrepreneurs – what drives them on and stimulates them to act – is, in fact, their ability to discover profitable opportunities. The distinguishing characteristic of entrepreneurs is then their ability to discover, better than any other, such opportunities through the demonstration of prudence in its purest form.

The Division of Labor: An Effect of Entrepreneurial Prudence It is now possible to further clarify this analysis of the entrepreneur in the light of Hayek’s conception of knowledge as foresight. Hayek states that the crucial question for all economic agents is whether they properly foresee the action of others as it relates in particular to exchange and, more fundamentally, to the division of labor. It is within this context that the Austrian school situates the action of the entrepreneur. What specifically characterizes entrepreneurs, then, is their capacity to foresee better than consumers which producer will sell what the consumer wants to purchase and to foresee better than producers which consumer is ready to purchase what the producer wants to sell. In this way, they coordinate their labor and make possible its division, which is the emerging outcome of their intermediation. In a self-sufficient household economy, it is the same individuals who deliberate, assess, and decide to take action – either on their own behalf or for those under their responsibility – to produce what they consume, in a single act that is based on comprehensive, imaginative, foresighted, and alert prudence. In an economy of divided labor, individuals do not consume all that they produce, nor do they produce all that they consume. It is no longer the same individual that assesses the characteristics of the product, determines whether or not it meets their needs, and initiates the act of consumption of what they could have otherwise produced or production of

31

Wisdom Within the Firm: An Aristotelian-Hayekian Approach to. . .

595

what they could have otherwise consumed: instead, it is two (or more) distinct individuals. Having used foresight to determine that a product with certain characteristics may satisfy a consumer, its producers imagine what this product should be and initiate the act of production. Having used foresight to determine that a product meeting certain of their needs may be produced, consumers alertly examine the characteristics of the products available to them and initiate the act of consumption. Imagining a product with such characteristics results from the initiative of its producer, while the alertness required to seek and find these characteristics is the initiative of the consumer. But the product can only be exchanged between the two if the foresight that leads the producer to decide to produce such a product coincides with the foresight that drives the consumer to seek out such a product. Such foresight depends on both the consumer’s alertness and the producer’s imagination. The vision of producers proves sound when the characteristics of the product they imagine correspond to those consumers, have alertly been seeking, and the foresight of consumers proves sound when the features that they alertly seek out correspond to the imagination of the producers. Briefly put, the visions of both producer and consumer coincide insofar as the imagination of the former and the alertness of the latter are complementary. An economy of divided labor is characterized by contingency. The action of each participant, whether it concerns production or consumption, depends on the actions of others, whether it concern consumption or production. Each is faced with the risk that their action will not come to a successful conclusion and overcomes this risk by foreseeing the actions of other agents upon which their own action is contingent. It has been seen above how Hayek stressed the importance of agents’ knowledge about the market to their alertness to foresee others’ plans so that they can adjust their own. It now seems clear that the very action that defines the entrepreneur is the discovery of profitable opportunities that had been previously overlooked. According to Hayek, if, in a state of equilibrium, no one has any reason to change their plan, this means that there are no longer any profitable opportunities for entrepreneurs to unearth, and the foresight of all the purchasers and sellers has been as accurate as possible. For Hayek, then, entrepreneurs only have a role to play when the economy does not reach a point of equilibrium – when it is possible to foresee, better than the purchasers and sellers themselves, the possible exchanges between them. The prudence of entrepreneurs is beneficial to the purchasers and sellers for whom they act as go-betweens. They coordinate their labors in a new way and modify the marginal utility of their division. The division and coordination of labor is the result, like a spontaneous order, of the decisions concerning production and trade made by all the economic agents, and these decisions are made continuously more prudent through the intermediation of entrepreneurs. This is where the company plays its role in prolonging the intermediation provided by the entrepreneur. In order to take advantage of the purchasers’ and sellers’ mutual unawareness, entrepreneurs mobilize their assets and hire personnel to cover all the functions required for their project, starting with commercial aspects. They hire each employee to acquire the individual competencies that will be of benefit to the common project and then give each employee a mission and the

596

A. Pellissier-Tanon

required means to accomplish it. All employees can consider themselves to be suppliers to their employer, even if their work is actually of use to their colleagues downstream in the production process. All employees focus their imagination on the expectations of the employer and the hierarchical line they represent – i.e., the colleagues whose tasks depend on their labor – rather than on the needs of their “customers” (as considered from a managerial, total quality point of view). This does not generate any quality issues as long as the work instructions provided by the employer and management make it possible to meet the needs of the customers effectively. But the economic world is in perpetual flux. Thus, entrepreneurs must constantly adapt their intermediation – and the company through which their profits from the intermediation pass – to market changes both upstream and downstream of their business. They constantly demonstrate prudence. But things may become more complicated: as the company’s activities continue to expand, entrepreneurs alone become less and less capable of monitoring markets upstream and downstream, to the point that they must delegate this task to their employees and depend on their prudence to adapt – either individually or within an autonomous group – their activity to market changes. They make decisions concerning purchasing or selling, production or consumption – both externally and internally – through delegation by the entrepreneur. Briefly put, they prolong their intermediation and coordinate their labors in a new way. By their very actions, they modify the marginal utility of the division of their labors. The effect by which entrepreneurs’ actions divide and coordinate labor in the market is extended to inside the company. The division of labor continues to be a spontaneous order, rendered more and more prudent through the continuous intermediation of entrepreneurs and their employees.

Conclusion The analysis of the entrepreneurial and managerial processes for the division and coordination of labor has reached its conclusion. Far from setting the division of labor in manufacturing in opposition to the division of labor in society, it shows that the two processes have a point in common: the prudence of the person who divides and coordinates tasks that were formerly combined. Both are a result of universitas, nomocracy, or spontaneous order. Whether outside the company or within it, these individuals discover, in the flows of information they process, an opportunity for profitable intermediation between all involved parties. They bring together the producer and consumer who were formerly unaware of one another and transform them into supplier or customer. They divide and coordinate their labor in parallel. They reorganize, even if by just a minor detail, the bonds forged between “suppliers” and “customers” throughout the production process, and through this decision, they further divide and coordinate their labors. They demonstrate imagination, foresight, and alertness. They exercise prudence in its purest form. In the market, such an individual is incarnated by the entrepreneur. In the company, this individual may be

31

Wisdom Within the Firm: An Aristotelian-Hayekian Approach to. . .

597

any employee to whom the entrepreneur has delegated the authority to make decisions. All may demonstrate prudence, but all do not have the same responsibilities. For example, in the marketplace, the entrepreneur cannot act with imprudence over the long term. But what about the responsibility of the company’s employees? By deciding to make an adjustment to a given market variation, they take risks on behalf of their employer. The question is then to determine the scope of their responsibility. Because free trade enables all customers to choose their preferred supplier in the market, the producer’s production forecast hinges on the discretion of consumers, to the point that it always behooves sellers to focus their imaginative power on buyers’ needs, to determine consumer attitudes based on the buying experience, and to retain this information for future endeavors. Simply put, competition forces sellers to integrate the prudence of consumers. Competition can be a major source of initiative and innovation to stay one step ahead of customer expectations. In their role as intermediary between producer and consumer, entrepreneurs are convinced that they are more prudent than both and assume the risks of their entrepreneurial gamble. Within a company, there is no mechanism comparable to competition that can realign the imaginative power of suppliers to better meet customer needs in terms of total quality management. The buyer of each employee’s work is not his or her “customer” but the employer. The freedom of trade thus focuses the imagination of employees on the needs of their employer or its agents and not on their “customers.” A problem arises if the employer and the hierarchy are less familiar with the needs of the company’s customers than the employees themselves. In this case, decisionmaking must be decentralized as close as possible to the company’s real customers. The employer and the hierarchy must refocus the imagination of each employee on the needs of his or her “customer,” in terms of total quality management, right down to the actual customer. Management deploys coordination mechanisms, and Mintzberg (1973, 1989) has distinguished six types. Direct supervision is not relevant to this study, as it is, in fact, the absence of delegation. The four standardization mechanisms (standardization of work processes, output, skills, and norms) leave employees free to decide on their work, provided they respect the standard. Management deploys indirect control that constrains employees to demonstrate prudence. A contradiction arises between, on the one hand, affirmation of a particular type of autonomy and, on the other hand, a specific limitation on an initiative that such autonomy may entail. The final of the six mechanisms of coordination is mutual adjustment, characterized by informal communication between the customer and supplier to coordinate their efforts as they go about their respective tasks. This mechanism reflects management styles deployed in response to the excesses of Taylorism and bureaucracy and includes participatory management, self-managed work teams, and “liberated” companies, which depend on the joint development of employees’ autonomous action, ability to take the initiative and sense of responsibility. At the very core of such development is the recognition and reinforcement of individual prudence. In simple terms, one now see the stark relief between the empowerment of employees

598

A. Pellissier-Tanon

and the proletarians – the contemporary avatars of the “natural slaves” described by Aristotle (Politics, 1252–1258), subject to the whims of tyrannical foremen, the science of organizers, and the paternalism of senior management. In order for mutual adjustment to provide each individual with the opportunity to develop prudence and participate more fully in the intermediation initiated by the entrepreneur, managers grant employees a certain degree of liberty and determine the scope of their initiatives based on the extent of their responsibilities. They hold the employees accountable through reporting: if they have not submitted their ideas for approval a priori, they must report the results a posteriori. Managers validate the use the employees intend to make or have made of their autonomy and the suitability of their initiatives. They then assume responsibility on behalf of the employer or, conversely, refuse to validate such use and hold the employees responsible. It is the managers who guarantee, from the bottom to the top of the hierarchical line, the prudence shown by employees when using their autonomy and initiative. This example illustrates a good practice of delegation of responsibilities that can compensate for the absence in the company of an accountability mechanism similar to competition. Following Berle and Means (1932), economic analysis points to the existence of information asymmetries between entrepreneurs and their collaborators. They typically generate moral hazard situations and/or misuses of delegation. Thus, the opportunism of agent-collaborators would lead the principal-entrepreneur to deploy incentives and control measures, which might be costly (Alchian and Demsetz 1972). Within the perspective of the theory of transaction costs initiated by Coase (1937), the expenditure on enhancing incentives and control measures counterbalances the costs of using the price system and delimits the frontier of the firm. The good practice example presented above consists precisely in incrementally increasing responsibility delegation insofar as the agent proves that she uses it well. This limits the risk and ensures that it is used properly, with a view to personal and professional development. This analysis demonstrates that it is through the exemplary use of prudence that entrepreneurs coordinate the division of labor resulting from their intermediation. They do so in the market as they do at the company, where they provide the impetus to seize an opportunity for profit. In the company, they allow their employees to use their own initiative to successfully accomplish and even go beyond the initial project. However, entrepreneurs must make sure that their prudence is properly focused on serving consumers, as no impersonal mechanism comparable to competition exists within the company for assigning responsibility. They, therefore, ask the managers to act as guarantors of the prudence of employees. The managerial process of the division and coordination of labor is not, by its nature, different from the entrepreneurial process since both are the result of intermediation between producer and consumer. It nonetheless differs in the way it is exercised. The employees who perform the intermediation do not assume the risks because they are acting on behalf of their employer. The managerial process of dividing and coordinating work remains a spontaneous order, even if it is regulated by management practices that are eventually meant to contribute to the empowerment of employees.

31

Wisdom Within the Firm: An Aristotelian-Hayekian Approach to. . .

599

Cross-References ▶ Innovation as Ethos ▶ Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics ▶ The Social Role of the Virtue of Integrity

References Alchian A, Demsetz H (1972) Production, information costs, and economic organization. Am Econ Rev 62(5):77–795 Alter M (1990) Carl Menger and the origins of Austrian economics. Westview Press, Boulder/San Francisco/Oxford Aristotle (1926) The Nicomachean ethics (trans: Rackham H). Harvard University Press, Harvard Aristotle (1932) The politics (trans: Rackham H). Harvard University Press, Harvard Arjoon S (2010) An Aristotelian-Thomistic approach to management practice. Philos Manag 9: 47–64 Aubenque P (1963) La Prudence chez Aristotle. PUF, Paris Berle A, Means G (1932) The modem corporation and private property. Macmillan, New York Blake R, Mouton J (1964) The managerial grid: the key to leadership excellence. Gulf Publishing Company, Houston Bylund P (2011) The division of labor and the firm: an Austrian attempts at explaining the firm in the market. Q J Austrian Econ 142:188–215 Bylund P, Manish G (2016) The Mises-Knight theory of uncertainty and its implications for entrepreneurship, equilibrium, and the theory of the firm. In: Fiorito L, Scheall S, Suprinyak C (eds) Research in the history of economic thought and methodology, vol 34. Emerald Publishing, Bingley, pp 305–336 Carney B, Getz I (2009) Freedom, Inc: free your employees and let them Lead your business to higher productivity, profits, and growth. The Crown Publishing Group, New York Coase R (1937) The nature of the firm. Economica 4:386–405 Coriat B (1979) L’Atelier et le chronomètre: essai sur le taylorisme, le fordisme et la production de masse. Christian Bourgois, Paris Coriat B (1990) L’atelier et le robot: essai sur le fordisme et la production de masse à l'âge de l’électronique. Christian Bourgois, Paris Cottereau A (2002) Droit et bon droit. Un droit des ouvriers instauré, puis évincé par le droit du travail (France, XIXe siècle). Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales 57(6):1521–1557 Détienne M, Vernant J-P (1974) Les Ruses de l'intelligence, la métis des grecs. Flammarion, Paris Durand C (1974) Les politiques patronales d’enrichissement des tâches. Sociologie du travail 16(4): 358–373 Durand C (1978) Le travail enchaîné, organisation du travail et domination sociale. Le Seuil, Paris Durkheim E (1893) La division du travail sociale. Félix Alcan, Paris Durkheim E (1947) The division of labour in society (trans: Simpson G). The Free Press, Glencoe Eabrasu M (2021) Bet against yourself: integrating insurance and entrepreneurship. J Inst Econ 1(14). https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744137421000394 Facchini F (2007) L’entrepreneur comme un homme prudent. La Revue des Sciences de Gestion 226–227(4–5):29–38 Fayol H (1918) Administration industrielle et générale. Dunod, Paris Ferguson A (1767) Essay on the history of the civil society. Grierson, Dublin Friedmann G (1956) Le Travail en miettes: Spécialisation et loisirs. Gallimard, Paris Gillespie R (1991) Manufacturing knowledge: a history of the Hawthorne experiments. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Gilson E (1989a) Le Thomisme, Introduction à la philosophie de Saint Thomas d’Aquin. Vrin, Paris

600

A. Pellissier-Tanon

Gilson E (1989b) L’Esprit de la philosophie médiévale. Vrin, Paris Gordon D (1993) The philosophical origins of Austrian economics. Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn Harris H (2007) Traditional virtues and contemporary management. Philos Manag 6:61–76 Hayek F (1937) Economics and knowledge. Economica 4:33–54 Hayek F (1945) The use of knowledge in society. Am Econ Rev 35(9):519–530 Hayek F (1978) New studies in philosophy, politics, economics and history of ideas. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago Hayek F (1979) Law, legislation and liberty, political order of a free people. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London/Hendley Hayek F (1988) The fatal conceit. The errors of socialism. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Kanigel R (1997) The one best way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the enigma of efficiency. Little, Brown, Boston Kauder E (1957) Intellectual and political roots of the older Austrian school. Z National 17(4): 261–270 Kirzner I (1973) Competition and entrepreneurship. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Kirzner I (1979) Perception, opportunity and profit. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Kirzner I (1982) Method, process and Austrian economics: essays in honour of Ludwig von Mises. Heath, Lexington Kirzner I (1989) Discovery, capitalism and distributive justice. Basil Blackwell, Oxford Kirzner I (1992) The meaning of market process, essays in the development of the modern Austrian economics. Routledge, London/New York Knight F (1921) Risk, uncertainty and profit. In: Casson M (ed) Entrepreneurship. Edward Elgar, Hants, pp 11–18 Laloux F (2016) Reinventing organization: an illustrated invitation to join the conversation on nextstage Organisations. Nelson Parker, Millis Langlois R (1985) Knowledge and rationality in the Austrian school: an analytical survey. East Econ J 9:309–330 Lefebvre P (2009) Subordination et ‘révolutions’ du travail et du droit du travail (1776–2010). Entrep Hist 57(4):45–78 Lewin K (1947) Frontiers in group dynamics: concept, method and reality in social science; social equilibria and social change. Hum Relat 1(1):5–41 Likert R (1967) The human organization. McGraw Hill, New York Mandeville B (1714) The fable of the bees: or, private vices, Publick benefits. J. Roberts, London Marx K (1867) Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie. Volume 1: Der Produktionsprozess des Kapitals. Verlag von Otto Meissner, Hamburg Menger C (1950) Principles of economics (trans: Dingwall J, Hoselitz B). Free Press, Glencoe Mintzberg H (1973) The nature of managerial work. Harper and Row, New York Mintzberg H (1989) Mintzberg on management, inside our strange world of organization. The Free Press, New York Oakeshott M (1975) On human conduct. Oxford University Press, Oxford Peaucelle J-L (2003) Du dépeçage à l’assemblage, l’invention du travail à la chaîne à Chicago et à Détroit. Gérer et Comprendre 73(5):75–88 Peaucelle J-L (2006) Adam Smith’s use of multiple references for his pin making example. Eur J Hist Econ Thought 13(4):489–512 Peaucelle J-L (2009) Vices et vertus du travail spécialisé. Gérer et Comprendre 97(3):28–38 Peaucelle J-L (2012) Rhetoric and logic in Smith's description of the division of labor. Eur J Hist Econ Thought 19(3):385–408 Plato (1925) Statesman, Philebus, Ion (trans: Fowler and Lamb). Harvard University Press, Harvard Queiroz R (2012) The importance of Phronesis as communal business ethics reasoning principle. Philos Manag 11:49–61 Rothbard M (1985) Professor Hébert on entrepreneurship. J Libertarian Stud 7(2):281–286

31

Wisdom Within the Firm: An Aristotelian-Hayekian Approach to. . .

601

Schumpeter J (1934) The theory of economic development. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Séris JP (1994) Qu’est ce que la division du travail? Ferguson. Vrin, Paris Sewell W (1980) Work and revolution in France: the language of labor from the old regime to 1848. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Small M (2011) Wisdom, management and moral duty: a Greco-Roman perspective. Philos Manag 10:113–128 Smith A (1776) An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Straham et Cadell, London Smith B (1990) Aristotle, Menger, Mises: an essay in the metaphysics of economics. Hist Polit Econ 22:263–288. (annual supplement) Solomon R (1992) Corporate roles, personal virtues: an Aristotelean approach to business ethics. Bus Ethics Q 2(3):317–339 Taylor F (1911) Principles of scientific management. Harper & Brothers, New York Thomas Aquinas (1920) The Summa Theologiæ (trans: Fathers of the English Dominican Province). Burns Oates and Washbourne, London Trist E, Higgin G, Murray H, Pollock A (1963) Organizational choice: capabilities of groups at the coal face under changing technologies: the loss, rediscovery and transformation of a work tradition. Tavistock Publications, London von Mises L (1949) Human action, a treatise on economics. Henry Regnery Company, Chicago Weil S (1951) La Condition ouvrière. Gallimard, Paris White L (1990) Entrepreneurship, imagination and the question of equilibration. In: Littlechild S (ed) Austrian economics. Edward Elgar, Aldershot, III, pp 87–104

The Social Role of the Virtue of Integrity An Aristotelian Perspective

32

Philippe Jacquinot

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Major Current of Thought in Management: Integrity as Adherence to Acceptable Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Mayer et al.’s Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Building on the Mayer et al.’s Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Deeper Exploration of the Complex Concept of Integrity through Aristotelian Social and Political Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Pioneering Work of Robert Solomon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Deeper Analysis: Integrity as an Act of Justice Based on a Disposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Avenues for Future Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Avenues Concerning Integrity as an Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Avenues Concerning Integrity as a Disposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

604 605 605 606 609 609 610 614 615 617 619 620 620

Abstract

There is broad consensus in management and philosophy that integrity is a complex concept, which has many facets. Integrity is undoubtedly considered a virtue, but no consensus has been reached about the nature of this virtue. This chapter proposes to clarify the nature of the virtue of integrity in a managerial context through the lens of Aristotle’s social and political philosophy. The chapter considers the individual first and foremost as a member of society, subject to temptations that may lead him or her to commit unjust acts. It defines the action of integrity, in a managerial context, as the promised exercising of the virtues of an individual’s social roles, in particular through the regulation of appetite for gain. It then explains how this action is based on character formed by individual will and practical wisdom. P. Jacquinot (*) Université Paris-Saclay, Univ Evry, IMT-BS, LITEM, Evry-Courcouronnes, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_60

603

604

P. Jacquinot

Keywords

Aristotle · Integrity · Justice · Management · Social philosophy · Social role · Trust · Virtue

Introduction Scholars in management have been examining integrity since the first major studies dealing with this concept were published in the mid-1990s. They have attempted to better understand what Mayer et al. (1995) identified as one of the three foundations of trust, along with ability and benevolence. Management literature has drawn on the philosophical works of McFall (1987), by examining either what she referred to as personal integrity – adherence to one’s own principles guiding individual behavior – or what she referred to as moral integrity – adherence to principles considered acceptable by the trustor. Works by Simons (1999, 2002) and Erhard et al. (2018), for example, explored an approach in which personal integrity was seen as both the consistency of an actor’s commitments and the congruency between these commitments and actions, while Moorman et al. (2012, 2013, 2018), in their work on moral integrity, studied integrity through an examination of its contents: the moral commitments themselves. However, defining integrity as adherence to acceptable principles fails to grasp the complexity of the concept fully. Various authors, including researchers in management, business ethics, and philosophy, have approached it from different angles. We can understand how respecting promises made to others (Simons 1999, 2002) and to oneself (Erhard et al. 2018) to act according to acceptable principles (Mayer et al. 1995) while resisting temptations (McFall 1987) can be construed as acting morally, in contrast to hypocrisy (Simons 1999) or corruption (Bauman 2013). Questions remain, however. Do acceptable principles cover all aspects of morality (DeGeorge 1993; Moorman et al. 2012, 2013, 2018)? Does one aspect – justice – take precedence (Mayer et al. 1995)? Why do many authors speak of virtue (Audi and Murphy 2006; Palanski and Yammarino 2007, 2009; Cox et al. 2017) rather than morals? In what way is adherence to principles fundamentally different from compliance (Paine 1994, 2003)? What happens when the norms of an organization deviate from those of the surrounding society (Gosling and Huang 2009)? Why do some authors speak of practical wisdom (Solomon 1992; Schwartz 2016; Calderon et al. 2018), individual will (Giroux 1999), the need for internal debate (Verhezen 2008; Vandekerckhove 2010), or even exemplarity (Heineman 2007)? Much like a diamond, this multifaceted concept has been studied from many different angles (Fig. 1). The purpose of this chapter is to draw on the sociopolitical philosophy of Aristotle to provide a deeper understanding of the complex structure of the concept of integrity in a managerial context, and to articulate more clearly the contribution of each author to the discussion. At the first level of analysis (action), integrity is the promised exercising by the agent of the virtues of an individual’s social roles, in particular through regulation of their appetite for gain. Here, it is a question of justice, which only partially covers moral aspects. At the second level of analysis

32

The Social Role of the Virtue of Integrity

605

Fig. 1 Integrity: a multifaceted concept

(disposition to take action), integrity is both the desire to honor one’s word to be just, and practical wisdom, which enables the individual to determine the appropriate action under the given circumstances. This disposition is buttressed by a learning process in which the will is guided by exemplary actions of just people, and practical wisdom is fostered in various ways, such as healthy debate. Through repeated acts of integrity, this disposition becomes firmly ingrained in the individual’s character and will then be a virtue. The first section of this chapter describes the contributions of management scholars in a selection of their works on integrity. The second section explores what light can be shed on this concept by an Aristotelian approach to the virtue of integrity. The third section proposes avenues for future research.

A Major Current of Thought in Management: Integrity as Adherence to Acceptable Principles Mayer et al. (1995) highlighted the fact that integrity is at the heart of a trust relationship. They drew on the writings of McFall (1987) when they defined integrity as adherence to acceptable principles, and several authors then built on their work and developed their ideas further.

The Mayer et al.’s Framework In their seminal article, Mayer et al. (1995) examined cooperation through trust. This is the only possible alternative to cooperation through coercion, which is a powerful management method, as it clearly demonstrates an ability to punish, but it exposes its user to defection – or even vengeance – once the punitive pressure has dissipated. Cooperation through trust, on the other hand, is based on the “willingness of a party

606

P. Jacquinot

that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor and control the other party” (p. 712). According to these authors, cooperation of this sort is well suited to the organization’s need to work in a participative manner. They defined the three characteristics of an individual that form the foundation for trust: • Ability, i.e., the “group of skills, competencies, and characteristics that enable a party to have influence within some specific domain” (p. 717) • Benevolence, i.e., the will “to do good to the trustor, aside from an egocentric profit motive” (p. 718) • Integrity, i.e., the fact that the trustee “adheres to a set of principles that the trustor finds acceptable” (p. 719) These passages make clear that it is, in fact, their ability that enables the trustee to increase the value of the entrusted goods better than the trustor could themself, or has time to. In addition, it is because she/he has integrity that the trustee will keep their promise to increase the value of these goods, even if their feelings of benevolence for the trustor no longer exist. The authors then further elaborated on integrity, drawing directly on the philosophical work of McFall (1987). They stressed in particular that adherence covers congruence between words and actions, as well as the consistency of the actions themselves. They felt that these principles so defined exclude the principle of profit-seeking at all cost and, unlike McFall, employed the term “justice.” They did not, however, note the passages where McFall speaks of integrity revealing itself through resistance to temptation. Mayer and Davis (1999) built on this work to propose a measurement scale: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Top management has a strong sense of justice. I never had to wonder whether top management would stick to its word. Top management tries hard to be fair in dealing with others. Top management’s actions and behaviors are not very consistent (reversed-score item). 5. I like top management’s values. 6. Sound principles seem to guide top management’s behavior. Items 2 and 4 concern adherence to principles. Items 5 and 6 concern the acceptability of the principles. Items 1 and 3 denote the value of justice and one of its aspects – equity. Whereas adherence to acceptable principles has been explored in management research, the question of justice has been overlooked, even though its relevance often seems implicit.

Building on the Mayer et al.’s Framework Tony Simons (1999) closely examined the question of adherence to principles. He defined an analogue, behavioral integrity, as “the perceived degree of congruence between the values expressed by words and those expressed through action” (p. 3).

32

The Social Role of the Virtue of Integrity

607

In 2002, he slightly modified his definition of behavioral integrity to clarify his idea, calling it “the perceived pattern of alignment between an actor’s words and deeds” (p. 18). The concept was now focused solely on the question of the alignment of words and deeds, which corresponds to item 2 in the Mayer and Davis (1999) scale. Simons et al. (2007) proposed a scale including eight items to measure the alignment between words and deeds: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

There is a match between my manager’s words and actions. My manager delivers on promises. My manager practices what he/she preaches. My manager does what he/she says he/she will do. My manager conducts themself by the same values he/she talks about. My manager shows the same priorities that he/she describes. When my manager promises something, I can be certain that it will happen. If my manager says he/she is going to do something, he/she will.

Simons et al. (2013) affirmed that, since 2006, many researchers at the Academy of Management sessions had shown a keen interest in the concept of integrity, and that the literature was now predominantly focused on his own construct of behavioral integrity: a “relatively simple and ‘clean’ construct that had significant explanatory power” (p. 391), which “demonstrated practical usefulness” (p. 391). At the same time, he acknowledged that this concept did raise a problem, as the researchers refused to answer “yes” to the question “did Hitler demonstrate behavioural integrity?” (p. 391). Moorman et al. (2013) sought to overcome this difficulty by proposing to add the construct of “moral behaviour” to the construct of behavioral integrity. Along with Moorman et al. (2012), they felt it was unfortunate that the Mayer and Davis (1999) scale combined consistency and principles in a single dimension, and that, with respect to principles, only “justice” in general and equity – one of its manifestations – are cited. They opted for the pluralistic approach of Burton et al. (2006), and Dunn (2009), and proposed a scale with items representing various philosophies (mentioned in brackets below): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

This leader acts to benefit the greater good (utilitarianism). This leader treats people fairly (justice). This leader protects the right of others (right-based). This leader treats people with care and respect (caring). This leader serves to improve society (social contract). This leader is honest (virtue).

Moorman et al. (2013, 2018) estimated, based on statistical data, that this scale and the behavioral integrity scale proposed by Simons et al. (2007) should be used together to determine trust. Michael Jensen also explored the concept of integrity as the alignment of adherence to acceptable principles. The Enron and Nortel scandals led him to reflect on the pertinence of the proposal he made with William Meckling in 1976 – when

608

P. Jacquinot

they first suggested that the CEO’s interests should be aligned with those of shareholders through stock options (Jensen and Meckling 1976) – and he gradually turned his attention instead to the question of integrity. In 2002, with Joseph Fuller, he lauded the courage of business leaders who refused to undermine their company in order to meet unreasonable expectations of market analysts, even if it came at a personal cost (Fuller and Jensen 2002). In 2003, he asserted that both superiors and subordinates lie in the budgeting process about the prospects for obtaining goals and about how successfully the goals have actually been reached in order to reduce bonuses paid to the former and increase them for the latter (Jensen 2003). In 2004 and 2005, he expressed his belief that large financial rewards had the same effect on business leaders as heroin (Jensen 2004, 2005). In 2010, with Kari Granger and Werner Erhard, Jensen said that integrity was a fundamental factor in production, and one that was still missing from theory (Jensen et al. 2010). In 2014, he stated that without integrity nothing works, and that a person of integrity does not ask themself whether or not she/he should honor their word when the moment comes to do so (Jensen 2014). His work therefore called into question the paradigm of a constantly calculating homo economicus that he had developed in 1994 (Jensen and Meckling 1994) to support his work of 1976. In 2018, Jensen published an article with Werner Erhard and Steve Zaffron that was the culmination of a research paper begun in 2005. In this text, Erhard et al. (2018) built on the work of Simons (2002). They stated their belief that a person of integrity is one who honors her word and who aligns her word with her actions. And whenever she cannot respect this alignment, she informs the person to whom she has given her word and seeks to remedy the consequences due to her failure to strictly align her deeds with her words. Their perspective further developed Simons’ proposal by introducing the notion of reparation. Furthermore, concerning the acceptability of principles, the authors felt that in order to reap the benefits of belonging to a community, one must promise to respect its standards. They thus raised the question of morality and proposed to study it as a phenomenon. And last, Erhard et al. (2018) made the connection between one’s word and identity. For these authors, “who I am is my word” (p. 18), because my word is “my expression of myself” (p. 32). A person of integrity demonstrates self-discipline by honoring the promise made to others and to oneself. The management works presented above have made major contributions to our understanding of the concept of integrity, but a number of questions still remain. Why is integrity so often associated with the term “virtue” (Palanski and Yammarino 2007, 2009)? Does the concept of integrity fully encompass the concept of morality (DeGeorge 1993)? Is justice the major principle among the acceptable principles proposed (Mayer et al. 1995)? Why does the question of personal gain often seem implicit in these discussions (Mayer et al. 1995; Solomon 1999; Simons 2002; Erhard et al. 2018)? What are the temptations that may lead an individual to lack integrity (McFall 1987)? Why is a distinction made between a strategy based on integrity and a strategy based on compliance (Paine 1994, 2003; Calderon et al. 2018)? How are the notions of practical wisdom (Solomon 1992; Calderon et al. 2018) and individual will (Giroux 1999) related to integrity? Why has it been

32

The Social Role of the Virtue of Integrity

609

recommended that debate be fostered within companies (Verhezen 2008, 2010; Vandekerckhove 2010)? Why has the exemplarity of senior management been stressed as a key to successful policies to promote integrity (Heineman 2007)? Is the person of integrity one who respects the principles and values of her organization, or the one who respects those of the society that encompasses the organization (Gosling and Huang 2009)? The Aristotelian tradition of social and political philosophy offers answers to these questions.

A Deeper Exploration of the Complex Concept of Integrity through Aristotelian Social and Political Philosophy In parallel with the works presented above, the question of integrity was also raised by Robert Solomon in as early as 1992, drawing on Aristotelian philosophy. He did not specifically examine integrity as such but provided several bases for an approach. This section presents the contributions made by Solomon and then builds on his work by referring directly to the writings of Aristotle.

The Pioneering Work of Robert Solomon For Solomon (1992), Aristotelian philosophy makes it possible to go beyond the practical limitations that have been encountered in attempts to operationalize the classical theories of Kant, Locke, and Mill. Business ethics must be considered at the appropriate level – neither as a general system, nor for a single person – by admitting individuals as members of their organization, in which they play a role, and by considering their organization as having its own role to play in society. Ultimately, each member of an organization is personally responsible, but this responsibility is, at least in part, defined by the individual’s roles and duties at the company. One must demonstrate loyalty to one’s community, which, in this instance, has collective goals and a clearly defined mission: to produce quality goods and services and generate a profit for shareholders. Everyone must give the best of themself – their virtues – which are defined by the two communities one belongs to: the company and the society that encompasses it. The difficulty arises from the fact that, inevitably, individuals play several roles in their private and professional lives, and their priorities may diverge depending on different roles. For Solomon (1992), integrity is “the linchpin of all virtues, the key to their unity or, in conflict and disunity, an anchor against personal disintegration. [. . .] But in harmony or in conflict, integrity represents the integration of one’s roles and responsibilities and the virtues defined by them” (p. 328). In the professional world, “a person’s integrity on the job typically requires him or her to follow the rules and practices that define that job, rather than allow oneself to be swayed by distractions and contrary temptations” (p. 328). For Solomon (1992), there are no simple principles that enable one to resolve conflictual roles and thereby maintain one’s identity. He felt that it was necessary

610

P. Jacquinot

above all to cultivate the virtue of practical wisdom, or phronesis. This virtue comes into play when one must apply one’s principles to a real-life situation. Solomon (1992) provided the example of a judge who must decide, based on the principle of justice, the sentence for a criminal. Such a decision must take into account a dozen different considerations, including not only legal aspects and the public good, but also the merits of the criminal and the circumstances. In 1999, Solomon once again asserted that the individual dimension of integrity only has meaning when considered from a social perspective as well. Of course, “integrity is not a single virtue, but a collection of virtues, working together to form a coherent whole” (p. 38). But integrity in this sense cannot be judged without having an understanding of the person “in the sense of being an integral part of something larger than the person – the community, the corporation, society, humanity, the cosmos” (p. 38). For Solomon, the idea of “wholeness” or of “unity” as suggested by the concept of integrity must be understood in this context. Solomon (1999) examined integrity from a social perspective, but did not overlook identity as another important aspect of integrity. For him, integrity enables its possessor to persist in the face of change, and to retain cohesion in case of a conflict or ethical dilemma. He felt that integrity was more prevalent than commonly believed. It may be evidenced by employees who refuse to give in and execute an order from their organization. Integrity is most often found among employees who are loyal but who also know how to draw boundaries and avoid placing their company in jeopardy. Integrity requires both a sense of belonging and moral autonomy. For Solomon (1999), people who lack integrity are subject to a form of self-deception, such as the thief who claims to have just been borrowing something, or the corrupt person who says a bribe was just a token of appreciation. Their “fragmentation of the self” (p. 41), more than their lack of word/deed consistency, betrays their vice. On the other hand, opportunists may be honest with themselves and others, openly declaring to their partners that they are in fact opportunists. But their personal integrity would then be at odds with the public part of their identity, which forbids them from manipulating others. The “chameleon” (p. 41) lacks not only principles but also goals. The chameleon’s lack of integrity, since the self is only a reflection of the given social situation, becomes apparent when opinions or behavior begin to diverge. And finally, there is the “person of integrity” (p. 42), who proudly proclaims their obedience to principles, but these principles are so general that they allow for all sorts of interpretations and exceptions, which the person of integrity readily uses to advance their own interests and avoid any discussion.

A Deeper Analysis: Integrity as an Act of Justice Based on a Disposition Robert Solomon did not specifically examine the link between the concept of integrity and that of justice, which had only been mentioned by Mayer et al. (1995) and noted, along with other concepts, by Moorman et al. (2012). To get a better understanding of this social virtue and articulate it in relation to integrity, we

32

The Social Role of the Virtue of Integrity

611

must go directly to the source, namely Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle 2012). Aristotle began by identifying justice in terms of law, which prescribes virtues and prohibits vices depending, in particular, on the role that each individual has agreed to play in society. He referred to this as “universal justice.” Respect for justice makes it possible to obtain the ultimate goal of a political society – the perfection of its citizens: “we call those acts just that tend to produce and [. . .] preserve happiness and its components for the political society. And the law bids us do both the acts of a brave man (e.g. not to desert our post nor take to flight nor throw away our arms), and those of a temperate man (e.g. not to commit adultery nor to gratify one’s lust), and those of a good-tempered man (e.g. not to strike another nor to speak evil), and similarly with regard to the other virtues and forms of wickedness” (NE 1129b 19-23). Aristotle then singled out a specific temptation: “while the man who exhibits in action the other forms of wickedness acts wrongly indeed, but not graspingly (e.g. the man who throws away his shield through cowardice or speaks harshly through bad temper or fails to help a friend with money through meanness), when a man acts graspingly he often exhibits none of these vices – no, nor all together, but certainly wickedness of some kind (for we blame him) and injustice” (NE 1130a1822). He went on: “Again, if one man commits adultery for the sake of gain and makes money by it, while another does so at the bidding of appetite though he loses money and is penalised for it, the latter would be held to be self-indulgent rather than grasping, but the former is unjust, but not self-indulgent; evidently, therefore, he is unjust by reason of his making gain by his act” (NE 1130a 23-28). For Aristotle, “There is, [then], another kind of injustice which is a part of injustice in the wide sense, and a use of the word ‘unjust’ which answers to a part of what is unjust in the wide sense of ‘contrary to the law’” (NE 1130a22-23). Justice ensures cohesion among men (NE 1132b32), in a relationship of exchange, and holds the city together (NE 1132b34). For Aristotle, particular justice consists in an equitable distribution, from one person to another, of a just share based on their contribution to the community (distributive justice); in an exchange, particular justice means ensuring the equality of the exchanged values (commutative justice). This entails resisting temptations for undue gains, whether it be riches or honors, that exceed one’s relative contribution or input. Upon examination of the Nicomachean Ethics, it would appear that, when Solomon (1992) evoked the exercise of virtue in social roles, he was in fact drawing on Aristotle’s ideas concerning universal justice. In order to define integrity, however, it is necessary to point out two important aspects for management. First, integrity is a matter of honoring one’s promise (to one’s employer, employee, supplier, customer, etc.). Second, due to the very nature of economic activity, management takes a special interest in particular justice. This chapter therefore proposes to define integrity, in a management context, as the act of honoring one’s promise to exercise the virtues of one’s social roles, in particular by controlling one’s appetite for gain. In real terms, a commercial or manufacturing organization embodies coordination of the division of labor to increase economic wealth. The organization receives

612

P. Jacquinot

authorization from society to mobilize resources in order to achieve the defined goal of generating a surplus – provided that it operates in an acceptable way. In midsize and large joint-stock companies, the shareholder, who guarantees the license to operate, delegates to the CEO, in exchange for various advantages, all or part of the usus against the promise to make the company more prosperous, while respecting the applicable rules of society. In the same way, the CEO delegates to their subordinates all or part of this usus. And this arrangement repeats itself up and down the ladder. Each agent who has been given the right of use – in fact, every manager – may act justly or unjustly, by adapting their behavior for the good of the organization or not. The virtue of fortitude will rein in their irascibility, their temperance will control their bodily appetite, and their sense of particular justice will control their appetite for gain, all three virtues being facets of universal justice. For example, the supervisor will restrain themself, or not, from angrily rebuking members of their team for no good reason, from sexually harassing them, or from taking undue credit for their work. Acting justly when exercising this right of use may be assessed both by the person who granted right of use (in Michael Jensen’s perspective) and by the person who has been granted this right (in Tony Simons’ perspective). As the mission of the company is to create wealth, it is easy to understand why distributive justice, taken directly from the works of Aristotle by Adams (1963, 1965), is of the utmost importance to organizations. Although not all the authors cited above mention the principle of justice, several do stress this point. For Mayer et al. (1995), “the issue of acceptability precludes the argument that a party who is committed solely to the principle of profit-seeking at all costs would be judged high in integrity (unless this principle is acceptable to the trustor)” (p. 719). Solomon (1999), when referring to a party with no integrity, spoke of opportunism and of the conscious decision to advocate self-interest. Simons (2002) considered that “a colleague who openly advocates self-interest, rather than the common good, as a basis for personal actions might be despised.” Erhard et al. (2018) also wrote that “treating integrity as a matter of cost– benefit analysis guarantees you will not be a trustworthy person” (p. 35). But it is always based on whether or not one has honored one’s promise, made either implicitly or explicitly, that the just act is considered to have integrity. It should be noted here that universal justice does not cover all of morality, as it only concerns relation to another (NE 1130a12-13) and giving the other, either tangibly or intangibly, what they deserve. It is therefore important that the definition of integrity provided above should draw attention to this point. In addition, Aristotle stated that it is easy to commit an unjust act, but much more difficult to be unjust and vicious (NE 1137a 5-9). For Aristotle, the same is true, in the opposite sense, for justice. To be just is to perform a just act not by accident but because of a disposition. To be just presupposes a certain habitus that can only be acquired over time. Aristotle immediately went on to say that to be just it is necessary above all to cultivate the virtue of practical wisdom (NE 1137a 9-11). He said that it is not all that difficult to perceive the true spirit of various legal prescriptions, but adapting the law to specific cases requires greater effort (NE 1137a12-17). Practical wisdom enables a person to remain equitable in specific cases, when it is not possible to fall back on a general dictate that could be applied with certitude (NE 1137b12-14).

32

The Social Role of the Virtue of Integrity

613

This means the ability to correct the omission and say what the legislator themself would have said had he been present (NE 1137b 22-23), either because it was not possible to establish a law for each particular set of circumstances, or because the law was too hastily conceived (NE 1125b25-26). According to Aristotle (2018), practical wisdom must guide the individual to the eternal and immutable principles of equity (Rhet. 1375a30-32). In this case, Aristotle was referring to the virtue that enlightens the disposition to take action, so that the act – performed after reflection and through an effort of the will – proves to be virtuous. Expressed through action, this form of intelligence is exercised to consider both the ends and the means, and to determine the degree of impulsivity, bodily appetite, and appetite for gain that will contribute to the agent’s happiness under the given circumstances. It is employed through deliberation and made perfect through regular practice. This wisdom is referred to as practical wisdom by those post-Aristotle authors to distinguish it from another form of intelligence: the contemplation of eternal truths, referred to simply as wisdom. The virtue of practical wisdom can be used to deliberate not only on one’s own behalf but also on behalf of others (NE 1140b 6-11). We can speak here of political phronesis, which enables those who have a political role to maintain their integrity. We can understand why authors from Paine (1994) to Calderon et al. (2018) have examined the relationship between integrity and compliance. Following the rules does not always mean acting justly, as it depends on the circumstances. Even when the principles underlying the rules may incite one to have the opposite reaction (such as being cautious while still striving for high performance), integrity is the virtue of judgment that is used to find the best compromise (Schwartz 2016). A person of integrity understands the principles behind the rules, does not merely interpret them literally – whether they be local or universal rules, or even hypernorms (Gosling and Huang 2009) – and knows how to act justly thanks to the virtue of practical wisdom. This may lead the individual to object in good conscience if she feels that neither the letter nor the spirit of the norms in the communities to which she belongs can be justly enforced. In the eyes of the other members of society, she would then be seen to be neither compliant nor even conforming. However, the virtue of practical wisdom does not represent the entirety of moral character. It also includes the will, which provides the necessary impetus to take action while maintaining self-control. Giroux (1999) considered practical wisdom to be the precondition for integrity, and one’s will to become a certain sort of person is at its source. This outlook, in which the person tries to act in such a way as to become the sort of person whom she thinks leads a good life, is fully in line with the Aristotelian philosophical tradition. More recently, the phenomenologist Ricœur (2007) stated that faithfulness to one’s word in the face of vicissitudes results from the individual’s will to achieve self-constancy, or self-maintenance, which then fully reveals their identity. Ricœur’s statement supports those of Erhard et al. (2018) and Solomon (1999) concerning identity. The person of integrity is therefore one who acts with integrity because she/he has a character that is predisposed to act in such a way. This character, comprising practical wisdom and will, is forged over time through the repetition of acts. In other words, each time one acts with integrity, one is more predisposed to act with integrity

614

P. Jacquinot

Fig. 2 The structure of the concept of integrity

on a subsequent occasion. This bijective relationship between act and character, each reinforcing the other, explains why philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition insist on exercise and repetition always being part of education. By suggesting that integrity is more an adjunctive virtue than a substantive one, Audi and Murphy (2006) and Palanski and Yammarino (2007, 2009) highlighted to what extent the act of integrity depends on the individual’s character. The concepts of exemplarity (Heineman 2007) and internal debate (Vandekerckhove 2010) would seem to be two managerial levers for fostering individual will and practical wisdom, respectively (Fig. 2). It is because the individual esteems that the life of such a person is good that he wants to become that sort of person. It is because the individual has discussions with others about the best way to apply a given rule in a given context that he has the opportunity to develop practical wisdom. This completes the definition of integrity proposed above by including the idea that the act of integrity depends on a disposition developed over time. This definition of integrity is then the act, ingrained in the character, of honoring one’s promise to exercise the virtues of one’s social roles, in particular by controlling one’s appetite for gain.

Avenues for Future Research Management literature about integrity has focused a great deal on the concept of honoring one’s promises. This is understandable: Exchanges between and within organizations are based on contracts – i.e., reciprocal promises of all kinds. In philosophical works, the individual has been the starting point to explore integrity. By drawing on the social philosophy of Aristotle, in line with works by Robert

32

The Social Role of the Virtue of Integrity

615

Solomon, this chapter has proposed a definition of integrity that reflects the complex nature of this concept. Many avenues exist for further research in this area.

Avenues Concerning Integrity as an Action The concept of justice has been examined from an organizational behavior point of view, particularly since the work of Adams (1963, 1965), who believed that each member of an organization seeks to equate their own retribution-to-contribution ratio with the ratio of the other members of the organization. As part of his research concerning equity, also referred to as distributive justice in the literature, Leventhal (1980) singled out procedural justice, which offers the receiving party the opportunity to express themself during the process that determines the retribution. Bies and Moag (1986) then focused on how receiving parties were treated during this process. Greenberg (1990) later identified, as part of this interactional justice, the concept of informational justice (i.e., the explanations provided to stakeholders) and interpersonal justice (i.e., expressed politeness, consideration, and respect for personal dignity). More recently, organizational behavior literature has shown how the individual who is witness to injustice is filled with anger, which gives her the impetus to correct the injustice. In cases where the individual is herself the victim of unfair treatment, the term “personal anger” is employed (Batson et al. 2007), whereas in cases where the individual responds out of empathy for the victim, the literature uses the term “empathic anger” (Hoffman 1989). In cases where the subject’s reaction is limited to the role of a witness, with no empathy for the victim, the term “deontic anger” is employed (Folger and Cropanzano 1998, 2001; Folger et al. 2005). Justice then becomes even more important, as it concerns not only procuring resources but also bolstering one’s self-esteem (Cropanzano et al. 2011). Reexamining organizational justice in the light of Aristotelian thought would undoubtedly provide a more nuanced picture. Organizational behavior does indeed make distinctions between different forms of justice, but it juxtaposes them rather than placing them in a larger context, and only considers them from the point of view of the person expecting a benefit. For the Aristotelian school of philosophy, before being a right, justice is first and foremost a duty – to contribute to the good of one’s community by exercising the virtues of one’s roles. General justice has three facets: the cardinal virtues of fortitude, temperance, and particular justice – which control irascibility, bodily appetite, and the appetite for gain, respectively. What is called distributive justice and procedural justice by organizational behaviorists may be considered in the same vein as the distributive justice of the Aristotelian school. Certain aspects of interpersonal justice could also be considered part of distributive justice, which encompasses all forms of retribution such as acts of appreciation and consideration. On the other hand, kindness or even reasons provided to justify the degree of retribution, which are cited as examples of interpersonal justice, are actually better reflected by other facets of justice. Furthermore, considering justice to be a duty rather than a right undoubtedly helps with understanding why deontic anger is directed toward the guilty party.

616

P. Jacquinot

But an act of integrity is more than justice alone. It is the honored promise of justice. As for the promise itself, it must, for Simons (2002), have first been verbalized – unlike the exchange of promises that forms the psychological contract (Rousseau 1995). For Erhard et al. (2018), it can only be tacit: belonging to a community implies that one agrees to follow its rules. The work of Thomas Reid, who succeeded Adam Smith in the philosophy chair at Glasgow University, has much to add to the discussion. According to Reid (1788), to make a pact, men must use natural signs that are understood by both parties or by an onlooker: exchanged looks, nuanced expression, voice modulation, or body language. These shared signals, acquired since the earliest age, enable human minds to communicate their thoughts and feelings – or, to use the author’s expression, to meld their souls. In contrast to Hume (1739–40, 1751), who thought that the fabric of society was unraveled by the self-interest of its members, Reid (1788) felt that human society had established solid footing, based on its faithfulness to its avowals and promises, and on the necessary counterpart – the trust and faith granted to them. As soon as a child reaches an age where she understands what a promise is, she is guided by her very nature to be truthful and forthright, and to the same degree, to count on this promise from others. These philosophical considerations concerning promises make it possible to see organizations as something else besides a series of binding contracts, where each party must remain on their guard and, as far as possible, seek to control the other. When Erhard et al. (2018) spoke of the person of integrity who “honors” rather than “keeps” a promise, they stressed that, through reparation, one could compensate for having not been able to honor one’s word – and even go beyond the call of duty. This idea concurred with the example provided by Jensen (2014) of a receptionist who makes an error taking a reservation and who then does everything in their power to find a solution, thereby demonstrating a great deal of integrity in the eyes of the customer. Schoorman et al. (2007), in their review of research that had employed the model of Mayer et al. (1995), insisted on the extent to which the concept of reparation opened new perspectives. This assertion is just as true today, and contemporary philosophy can be a source of enlightenment in this area. For Arendt (1958), it is the promise that enables people to consider the continuity of their relationships, creating what she referred to as islands of security. But, at the same time, she considered forgiveness to be a necessity, as it liberates people from the consequences of their past deeds and restores their ability to take action. Spaemann (1996) agreed with Arendt: Forgiveness is a form of external assistance to the guilty party to help them redefine themself in a new way with respect to their acts and obtain a certain degree of liberty. He felt that forgiveness could only truly achieve its aim through reconciliation, which eliminates the imbalance inherent in forgiveness – i.e., a duty to forgive with no corresponding right to be forgiven. Forgiveness may come with conditions, such as reparation for damages or even serving a sentence – in certain cases even at the behest of the guilty party – to redeem oneself. But it can also be granted in anticipation, by bearing in mind the lack of foresight of the individual who could not or would not honor a promise. Forgiveness can then repair a

32

The Social Role of the Virtue of Integrity

617

relationship, or at least prevent the other from being defined by their actions. Just as granting forgiveness liberates the forgiven person, it also liberates the forgiver by reaffirming that he is not confined by the contingencies or injustices imposed by past deeds. At the culmination of Spaemann’s book (1996), to get a better grasp of the concept of the human person, he asked what the difference was between “someone” and “something.” In short, integrity opens new perspectives for considering the organization in terms of human beings, rather than simply as a collection of self-serving individuals. The company can then be seen as a place where forgiveness in many forms can enable relations to endure over time, unlike the traditional dealings of a market transaction. Justice, trust, forgiveness: Lines of research in which integrity is considered as an action offer new possibilities because organizations can be considered from another angle, and not simply as a series of manipulations of certain individuals by others. Through these avenues, organizations can be seen as working communities, where each member can find help and support to deal with vulnerabilities by adopting a form of intelligence based on reciprocal dependency.

Avenues Concerning Integrity as a Disposition Contemporary philosophy has shown how the act of honoring one’s word stems from individual will. For Ricœur (1990), the person who makes a promise expresses the wish to place “self-consistency above the intermittent nature of [personal] desires, disdainful of external obstacles and difficulties” (p. 267), failing which, the person would lose a facet of her identity, i.e., the ipse-ite, in Ricœur’s terms. And through the very act of making a promise, she assumes a duty, thereby ensuring in a much stronger manner than through a simple wish that she must honor her promise, even if her original intentions were to change. In the same vein, Spaemann (1996) pointed out that one must have a firm will to curb a certain penchant for avoiding commitments. It is in this way, he later elaborated, that people recognize themselves as individuals, or claim such recognition. This later work lends support to the research of Erhard et al. (2018), according to which a person is the given promise, and a person of integrity is someone who refuses to perform any cost-benefit calculations when the moment comes to honor the promise. If we consider the object of the promise, Ricœur (1990, 2003) concurred with Lévinas (1987) when he said that the promise was required by the fragile party. However, in 1990, he criticized the expression employed by Lévinas of the “other as master” owing to the connotations of the word “master.” He preferred the term “solicitude,” and spoke of a relationship that finds its equilibrium when the receiving party returns the gift to their benefactor by reminding him of their own fragility. In 2003, he used the term “love” to describe the overabundance of the giver, beyond what is justified: metaethics akin to poetry. For Ricœur (2003), taking responsibility means assuming one is the author of one’s own acts. According to him, responsibility is nurtured through the account of one’s own past history and those of others, as told by oneself and by others. A phenomenology of the encounter in a company setting could therefore be an interesting

618

P. Jacquinot

avenue for future research, and further flesh out the proposal at the end of the previous section to foster exemplarity. With respect to exemplarity, Nussbaum (2010) showed to what extent the model of the accomplished adult, when presented to a child or adolescent, has an effect on their future behavior. In particular, if the model is presented as someone with no weaknesses or needs, or who controls every aspect of their life, this will inhibit sympathy for individuals perceived as weak or in a subordinate position. For Nussbaum, a successful education must develop awareness of one’s own vulnerabilities and those of others, so that the other is considered as the end and not means. It should also foster a desire to seek reciprocity and mutual support. The ideal is then portrayed as interdependent, mutual needs rather than the myth of total control – in order to explain how different social and political arrangements can shape the vulnerabilities shared by all human beings. With respect to exemplarity as demonstrated by honoring one’s promise, Reid (1788) felt that children were capable of understanding declarations and promises, and were instinctively inclined to both honor them and to count on those of others. According to Reid (1788), they only deviate from this way of thinking when a bad example and bad company manage to corrupt them. In a similar vein, Spaemann (1994) felt that children had a highly developed sense of justice, and were indignant when they were witnesses to injustice. However, he also felt that this sense would be atrophied if the value was not incarnated by an authority figure, and further weakened if they were intimidated or threatened, or saw that their parents hid the truth from them or used lies in daily life as a normal means of getting ahead. The notion of exemplarity in the development of individual will, as part of education, is therefore essential. Of course, employees at a company are not teenagers, but they are quite capable of desiring, through mimicry, those same things that the most prominent members of the company desire – and also of despising, while at the same time venerating, these same people if they prove to be obstacles to obtaining the desired good (Girard, 1961). In keeping with her ideas presented earlier, Nussbaum (2010) defined the concept of pernicious structure as one in which “imperfect people will no doubt act much worse” (p. 43) than they would had they not been placed in such structures. Nussbaum (2010) drew on the experiments of Stanley Milgram and Solomon Asch when she posited that submission to authority and to the majority opinion could be at work in these types of structures in particular. She also mentioned the case where people may perform actions anonymously. There is an opportunity here for future research on how mimicry and routines may place constraints on moral liberty and allow these types of structures to develop. If a person wants to act with integrity, he must first know how to do so. Aristotle stated that practical wisdom is a necessary antecedent to the virtue of justice. Following him, Ricœur (1990), in his ninth study, recalled that practical wisdom is the virtue that enables one to decide on the appropriate action in the present circumstances, given one’s ethical aim and the aporias encountered. Verhezen (2008, 2010) and Vandekerckhove (2010) felt that internal debate should be given an arena within the company. It is certain that internal debate may help establish a clearer picture of practical wisdom. Concentrating solely on the technical or moral

32

The Social Role of the Virtue of Integrity

619

aspects in the internal debate would mean forgetting that the question at hand is always trust: the object entrusted to another by the trusting party, and the position of vulnerability thus assumed by the trustor. The trustee does justice to the trustor by striving to employ the usus both effectively and efficiently. Discussions about justice should therefore be encouraged within the company, despite the moral muteness of managers (Bird and Waters 1989) or the moral silence that is more generally prevalent within the organization (Morrison and Milliken 2000). Spaemann (1994) explained how the heart of the debate could be similar to a disputatio, in which each side attempts to present their point of view in order to determine and agree on what is fair. The sociologist Chateauraynaud (1991) felt that the discussion must go beyond simply expressing personal opinions, and seek to establish a general consensus about what is fundamentally just. The “trials of reality” (p. 439) should become opportunities to ground universal principles firmly in conventions and initiatives. In the conclusion of his work, Chateauraynaud (1991) suggested that, ultimately, the focus should be placed on “what makes up a person, and the ways in which a person can be identified, defined, structured, formed and deformed in various situations” (p. 442). Hence, sociology, in accord with philosophy and management science, shows us to what degree the concept of integrity involves both anthropological and ontological questions, and offers perspectives for future research in this area. Avenues of research in which integrity is approached as a disposition are particularly important, as they introduce new possibilities for fostering employee self-empowerment without limiting it to various forms of supervision. Through encounters, exemplarity, and discussion, an employee’s coworkers can help her to “live by her own laws” (to paraphrase the etymology of the term autonomy), by realizing that her happiness ultimately resides in the virtuous accomplishment of her role in the various communities she belongs to. Where Aristotle spoke of liberty and education, the manager speaks of autonomy and training: quite an agenda.

Conclusion The Aristotelian sociopolitical perspective makes it possible to better articulate the relationship between the many contributions made by researchers who have examined integrity in a managerial context. The complex structure of the concept of integrity can be explored at two different levels: integrity as an action, and as a disposition. At each level, integrity comprises two elements. For integrity as an action, these elements are the honored promise and the social virtue of justice (both general and particular). For integrity as a disposition, they are the will and practical wisdom. In the end, integrity as an action will depend on this disposition but will also reinforce it by making it an ingrained behavioral trait, thereby forging moral character. The researcher may be more attuned to one facet or another, depending on the angle of view and depth of focus. Two managerial recommendations emerge from the literature: Showcase those people who are exemplary in terms of integrity to encourage others to behave in the same manner, and foster internal debate to develop practical wisdom.

620

P. Jacquinot

The person of integrity who now begins to emerge has a much more complex nature than the homo economicus who has been the reference for the majority of economic research and, to a certain extent, for management science. She/he is capable of foregoing an opportunity that would force them to break the promise made to others, as she/he has made the promise to themself to be just. This is a person who is capable of following their own rules – the person presented by Aristotle as a model. Aristotle also showed that this ultimate good can only be obtained through self-accomplishment, founded in particular on the education received from a master and the mutual assistance of a benevolent friend, in order to obtain excellence and develop the virtues of their roles, within the spirit of laws and customs, and ultimately according to their innermost and wisest convictions. Contemporary philosophy can add to the contributions made by the Aristotelian school by focusing on the fragility and dignity of each human being, and on the development of the will to protect them. A management researcher who takes an interest in integrity can now imagine it from another angle: that of a company that is gradually transformed into a working community where each member willingly provides assistance to the others, while exercising their role with determination. This offers new perspectives to the researcher in many different areas, such as the personal autonomy found in “liberated” companies.

Cross-References ▶ Creating an Effective Business Ethics ▶ Wisdom Within the Firm: An Aristotelian-Hayekian Approach to the Managerial Process of Division and Coordination of Labor

References Adams JS (1963) Wages inequities, productivity, and work quality. Ind Relat 3:9–16 Adams JS (1965) Inequity in social exchange. In: Berkowitz C (ed) Advances in experimental social psychology, vol 2. Academic, New York, pp 15–37 Arendt H (1958) The human condition. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Aristotle (2012) The Nicomachean ethics (trans: Ross D). Oxford University Press, New York Aristotle (2018) The art of rhetoric (trans: Waterfield R). Oxford University Press, New York Audi R, Murphy PE (2006) The many faces of integrity. Bus Ethics Q 16(1):3–21 Batson AP, Kennedy CL, Nord LA, Stocks EL, Fleming DA, Marzette CM, Lishner DA, Hayes RE, Kolchinsky LM, Zerger T (2007) Anger at unfairness: is it moral outrage? Eur J Soc Psychol 37(6):1272–1285 Bauman DC (2013) Leadership and the three faces of integrity. Leadersh Q 24(3):414–426 Bies RJ, Moag JF (1986) Interactional justice: communication criteria of fairness. In: Lewicki RJ, Sheppard BH, Bazerman MH (eds) Research on negotiations in organizations, vol 1. JAI Press, Greenwich, pp 43–55 Bird FB, Waters JA (1989) The moral muteness of managers. Calif Manag Rev 32(1):73–88 Burton BK, Dunn CP, Goldsby M (2006) Moral pluralism in business ethics education: it is about time. J Manag Educ 30(1):90–105 Calderon R, Pinero R, Redin DM (2018) Can compliance restart integrity? Toward a harmonized approach. The example of the audit committee. Bus Ethics Eur Rev 27(2):195–206

32

The Social Role of the Virtue of Integrity

621

Chateauraynaud F (1991) La faute professionnelle. Métailié, Paris Cox D, La Caze M, Levine M (2017) Integrity. In: Zalta EN (ed) The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/integrity/. Accessed 15 April 2018 Cropanzano R, Stein JH, Nadisic T (2011) Social justice and the experience of emotion. Routledge, New York DeGeorge RT (1993) Competing with integrity. Oxford University Press, New York Dunn CP (2009) Integrity matters. Int J Philos Stud 5(1):102–114 Erhard WH, Jensen MC, Zaffron S (2018) Integrity: a positive model that incorporates the normative phenomena of morality, ethics, and legality (Abbreviated version). In: Orlitzky M, Monga M (eds) Integrity in business and management. Routledge, New York, pp 11–39 Folger R, Cropanzano R (1998) Organizational justice and human resource management. Sage, Thousand Oaks Folger R, Cropanzano R (2001) Fairness theory: justice as accountability. In: Greenberg J, Cropanzano R (eds) Advances in organizational justice. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, pp 1–55 Folger R, Cropanzano R, Goldman B (2005) What is the relationship between justice and morality. In: Greenberg J, Colquitt JA (eds) Handbook of organizational justice. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, pp 215–245 Fuller J, Jensen MC (2002) Just say no to wall street. Courageous CEOs are putting a stop to the earnings game and we will all be better off for it. J Appl Corp Financ 14(4):41–46 Girard R (1961) Mensonge romantique et verité romanesque. Grasset, Paris Giroux A (1999) Aux confins des éthiques, la vertu d’intégrité. Laval théologique et philosophique 55(2):245–265 Gosling M, Huang HJ (2009) The fit between integrity and integrative social contracts theory. J Bus Ethics 90(3):407–417 Greenberg J (1990) Organizational justice: yesterday, today and tomorrow. J Manag 16(2):399–432 Heineman BW Jr (2007) Avoiding integrity land mines. Harv Bus Rev Apr:1–8 Hoffman ML (1989) Empathic emotions and justice in society. Soc Justice Res 3(4):283–311 Hume D (1739–40) Treatise of human nature. John noon, London Hume D (1751) An enquiry concerning the principles of morals. Millar, London Jensen MC (2003) Paying people to lie: the truth about the budgeting process. Eur Financ Manag 9(3):379–406 Jensen MC (2004) The agency costs of overvalued equity and the current state of corporate finance. Financ Manag 10(4):549–565 Jensen MC (2005) Agency costs of overvalued equity. Financ Manag 34(1):5–19 Jensen MC (2014) Integrity. Without it nothing works. Rotman Mag Fall:16–20 Jensen MC, Meckling WH (1976) Theory of the firm: managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure. J Financ Econ 3(4):305–360 Jensen MC, Meckling WH (1994) The nature of man. J App Corp Financ 7(2):4–19 Jensen MC, Granger KL, Erhard W (2010) A new model of integrity: the missing factor of production. Harvard Business School. Working paper 10-087. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/ Pages/item.aspx?num¼37715. Accessed 27 Apr 2018 Leventhal GS (1980) What should be done with equity theory? New approaches to the study of fairness in social relationship. In: Gergen K, Greenberg M, Willis R (eds) Social exchange: advances in theory and research. Plenum, New York, pp 27–55 Lévinas E (1987) Humanisme de l’autre homme. LGF – Livre de poche, Paris Mayer RC, Davis JH (1999) The effect of the performance appraisal system on trust for management: a field quasi-experiment. J Appl Psychol 894(1):123–136 Mayer RC, Davis JH, Schoorman FD (1995) An integrative model of trust. Acad Manag Rev 20(3): 709–734 McFall L (1987) Integrity. Ethics 98(1):5–20

622

P. Jacquinot

Moorman RH, Darnold TC, Priesemuth M, Dunn CP (2012) Toward the measurement of perceived leader integrity: introducing a multidimensional approach. J Change Manag 12(4):383–398 Moorman RH, Darnold TC, Priesemuth M (2013) Perceived leader integrity: supporting the construct 7validity and utility of a multi-dimensional measure in two samples. Leadersh Q 24(3):427–444 Moorman RH, Blakely GL, Darnold TC (2018) Understanding how perceived leader integrity affects follower trust: lessons from the use of multidimensional measures of integrity and trust. J Leadersh Org Stud 25(3):277–289 Morrison EW, Milliken FJ (2000) Organizational silence a barrier to change and development in a pluralistic world. Acad Manag Rev 25(4):706–725 Nussbaum M (2010) Not for profit. Why democracy needs the humanities. Princeton University Press, Princeton Paine LS (1994) Managing for organizational integrity. Harv Bus Rev 72(2):106–117 Paine LS (2003) Value shift. McGrawHill, New York Palanski ME, Yammarino FJ (2007) Integrity and leadership: clearing the conceptual confusion. Eur Manag J 25(3):171–184 Palanski ME, Yammarino FJ (2009) Integrity and leadership: a multi-level conceptual framework. Leadersh Q 20(3):405–420 Reid T (1788) Essays on the active powers of man. John Bell, G. G. G. and G. J. Robinson, Edinburgh Ricœur P (1990) Oneself as another (trans: Blamey K), 1992nd edn. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago Ricœur P (2003) Responsabilité et fragilité. Autres temps – Cahiers d’éthique sociale et politique 76–77:127–141 Ricœur P (2007) The course of recognition. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Rousseau D (1995) Psychological contracts in organizations. Understanding written and unwritten agreements. Sage, Thousand Oaks Schoorman FD, Mayer RC, Davis JH (2007) An integrative model of organizational trust: past, present and future. Acad Manag Rev 32(2):344–354 Schwartz J (2016) Integrity: the virtue of compromise. Palgrave Commun 2:16085 Simons T (1999) Behavioral integrity as a critical ingredient for transformational leadership. J Organ Change Manag 12(2):89–104 Simons T (2002) Behavioral integrity: the perceived alignment between managers’ words and deeds as a research focus. Organ Sci 13(1):18–35 Simons T, Liu LA, Friedman R, Parks JM (2007) Racial differences in sensitivity to behavioral integrity: attitudinal consequences, in-group effects, and “trickle down” among black and non-black employees. J Appl Psychol 92(3):650–665 Simons T, Palanski M, Treviño L (2013) Toward a broader – but still rigorous – definition of leader integrity: commentary. Leadersh Q 24(3):391–394 Solomon RC (1992) Corporate roles, personal virtues: an Aristotelian approach to business ethics. Bus Ethics Q 2(3):317–339 Solomon RC (1999) A better way to thing about business. How personal integrity leads to corporate success. Oxford University Press, New York Spaemann R (1994) Notions fondamentales de morale (trans: Robillard S, 1999). Flammarion, Paris Spaemann R (1996) Les personnes: Essai sur la différence entre « quelque chose » et « quelqu’un » (trans: Robillard S, 2009). Les Editions du Cerf, Paris Vandekerckhove W (2010) On the notion of organizational integrity. Philos Manag 9(1):123–134 Verhezen P (2008) The (Ir)relevance of integrity in organizations. Public Integr 10(2):133–149 Verhezen P (2010) Giving voice in a culture of silence. J Bus Ethics 96(2):187–206

A Critical Approach to Civil Society: The Case of Corporate Social Responsibility

33

Guillaume Delalieux

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Foundational Heroization of CS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Definitions: The Problem of the Frontier, the Influence of the State and MNC on CS . . . . A Problem of Boundaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Genealogy of the Heroization of CS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Theory and CS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critics of CS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CS, Critical Theory, and Corporate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Limits of CS Influence on Corporate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CS: From Liberal Utopia to Neoliberal Dystopia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

624 625 625 626 627 629 629 631 631 636 637 638 638

Abstract

The hegemonic conception of civil society (CS), also known as neo-Tocquevillian, suggests that it is all-powerful and carries significant influence. This idealistic perspective, which is rooted in the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and has more recently been reinterpreted through a Habermasian lens, implicitly assumes that CS is independent of institutional pressure from business, governments, or even citizens. Here, this approach is challenged, drawing on concepts developed by critical thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Adorno, and Gramsci. The adoption of this standpoint also provides insight into the tensions between CS organizations and corporate social responsibility.

G. Delalieux (*) University of La Rochelle, La Rochelle, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_62

623

624

G. Delalieux

Keywords

Civil society (CS) · Critical theory · de Tocqueville · Gramsci · Corporate social responsibility (CSR)

Introduction The United Nations define civil society (CS) as all nongovernmental and nonprofit associations that act as pressure groups to influence government policies in a direction favorable to the interests of those they represent (United Nations 2021). Accordingly CS refers to the self-organization of society, either external to, or in parallel with the political, administrative, or commercial institutional framework. As such, it encompasses organizations ranging from small, local youth and sport associations to huge international NGOs such as Greenpeace. The latter engage in lobbying work towards governments and international organizations to influence them to adopt new regulations or find solutions to societal challenges such as global warming. The notion of CS has become so ubiquitous and is used in so many different ways, notably in the context of corporate social responsibility (CSR), that a focus on its origins is necessary to avoid misuse. But as simple as the United Nations’ definition may appear, it implicitly contains a set of normative assumptions – one of the first being the existence of a State that implements legislation to guarantee the liberties and rights of CS, and sets the boundary between commercial and political sectors. Going further, the following question can be asked: To what extent do CS organizations really self-organize? Are they really separate and independent from the commercial sector and the State? To answer this question, this chapter draws on the work of prominent scholars who hold different and even dissenting views on CS, notably the classical thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment (Locke, Hume, Smith), Hegel, Marx and the Marxist critics of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer, and to a lesser extent Habermas), and de Tocqueville, the founding father of the currently dominant neo-Tocquevillian vision of CS. A focus on these Thinkers is proposed since they are widely considered as seminal authors on civil society (Seligman 2002). Indeed, one of the main characteristics of CS, besides the fact that it has been so (mis)used by politicians that it has rejoined the vocabulary of political cant, if not Orwellian Newspeak, is that it is supported by almost all positions on the political spectrum – from the far-left to the far-right through the “extreme center” (Deneault and Browne 2018) – and for this reason alone it should be regarded with the greatest skepticism. Although the arguments developed in this chapter are already well-known in critical philosophy, it is striking to note the success of such an unstable and troubled notion with blurred philosophical foundations (Keane 2013). How can its current popularity be explained, lauded by governments or corporations that love nothing more than the “dialogue” that goes with it? Various opinion polls

33

A Critical Approach to Civil Society: The Case of Corporate. . .

625

(Edelman Trust Barometer 2020) have reported that CS organizations (CSO) enjoy the highest level of trust among citizens compared to other organizations such as government, corporations, or trade unions. Beyond the classical methodological precautions that must be kept in mind when generalizing the findings of surveys and polls, respondents’ answers to the follow-up “Why” question are more interesting. When asked about the reasons for their preference for CSO, most interviewees were unable to provide an explanation. This unconscious bias should lead us to question the foundations of social representations of CSO as modern heralds, a contemporary version of David against Goliath, in line with the Cesarist tradition or the Machiavellian vision of power incarnated by exceptional individuals (Levy and Scully 2007). This overly positive bias, sometimes called the neo-Tocquevillian perspective (Berman 1997), which CS benefits from, resides in its utopian foundations that is presented in the first part of this chapter. In the second part, the main contributions of Hegel, Marx, and Gramsci are highlighted. In the third and final part, a demonstration of how critical theory can help us to rethink the limitations of the influence of CS on CSR in modern multinational corporations (MNC), considered as contemporary private tyrannies (Chomsky 2005), is offered. Drawing on the arguments presented above, the analysis is divided into two parts, the limits of the potential influence of CS, and CS as a neoliberal dystopia.

The Foundational Heroization of CS Definitions: The Problem of the Frontier, the Influence of the State and MNC on CS There are many different definitions of the modern concept of CS. At the same time, they mask struggles between underlying and opposing moral and political philosophies. The ambition here is not to provide an exhaustive set of typologies of these definitions nor an overview of them; rather an emphasis is proposed on how the dominant neo-Tocquevillian conception of CS is linked with key concepts in moral and political philosophy, such as the distinction between political society, economic society, the rule of law and State bureaucracy. In general terms, CS is known as the Third sector, distinct from the State and Business. In the Encyclopedia Britannica, Michael Kenny described it as “[a] dense network of groups, communities, networks, and ties that stand between the individual and the modern state” (Kenny 2016). Various CSO typologies can be identified, for instance, as a function of the nature of their activity (e.g., children’s rights; the environmental movement; religious groups; nonprofit media, art and culture groups; social organizations; nonprofit economic interest organizations such as mutual savings groups or cooperatives; and lobbying associations for the for-profit sector or Workers Rights), their organizational form in terms of legal status, size, or formality (grassroots/local organizations; regional, national, or international)

626

G. Delalieux

(Chowdhury et al. 2021), or their financing. Overall, there is a vast array of different organizations, operating in different sectors, with very different aims. In some cases, boundaries with government and the for-profit sector can become blurred, illustrated by the emergence of government-owned NGOs (GONGO) or BONGOs (businessowned NGOs) (Hasmath et al. 2019).

A Problem of Boundaries In practice, the boundaries between CS (and CSO) and the State or Business are more a matter of shades of gray than a clear and sharp distinction. CS lies at the intersection between the State and individuals, private and public domains of life. It has direct links with political and economic spheres of society; in turn, the latter spheres significantly influence CS through direct and indirect actions, and tactics that range from collaborative to conflicting. States have varying degrees of influence over CS (Bloodgood et al. 2014). Public authorities can use both direct (authority to operate, approval of the range of activities) and indirect (accounting regulations, competition conditions) methods, reflecting their desire to not only nurture and develop CS, but also to discreetly exercise control. There are even rankings or benchmarks of governments, based on their degree of openness to CS (CSOSI 2020) and collaboration with CS (OGP 2021). It is no surprise that countries with a tradition of political liberalism rank at the top here, although this does not foreclose that they are controlling their CS in more subtle ways. Culturalist-based explanations have tried to explain differences. A notable example in this context is the United States, which is reputed to be more open, given its liberal traditions. However, this overlooks the unpleasant actions of governmental agencies during and after the Cold War, when a vast segment of CS (the media, labor unions, associations) – as originally defined by Tocqueville (see below) – were literally purged from left-leaning CSOs (Bakir 2018). More recently (since the 1990s), CS has become central in political debates. In fact, it seems to have achieved the improbable goal of reconciling opposing ends of the political spectrum. In particular, it is a key element in a vision of society that defends a market organized by a powerful (but constitutionally limited) neoliberal State. The focus is on the regulation of competition or the provision of expertise through administrative agencies that replace democratic institutions, thus contributing to the de-democratization of the State (Brown 2006). This weakening of the classical Weberian vision (Eabrasu 2012) in favor of CS is inspired by both the social-democratic critique of the State’s totalitarian tendencies (especially in Eastern European countries), and right-wing conservative critiques of the primacy of individuals and market initiatives over the State. CS can even be reconciled with a moderate anarchist vision (Jun 2019), notably a limited federalist conception, and recent political writings on anarchy (Blumenfeld et al. 2013), in a sphere where the State’s power mechanisms can be controlled. The Habermassian vision of discursive ethics (Habermas 1994) clearly sees the function of CS as expunging the latent conflicts and tensions that pervade society,

33

A Critical Approach to Civil Society: The Case of Corporate. . .

627

through what could be labeled a “magical” reconciliation of conflicting powers. From this perspective, CS is conceived of as a public sphere, where discursive ethics (in an ideal situation that is based on the law of the best argument from a rational perspective) supports a consensus between opponents. Here, CS is separate and independent from what Habermas called the “strategical” sphere, where dialogue is conceived as instrumental, and its rhetorical dimensions are used as a weapon to convince opponents or mask intentions. Instead, it refers to the original use of dialogue by sophists denounced by Plato. The Habermasian vision has been criticized by several scholars in political philosophy (Willke and Willke 2008) for being rooted on a romanticized vision of deliberation and deliberative democracy, which may be inoperative in a globalized context where strategic and instrumental reasoning are dominant. For Mowles (2007), the belief that CSO have the power to peacefully reconcile political conflicts is reminiscent of the Weberian notion of magic (Wax 1967) rather than any kind of rational thinking. These critiques will be analyzed in the second part of this chapter. But the current conception of CS and its modern heroization, which was revived in the 1980s with the rise of neoliberalism, and in the 1990s with the fall of the Berlin Wall, has deeper roots that will be assessed in greater depth.

Genealogy of the Heroization of CS While there are several versions of the history of CS (Anheier and Toepler 2009), here a brief genealogy is offered. As noted by Keane (2013), it is only since the end of the twentieth century that the antiquated distinction between CS and the State was totally reversed. If the earliest traces of CS can be found in the work of Aristotle, its modern meaning was developed by the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment.

The Scottish Enlightenment John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith all tried, each of them in his own way, to reconceptualize the notion of CS. Their concern was to find a solution to rising tensions between private interests and social order that had been created by the disappearance of the old feudalist order and its replacement by the new capitalist order. For Locke (1960: 325), CS is “that realm of political association instituted among men when they take leave of the state of nature and enter into a commonwealth.” The political sphere, or CS (Locke does not distinguish between them) is the sphere where the weaknesses and dysfunctions of the “state of nature” are settled through mutual contractual consent between individuals. The state of nature is itself rooted in a specific theological conception: the Medieval Christian tradition of reason and revelation. For Adam Smith, CS is the sphere where moral sentiments and natural sympathy can be freely expressed, where “men are united by instinct, that they act in society from affections of kindness and friendship” (Seligman 2002). Smith considered that natural sympathy and moral sentiments formed the foundations of economic activity, which is rooted in noneconomic needs such as mutual recognition (Smith 1982).

628

G. Delalieux

The analysis of the origins of CS, grounded in a specific Christian theology (Locke) and a specific anthropologic conception of moral sentiments and natural sympathy (Smith), clearly illustrates that it was idealized as the locus of utopianism, a place where moral sentiments and natural sympathy could flourish – unlike the economic sphere, where private interests must be defended. CS was conceptualized as a tool that could balance the traditional social order, which had been shaken by the rise of early capitalism. That being said, the de Tocquevillian conception is the key to understanding the roots of the current dominant vision of CS.

Alexis de Tocqueville and the Neo-Tocquevillian Vision of CS In his two-volume work Democracy in America (1835, 1840), Alexis de Tocqueville describes CS as a sphere of private entrepreneurship and civilian affairs regulated by the civil code. This sphere includes voluntary associations such as the family, churches, neighborhoods, a free press, and other associations who “solely consist in the decision of a certain number of individuals to adhere publicly to certain doctrines, and to commit themselves to seek the triumph of those doctrines in a special way” (Swedberg 2008: 43). de Tocqueville sees associations as playing a key role in democratic societies, as they offer minorities (who lost democratic elections) a rampart against the tendency of democracy to act as the tyranny of the majority. They “link the efforts of divergent minds and vigorously propel them towards a single goal, which it unambiguously designates” (Swedberg 2008: 44). In addition to the freedom of association, de Tocqueville insisted on the freedom of political choice and information, the latter being a precondition of the former. He sees CS as offering minorities a depoliticized shelter to continue fighting and prepare to win the next election. Its function is to offer an arena where the latent violence of class conflict can be expunged and is a peaceful way to resolve political opposition and address caustic criticism (Goonewardena and Rankin 2004), avoiding the need to separate opponents’ heads from their bodies during revolutions. It was by drawing on this rather optimistic vision of CS that Habermas developed what he called the “lifeworld,” which can be described as a variegated space of institutions and practices that reproduces itself through communicative action. The contribution of Habermas to the concept of CS varies greatly depending on which version of his work we consider: the young critical Habermas is radically different to the neo-Kantian Habermas (Chambers and Kymlicka 2002). However, Habermas himself identified clear limitations and boundaries regarding the concept: an underlying, persistent threat was the potential colonization of the lifeworld, the “invasion of the logic of commodity and exchange into underlying processes of cultural reproduction” (White 2002: 147), and the power of the State through legislation. His narrower definition of CS (which excludes the economy) describes it as “[. . .] pieces in marketing strategies” (Chambers and Kymlicka 2002: 94). Although there are numerous perceptive critiques of the notion of CS, they are often overshadowed by the hegemony of the neo-Tocquevillian conception. Many authors have criticized the idealized notion, developed by Locke and Smith of “civil society,” and the classic concept of CS ends with Hegel and Marx (Seligman 2002).

33

A Critical Approach to Civil Society: The Case of Corporate. . .

629

Critical Theory and CS No sooner had the concept of CS emerged, than it was subject to critiques. In this section, light is being shed on alternative conceptions developed by critical thinkers such as Hegel (the State as its rationalization), Marx, Gramsci (the passive revolution), and Marcuse (repressive desublimation).

Critics of CS Hegel: CS as the Prehistory of the State The utopian nature of the vision developed by the great thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, which saw CS as a shelter for moral sentiment, natural sympathy or natural benevolence was rapidly pointed out by Hegel, along with the artificial separation from Business and the State. Hegel (1821: 162) defined CS as “an association of members as self-subsistent individuals in a universality which, because of their self-subsistence, is only formal. Their association is brought about by their needs, by the legal system—the means to security of person and property—and by an external organization for attaining their particular and common interests.” However, this view of CS presupposes the State: “CS is the [stage of] difference which intervenes between the family and the state, even if its formation follows later in time than that of the state, because, as [the stage of] difference, it presupposes the state; to subsist itself, it must have the state before it as something self-subsistent” (Hegel 1821: 181). He clearly accounted for the private interests at work within CS, as the diversity of conflicting interests between groups makes it impossible to reach a universal accord. He also distinguished it from the sphere of ethical life saying, “the Idea of freedom in that, on the one hand, it is the living good—the good endowed in self-consciousness with knowing and willing and actualized by self-conscious action—while, on the other hand, self-consciousness has in the ethical realm its foundation in and for itself and its motivating end. Thus, ethical life is the concept of freedom developed into the existing world and the nature of self-consciousness” (Hegel 1821: 159). For him, the inherent contradiction engendered by the fact that CS is composed of a multitude of conflicting private self-interests, can only be overcome within the State. Hegel idealized the State as the democratic rationalization of the search for freedom, in order to overcome a CS marked by self-interest. Thus, CS, for him, reflects the prehistory of the State. Ethical life begins with it, but does not end with it (Seligman 2002: 25). Marx: CS as the Instrument of Bourgeoise Domination Like Hegel, Marx criticized the utopian dimension of the eighteenth century Enlightenment conception of CS, especially its natural origin in myth and fantasy, but he also criticized Hegel’s idealized vision of the State, itself influenced by conflicting CS forces. By redeveloping and extending Hegel’s arguments, he highlighted the inherent contradiction that CS is nested in the market economy, and is artificially separated from politics. Thus, for Marx (and unlike Hegel), it is impossible for the capitalist state to abolish or transcend the economic contradictions of CS, because

630

G. Delalieux

the State itself is the instrument of dominant economic elites who are keen to defend their property rights and further their own interests. Marx instead argued that the anatomy of CS is to be found in the political economy and its reunification with political society. The idea is closely related to political and economic spheres, from which it cannot be detached. The liberal conception of CS as an autonomous sphere, distinct from the State and Business, comes to an end with Marx’s analysis of it as being simultaneously the realm of rights, property, civility, and economic exploitation. It is a public sphere composed of private interests and not necessarily oriented toward moral sentiments, natural sympathy, or ethical life.

Gramsci: The Ambivalence of CS The ability of CS to peacefully resolve conflict within democratic systems has been discussed by many critics, among them Gramsci. In particular, the latter sees CS as a way in which the bourgeois/elite can prevent class struggles from escalating into revolution. It can expunge the latent violence of class conflicts by separating politics from economics, and keeping workers within a corporatist framework rather than a political one (Anderson 1976). As Goonewardena and Rankin (2004) underline, de Tocqueville was probably shocked by the French Revolution, and the death of some of his family members is likely to have encouraged him to favor a peaceful way to settle social struggles and develop democracy and liberty. Gramsci’s own definitions of CS vary significantly. Sometimes it is defined as a sphere, encompassing organizations such as the Church, the school system, sports teams, the media, and family. His broadest definition is “the ensemble of organisms commonly called ‘private’” (Gramsci et al. 2000: 12). His conception is also ambivalent. For him, the State is “[. . .] only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks” (Gramsci et al. 2000: 236) that provides stability to the capitalist hegemonic order. However, it is also a contested, partially autonomous arena from which challenges to capitalist power might arise. While CS can sustain an unequal society, Gramsci considers that significant political change must penetrate this private realm in order to remain durable. He described it as having a critical intermediary role, while both transformative and reactionary forces seek to control it. For Gramsci, a particularly important aspect of CS is how it can blur the border between political authority and everyday life. In this respect, his notion overlaps with the idea of common sense. As Jones (2007: 9) notes, Gramsci sees it as “a confused formation, in part drawn from ‘official’ conceptions of the world circulated by the ruling bloc, in part formed out of people’s practical experience of social life. Despite its unevenness, if offers a deeply held guide to life directing people to act in certain ways and ruling out other modes of behavior as unthinkable.” The private realm is where power operates in the shadows, while the ruling power appears as natural and apolitical. But both official and practical understandings of common sense can be dismantled in order to show how they serve the interests of the ruling class (Jones 2007). For Gramsci, CS is a key mechanism in maintaining the authority of modern regimes – not through domination or coercion (the function of the

33

A Critical Approach to Civil Society: The Case of Corporate. . .

631

political sphere) – but through people’s active consent, which is secured via a cultural hegemony in which different blocs try to impose their values, way of living, opinions, or point of view. Gramsci sees the boundaries between CS and the State as porous, as the latter has to control the former to maintain its hegemony. The State is also an essential mechanism in connecting CS to the economy (Jones 2007). He clearly distinguished the private sphere from the coercive State (political society) and saw CS as providing a trench for capitalism to protect it against the State. From this perspective, the apparent autonomy of CS is itself the result of deliberate action by the ruling class, and its transformation is a precondition for radical social change. But transformation is a challenging, slow, and never-ending process. Although charismatic figures may emerge and appear to reverse the balance of power, they do not change CS directly through responding to people’s needs and desires. On the contrary, hidden behind their rhetoric, these populist Cesarist figures contribute to maintaining the monopoly over power, as they do not change the infrastructure that supports decision-making processes, which continue to exclude the majority of the people (Jones 2007).1 From this radical perspective, CS appears more as a locus of dystopia than utopia. However, it could, following Gramsci, still be the locus of revolution, if it is entirely transformed. If Gramsci’s definition is extended to include all organizations that could be considered private, the task is quite ambitious.

CS, Critical Theory, and Corporate Change Now that the theoretical foundations of the modern notion of CS have been presented, its neo-Tocquevillian positive bias, and its limitations, the following question can be asked: What does critical theory tell us about how CS influences CSR in MNC, considered as modern private tyrannies (Chomsky 2005)? Drawing on the arguments presented above, the analysis is divided into two parts: (i) the limits of the potential influence of CS and (ii) CS as a neoliberal dystopia. In the latter case, it is interpreted as a trap that attracts and channels the energies of individuals and organizations towards it, rather than the political sphere, thus contributing to the depoliticization of social and environmental issues.

The Limits of CS Influence on Corporate Change The previous sections illustrate the numerous ways through which CS and CSO that aim to change corporations are influenced by the State and Business: two spheres from which they are supposed to be independent. 1

In the management literature, for example, there is a strong belief that the activity of MNCs should be regulated through CS actions. This idea serves to mask the real power loci where change could happen (e.g., within the European Commission).

632

G. Delalieux

The Influence of the State Following Hegel, Marx or Gramsci, CS is artificially separate from the State. Without the State, there is no CS. As Bloodgood et al. (2014) note, governments provide legal definitions of the boundaries of CS. States can influence their CS in many different ways, which are more or less visible and direct, the latter not necessarily being the most effective. Liberal societies tend to favor indirect ways to exercise their control. They rule by instruments (Foucault 2019) but do not totally reject violence when directly threatened (Graeber 2012). Bloodgood et al. (2014) also highlight how the State can shape barriers to entry into CSO sphere. In the legal sphere, it can impose stringent registration requirements to gain official status, use government discretion to approve NGO registration, or simply increase the complexity of regulations. In the political sphere, it can impose requirements regarding public education, policy advocacy, lobbying, as well as introduce restrictions on partisan activity, or allow a government to dissolve an organization. Finally, in the economic sphere, it can tax individuals and corporations that contribute to NGOs, offer tax exemptions and other benefits to NGO themselves, or restrict the ability of NGOs to engage in for-profit activities. A discreet change in how donations to foundations are taxed, accounting reporting mechanisms, how funding applications are considered, or the role of competition-driven processes can have a greater long-term impact than a direct ban. Specific legal requirements, combined with competition with other organizations on a quasi-market are known to have adverse effects on the commercialization, oligarchization, or neoliberal bureaucratization of CSO (Cooney 2007; Eikenberry et al. 2004). As the John Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project (CNSP 2020) has shown in different fields such as environmental protection or women rights these actions can clearly seek to align the CSO political agenda (which is reformist rather than radical) and their functions (service provision rather than advocacy) with other dominant institutions in the field. This tactic of forcing NGOs that defend the same values to compete with each other (in areas such as environmental protection) is tantamount to the classical “divide and conquer” strategy. As these tactics do not attract media attention, and are sometimes even unnoticed by the actors themselves, there is little resistance. The liberal State excels in the art of quiet repression or social control. Analyses of the long-term evolution of the political agenda of advocacy organizations (Jenkins 2006), INGO activity (Boli 2012), or the actions of social movements (Della Porta and Fillieule 2004) underline this dimension of the policing of protest. Liberal societies have a long history of encouraging CSOs that support their ideas and discouraging others that are less enthusiastic. A recent example is that in many countries, anti-terrorist legislation that was drawn up under a state of emergency has been incorporated into existing law and become permanent, allowing governments to use it against activists who defend the environment or promote progressive social values (Codaccioni 2019). Several recent examples illustrate this point. According to various reports (Amnesty International 2017; Carnegie Europe 2021; CNDCH 2020), the freedom to demonstrate (the most common tactic used by NGOs) has been severely

33

A Critical Approach to Civil Society: The Case of Corporate. . .

633

undermined in many countries. Governments have imposed arbitrary or sweeping bans on demonstrations, authorized the excessive use of force leading to severe injuries or even death, and introduced vaguely defined repressive legislation that allows demonstrators to be arrested or pursued without good reason. For instance, in 2015 during the Paris COP 21 conference, several supporters of environmental movements were placed under house arrest (Huffington Post 2016), preventing them from taking part in the demonstration. This action was the result of an administrative decision that was taken without the approval of a judge, following the state of emergency that had been declared by the government as an anti-terrorist measure. Another example dates from June 28, 2019, when French police following orders from the Prefect used pepper spray to disperse peaceful demonstrators who were sitting on a bridge to protest against the environmental emergency. According to a police report published in a French newspaper (Bouanchaud 2019) in just a few minutes, over 5 l of gas were sprayed only a few centimeters from demonstrators’ faces. So much gas was released that the commanding officer collapsed, lost consciousness, and was replaced by another officer. This case caught the media’s attention, notably because one of the demonstrators was the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. On that day, Olivier de Schutter, a Belgian professor at UCL, discovered how the French government could use its police force to repress a peaceful demonstration. Since the events of 2015, many cases of human rights (the right to protest, in particular) violations have been documented. In France, on 28 January 2020, the Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme (2020) published a declaration condemning French police violence and abuses. State use of repression to control social protest is nothing new: Earl (2006), and Johnston (2006) observe that a pervasively repressive environment provides the foundations for resistance. While police force can be used to smother public protest, State police can also directly infiltrate CSOs to carry out investigations. Anti-terrorist legislation has also been used to increase government powers in this domain. Data are difficult to gather; countries are more or less open to sharing information, and most of the time interesting material is protected by national security legislation. While it is well-known that State intelligence agencies can use NGOs as a covert organization (BONGO) to hide their activities, the covert infiltration of agents within NGOs is less well-known. Apart from one-off scandals, such as those mentioned above, it is very difficult to evaluate (EUAFR 2015) the extent and frequency of these tactics. In the United Kingdom, the scandal surrounding the unmasking of Mark Kennedy (HMICFRS 2012), an undercover policeman who infiltrated environmental groups using a fake identity, revealed a covert State operation that had been running since 1968. During this time, over 100 undercover officers had infiltrated political protest movements. In addition to Secret Service agencies, police officers can be mobilized by the State to investigate protest movements. For instance, in 2017, French authorities launched a massive surveillance operation of antinuclear activists, supervised by a judge. Dozens of activists were targeted, thousands of conversations were transcribed, and over 15 years of tapped phone recordings were gathered (Barbier and Lindgaard 2020). According to journalists, State authorities spent over 1 million

634

G. Delalieux

euros, and used dubious tactics to build a case against environmental activists who were protesting about the burial of nuclear waste. More recently, the French Gendarmerie has created a department known as DEMETER (Ministère de l’intérieur 2019), which is dedicated to the surveillance of agricultural protests. Its mission is not only to prevent criminal acts but also to prevent ideologically motivated actions intended to denigrate the agricultural community (Horel 2020). In response, CSOs organized a petition (Reporterre 2020) to denounce what they considered to be the criminalization of environmental activism by the French State, which was seeking to protect the current hegemonic industrial model and prevent environmental change. From this perspective, French CS appears to enjoy a channeled, tightly controlled form of freedom that is limited to movements that support the cardinal values of modern Western societies such as hierarchy, private property, or representative democracy. But France is just one example of a Western country where cybersecurity legislation, counterterrorism laws, or business intelligence are used to restrict political and civil liberties. Several studies (Freedom in the World Report, 1973–2021) have emphasized how political rights and civil liberties are tightly controlled in other Western States. More generally, the authoritarian tendencies of Western democracies in the twenty-first century, prophesized by Ralf Dahrendorf (1997) that, “a century of authoritarianism is by no means the least likely prognosis for the 21st century,” has been documented in academic work (Dabène et al. 2008). Rather than leading to the development of representative democracies, as theorized by proponents of classical liberalism, the liberalization of economies has reinforced the personal power of autocrats, the takeover of economic resources by clans, and the manipulation of ballots. All of this is happening not only in poor countries but also, and more unexpectedly, in the heart of richer countries in North America or Europe. Founded on a claim of “better” governance, contractual arrangements between stakeholders have resulted in the weakening of the mechanisms of representative democracy.

The Influence of MNCs The influence of the economic sphere on the structuring of CS can be considered as more or less important, depending on the perspective that is adopted (total from a Marxist perspective that subordinates society to the economic structure, or partial from a Habermassian perspective). Not only can firms mobilize the State apparatus and agencies to protect their interests, they can also directly use their own resources to control CS and counter CSO influence on public decision-making. One tactic is to use nonmarket strategies such as corporate political activities, defined as attempts by corporations to influence government policy in a favorable direction (Barley 2010). They also have at their disposal resources such as the lobbying department (to counter CS pressure on decision-making), corporate diplomats (sent to negotiate before the cavalry of lawyers is deployed), the legal department (able to sue or threaten to do so, intimidate, or use gagging legislation), and the security department (composed of former military or police personnel who can activate their revolving door network to carry out investigations). These units, which are often embedded in CSR departments, are located under the waterline and quietly operate under the radar of public opinion. Like CSR departments, they are part of the same global strategy to

33

A Critical Approach to Civil Society: The Case of Corporate. . .

635

contain and defeat any opposition, and address its root causes, to use the United States Department of State definition of Counter-Insurgency Strategy (COIN). In this context, the work of Chamayou (2018) is interesting. The latter author developed a genealogic analysis of modern CSR and noted that CSR tactics are the most visible part of COIN strategies deployed by multinational corporations (MNCs). The point is illustrated by the case of the Nestlé Infant Milk Boycott in the 1970s (Richter 2001; Knapp 2015). Nestlé had commercialized a dried milk for infants in Africa; however, babies were dying when the product was mixed with unsafe water. When Nestlé refused to stop the commercialization of its dried milk, protests grew and resulted in a massive boycott of Nestlé products, not only in Africa but also in Europe and North America. This was the first massive modern boycott targeting an MNC and Nestlé managers did not know how to react. They hired consultants with connections to political (Republican) networks, some of whom had military experience in South America and South East Asia, where they used COIN tactics against the population. Following Maslow’s rule (1966: 15), “If the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail,” they considered the protests against Nestlé in the same way as South American or South East Asian insurgents protesting against the presence of US troops. In the end, a solution was found in the form of COIN tactics that, contrary to opinion, did not consist in the use of violence, but in the use of dialogue. Centuries of invasion and the polishing of military tactics have shown not only that the use of violence is counterproductive in the long run, but also that dialogue can be much more effective. Dialogue, when conceived as a weapon in its original Platonist meaning, can be seen as a tool like any other (Plato 2008: 456b). In the COIN context, it has many functions that include intelligence, cantonment, diversion, and cooptation (Chamayou 2018). These functions are linked. The intelligence function tries to identify potential threats, anticipate them, and get to know the enemy. The cantonment function invites members of the corporation’s inner circle to engage in private dialogue, away from the public sphere where mediatization is a threat. The diversion function seeks to keep opponents occupied in dialogue – if they are engaged in talks they cannot also prepare boycotts or develop more radical tactics. Cooptation identifies the most visible and reformist opponent groups, and seeks to pay them off in order to resolve the issue. In the Nestlé case, Chamayou (2018) shows how the company identified a reformist church group as one of their opponents. They engaged the group in dialogue and negotiated an apparent solution acceptable to public opinion. At the same time, they weakened more determined opposition, cutting them off from their grassroots supporters, isolating them, and stigmatizing them as “dangerous radicals” who refused to talk and who should be put in jail. Nestlé’s CSR strategy was launched in the 1970s. The company’s managers were advised by former intelligence service officers who had retrained as business consultants. Chamayou (2018) observes that, from the very beginning, the aim was to go beyond window dressing and use CSR as a weapon to convince public opinion (and some of their opponents) of the firm’s readiness to enter into dialogue and make concessions. This case is particularly interesting, as it clearly illustrates how CSR was used as a COIN tactic to control CS.

636

G. Delalieux

As Earl (2006) notes, the control of private protest by private actors remains an under-researched area. This is likely to be because private actors who seek to repress protest prefer to operate in the dark, avoiding media attention, and mostly remaining unnoticed. Data are hard to find, and the extent of such actions remains unknown. However, a few famous examples of CS repression by private actors can still be found, such as MNCs, in newspaper headlines. Other limitations undermine the ability of CSOs to provoke meaningful corporate change. In most cases, dominant organizations allow minor change to happen in order to secure their core interests and avoid structural change. It seems difficult to continue to unequivocally defend the idea that CS is a powerful lever of change without seeing it as either an act of faith, Weber’s magical thinking or an example of the idea that indefinitely repeating the same idea will eventually have consequences.

CS: From Liberal Utopia to Neoliberal Dystopia How is it possible that, given the observations outlined above, CS and CSO continue to benefit from such strong public support? Critical theory can provide one answer to this question. A more pertinent question refers to how can best qualified the paradoxical idea that CS and CSO (as spheres that are immersed in the logic of the market and competition) can overcome the dead ends that these mechanisms have generated within the economy? The idea that NGOs can resist and curb market excess through subversive mechanisms could be said to correspond to a free market ideology where the critics of a system reinforce the system itself. Within CS, values not only compete with each other to catch people’s attention, provoke emotions, and attract financing from donors, but also with consumer products. CSOs’ increasing reliance on communication and marketing techniques exposes them to the same perverse effects of the use of rhetoric, manipulation, and the instrumentalization of emotions – even if it is for a good cause (Boltanski 1993). From this perspective, and following White (2002), the recent resurgence and celebration of CS, in particular NGOs, can be interpreted as an attempt to reify certain aspects of capitalism. The latter author suggests that this is the approach that the thinkers of the early Frankfurt School, such as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse would have adopted if they had examined the issue. Similarly, Chambers and Kymlicka (2002) notes that Adorno and Horkheimer saw little prospect of liberal institutions breaking out of authoritarian and bureaucratic modes of domination.

Repressive Desublimation: From Utopia to Dystopia The concept of repressive desublimation, developed by Marcuse (2002), describes how consumer societies dissipate energy that would otherwise be put into social critique by offering instantaneous rather than mediated gratification. Applied to CS and CSOs in the humanitarian domain (Rostis 2016), repressive desublimation describes how short-term solutions proposed by humanitarian NGOs can distract

33

A Critical Approach to Civil Society: The Case of Corporate. . .

637

from long-term options that take into account more complex political dimensions. They thus contribute to the disaster or the ongoing passive revolution, especially when local political elites combine with INGO managerial elites to promulgate neoliberal remedies to CSR issues (Chowdhury 2017). In this context, the original liberal CS utopia – conceived of as an autonomous counterweight to powerful political and economic institutions – could be transformed into the opposite: a neoliberal dystopia. This situation is characterized by powerful institutions that concentrate and control opposition forces through sophisticated invisible mechanisms that are usually presented as progress. This superior, participatory form of democracy is claimed to reinforce modern governance technologies and legitimize elite social domination (Murphy 2010). It could be said that modern CS is the result of a neoliberal process of rationalization, where CSOs compete with both State administrations and the private sector (for-profit organizations) on quasi markets. This process is the exact opposite of the Hegelian conception of the State as the democratic rationalization of CS, in which CS is exposed to the contradictions of private interests and, as such, is self-defeating. History repeats itself twice according to Hegel, while Marx (2012) adds that it does so “first as tragedy then as farce.” CS gives the illusion of change. Moral Entrepreneurs must compete with MNC marketing departments in a society that is driven by consumption (Debord 1992) and where virtues are both marketized and depoliticized.

Conclusion To conclude, in this chapter, the contribution of critical theory to the conversation on CS both in practice and theory was illustrated. This critical perspective can help to deconstruct the contemporary heroization of CS and CSO in the mainstream CSR literature, where NGOs are conceived of as a modern David who fights against public (governments) and private (MNC) Goliaths, with only dialogue and transparency as a catapult. Critical theory, notably the literature on the philosophy of devices (Foucault, Agamben), is a powerful technique to identify the theoretical foundations of CS and clarifies the picture painted by modern rhetoric. Genealogies shed light on the shameful origins (pudenda origo) of the modern devices used by firms and governments to control CS, and can counterbalance the forgetting process that is unfolding in modern societies (Harrisson 2013). As long ago as 1973, Arendt warned against the totalitarian tendencies of modern governments and suggested that the military techniques and tactics that had been polished by governments during their colonial wars would be turned against their own population. The utopian origin of modern CS finds its origins in the work of eighteenth century Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, who saw it as an independent sphere that could oppose the tyranny of rule by divine right and threats from nascent capitalism. Later, the modern neo-Tocquevillian and Habermassian incarnation subordinated the health of democracies to intense exchanges and dialogue. However, both of these

638

G. Delalieux

views must be counterbalanced by Hegelian, Marxist, or Gramscian critiques that demonstrate the absence of a normative foundation for CS as a concept. The recent resurgence of CS, linked to the Orwellian newspeak of politicians and a belief in its independence, encourages us to forget the extent to which both economic and political spheres of CS are tightly controlled. In practice, this is where critical theory might be most fruitful. From this perspective, CS changes from a utopia to a modern dystopia (or heterotopia) that attracts deviant individuals such as protestors and opponents of the economic and political system into a sealed circle where they can be closely monitored through intelligence, cantonment, diversion, and cooptation tactics. The recent trend of criminalizing social and environmental activists in Western democracies goes hand-in-hand with the mobilization of military or State devices such as (counter) intelligence tactics, judicial investigations, or discretionary administrative decisions. All of these actions are an illustration of how governments in modern Western democracies are progressively becoming more authoritarian (Dabène et al. 2008). If counterweights, such as the fear of communism, have in the past been powerful scarecrow mechanisms that have restrained Western governments from repressing internal opponents too harshly, the post-communist era might mark the start of another chapter in the history of State control of social protest. CS might prove to be a very fragile colossus, with feet of clay.

Cross-References ▶ Critical Inquiry ▶ Critical Moral Philosophy and Management

References Amnesty International (2017) A right not a threat: disproportionate restrictions on demonstrations under the state of emergency in France. https://policehumanrightsresources.org/a-right-not-athreat-disproportionate-restrictions-on-demonstrations-under-the-state-of-emergency-in-france. Accessed 30 June 2021 Anderson P (1976) The antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. New Left Rev 1(100):5–78 Anheier HK, Toepler S (2009) International encyclopedia of civil society. Springer. https://books. google.fr/books?id=oBxyaj3b50EC&newbks=1&newb Bakir V (2018) Intelligence elites and public accountability: relationships of influence with civil society. Taylor & Francis. https://books.google.fr/books?id=zSFWDwAAQBAJ&newbks=1& ne Barbier M, Lindgaard J (2020) La justice a massivement surveillé les militants de Bure, Reporterre. https://reporterre.net/1-3-La-justice-a-massivement-surveille-les-militants-antinucleaires-deBure. Accessed 25 Feb 2020; https://reporterre.net/2-3-L-Etat-a-depense-un-million-d-euroscontre-les-antinucleaires-de-Bure. Accessed 25 Feb 2020; https://reporterre.net/A-Bure-lajustice-a-bafoue-les-droits-de-la-defense. Accessed 25 Feb 2020 Barley SR (2010) Building an institutional field to corral a government: a case to set an agenda for organization studies. Organ Stud 31(6):777–805 Berman S (1997) Civil society and political institutionalization. Am Behav Sci 40(5):562–574

33

A Critical Approach to Civil Society: The Case of Corporate. . .

639

Bloodgood EA, Tremblay-Boire J, Prakash A (2014) National styles of NGO regulation. Nonprofit Volunt Sect Q 43(4):716–736 Blumenfeld J, Bottici C, Critchley S (2013) The anarchist turn. Pluto Press, London Boli J (2012) International nongovernmental organizations. In: Ritzer G (ed) The Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia of globalization. Wiley Blackwell, Chichester Boltanski L (1993) La souffrance à distance: morale humanitaire, médias et politique. Collection Leçons de choses. Editions Métailié, Paris Bouanchaud C (2019) Des militants écologistes évacués violemment par les CRS lors d’un rassemblement pour le climat à Paris, Le Monde, 29 June 2019 Brown W (2006) American nightmare: neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and de-democratization. Political Theory 34(6):690–714 Carnegie Europe (2021) Europeans’ right to protest under threat. https://carnegieeurope.eu/2021/ 01/27/europeans-right-to-protest-under-threat-pub-83735. Accessed 5 Mar 2021 Chamayou G (2018) La société ingouvernable: une généalogie du libéralisme autoritaire. La Fabrique éditions, Paris Chambers S, Kymlicka W (2002) Alternative conceptions of civil society. Princeton University Press, Princeton Chomsky N (2005) Chomsky on anarchism. AK Press, Edinburgh Chowdhury R (2017) The Rana Plaza disaster and the complicit behavior of elite NGOs. Organization 65(35):1–12 Chowdhury R, Kourula A, Siltaoja M (2021) Power of paradox: grassroots organizations’ legitimacy strategies over time. Bus Soc 60(2):420–453 Civil Society Organization Sustainability Index (CSOSI) (2020) https://www.fhi360.org/projects/ civil-society-organization-sustainability-index-csosi. Accessed 30 June 2021 Codaccioni V (2019) Répression: l’État face aux contestations politiques. Textuel Petite encyclopédie critique Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme (2020) Declaration sur les violences policieres illegitimes. https://www.cncdh.fr/sites/default/files/202801_declaration_sur_les_vio lences_policieres.pdf. Accessed 23 Apr 2020 Commissioner For Human Rights (2019) CommDH(2019)8. https://rm.coe.int/memorandumsur-le-maintien-de-l-ordre-et-la-liberte-de-reunion-dans-le/1680931add. Accessed 30 June 2021 Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project (2020). https://ccss.jhu.edu/research-projects/comparativenonprofit-sectorproject/comparative-nonprofit-sector-project-publications/. Accessed 30 June 2021 Cooney K (2007) Fields, organizations, and agency: toward a multilevel theory of institutionalization in action. Adm Soc 39(6):687–718 Dabène O, Geisser V, Massardier G (2008) Autoritarismes démocratiques et démocraties autoritaires au XXIe siècle: Convergences nord-sud. Mélanges offerts à Michel Camau. Découverte Dahrendorf R (1997) Die Globalisierung und ihre sozialen Folgen werden zur nächsten Herausforderung einer Politik der Freiheit. An der Schwelle zum autoritären Jahrhundert, Die Zeit 14 Nov 1997 Debord G (1992) La société du spectacle. Gallimard, Paris Della Porta D, Fillieule O (2004) Policing social protest. In: The Blackwell companion to social movements, vol 217, p 241 Deneault A, Browne C (2018) Mediocracy: the politics of the extreme centre. Between the Lines, Toronto Eabrasu M (2012) Les états de la définition wébérienne de l’État. Raisons politiques 45(1):187–209 Earl J (2006) Introduction: repression and the social control of protest. Mobilization: An International Quarterly 11(2):129–143. https://meridian.allenpress.com/mobilization/article-abstract/ 11/2/129/ Edelman Trust Barometer (2020) 20th annual report, p. 3. https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/440941/ Trust%20Barometer%202020/2020%20Edelman%20Trust%20Barometer%20Global% 20Report.pdf. Accessed 30 Jun 2021 Eikenberry AM, Drapal Kluver J (2004) The marketization of the nonprofit sector: CS at risk? Public Adm Rev 64(2):132–140

640

G. Delalieux

EUAFR (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights) (2015) Surveillance by intelligence services: fundamental rights safeguards and remedies in the EU. https://primarysources. brillonline.com/browse/human-rights-documents-online/surveillance-by-intelligence-ser vices-fundamental-rights-safeguards-and-remedies-in-the-eu;hrdhrd99922015022. Accessed 2 Nov 2020 Foucault M (2019) Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. Penguin Books, London Freedom in the World Report, 1973–2021. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world. Accessed 30 June 2021 Goonewardena K, Rankin K (2004) The desire called CS: a contribution to the critique of a bourgeois category. Plan Theory 3(2):117–149 Graeber D (2012) Debt: the first 5000 years. Penguin Books, London Gramsci A, Forgacs D, Hobsbawm E (2000) The Gramsci reader: selected writings, 1916–1935. The Gramsci reader: selected writings, 1916–1935. NYU Press Habermas J, Cronin C (1994) Justification and application: remarks on discourse ethics. MIT Press, Cambridge Harrisson R (2013) Forgetting to remember, remembering to forget: late modern heritage practices, sustainability and the ‘crisis’ of accumulation. Int J Herit Stud 19(6):579–595 Hasmath R, Hildebrandt T, Hsu JYJ (2019) Conceptualizing government-organized non-governmental organizations. J Civ Soc 15(3):267–284 Hegel GWF (1821) Philosophy of right. In: Knox TM (ed) Hegel’s philosophy of right. Oxford University Press, London HMICFRS (2012) A review of national police units which provide intelligence on criminality associated with protest, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ cm201213/cmselect/cmhaff/837/130205iv.htm. Accessed 15 Nov 2020 Horel S (2020) Vives critiques contre Déméter, la cellule de gendarmerie surveillant les atteintes au monde agricole, Le Monde. https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2020/02/13/enquete-sur-demeter-lacellulede-surveillance-contestee-des-campagnes_6029381_3244.html. Accessed 18 Feb 2021 Huffington Post (2016) Monsieur le président de la République, levez immédiatement les assignations à résidence des militants du climat https://www.huffingtonpost.fr/jeanfran/monsieur-lepresident-de-la-republique-levez-immediatement-les-assignations-a-residence-des-militantsdu-climat_b_8707200.html Jenkins J (2006) Nonprofit organizations and political advocacy. In: The nonprofit sector: a research handbook, pp 307–332 Johnston H (2006) “Let’s get small”: the dynamics of (small) contention in repressive states. Mobilization: An International Quarterly 11(2):195–212. https://meridian.allenpress.com/ mobilization/article-abstract/11/2/195/ Jones S (2007) Antonio Gramsci. Routledge critical thinkers, Routledge. https://books.google.fr/ books?id=_12AAgAAQBAJ&newbks=1&ne Jun NJ (2019) The state. In: Levy C, Adams MS (eds) The Palgrave handbook of anarchism. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 27–45 Keane J (2013) Civil society: old images, new visions. Wiley, Cambridge Kenny M (2016) Civil society. In: Encyclopedia Britannica Knapp B (2015) The biggest business in the world: the Nestlé boycott and the global development of infants, nations, and economies, 1968–1988. Brown University, Providence Levy D, Scully M (2007) The institutional entrepreneur as modern prince: the strategic face of power in contested fields. Org Stud 28(7):971–991 Locke J (1960) Two treatises of government (ed: Laslett P) Cambridge University Press Marcuse H (2002) One-dimensional man: studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Routledge, London Marx K (2012) The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform Maslow AH (1966) The psychology of science. New-York, Harper & Row, p 15

33

A Critical Approach to Civil Society: The Case of Corporate. . .

641

Ministère de l’Intérieur (2019) Présentation de DEMETER, la cellule nationale de suivi des atteintes au monde agricole. https://www.interieur.gouv.fr/Archives/Archives-ministres-de-l-Interieur/ Archives-Christophe-Castaner/Dossiers-de-presse/Presentation-de-DEMETER-la-cellulenationale-de-suivi-des-atteintes-au-monde-agricole. Accessed 30 June 2020 Mowles C (2007) Promises of transformation: just how different are international development NGOs?. J Int Dev 19:401–411 Murphy J (2010) The dark side. In: Third sector research. Springer, New York, pp 253–268 Open Government Partnership (2021). https://www.opengovpartnership.org. Accessed 30 June 2021 Plato (2008) Gorgias, (456 b) in Oeuvres Complètes, trad. Luc Brisson, Flammarion, Paris Reporterre (2020) Le gouvernement a créé une cellule militaire pour surveiller les opposants à l’agro-industrie. https://reporterre.net/Le-gouvernement-cree-une-cellule-militaire-poursurveiller-les-opposants-a-l-agro-industrie?fbclid¼IwAR1OnaxeLxnaDDs__Y-wOru3ypzz S8irZCH1WCgSfOqp774irNdX5lovv1c. Accessed 4 Mar 2020 Richter J (2001) International regulation of transnational corporations: the infant food debate. UvA– DARE Rostis A (2016) Organizing disaster: the construction of humanitarianism. Emerald Group Publishing, Bingley Seligman AB (2002) Civil society as idea and ideal. In: Chambers S, Kymlicka W (eds) Alternative conceptions of civil society. Princeton University Press, Princeton Smith A (1982) Theory of moral sentiments. Indianapolis Liberty Classics Swedberg R (2008) Tocqueville as a pioneer in organization theory. In: Adler P (ed) The Oxford handbook of sociology and organization studies. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 39–61 United Nations (2021). https://www.un.org/en/get-involved/un-and-civil-society. Accessed 30 June 2021 Wax ML (1967) Magic, rationality, and Max Weber. Kansas J Sociol 3(1):12–19 White SK (2002) Skeptics at the celebration: CS and the early Frankfurt School. In: Rosenblum NL, Post RC (eds) CS and government. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp 146–150 Willke H, Willke G (2008) Corporate moral legitimacy and the legitimacy of morals: a critique of Palazzo/Scherer’s communicative framework. J Bus Ethics 81(1):27–38

Blackness as Dignity-in-Sacrifice: From Exploitation to Contribution

34

Paul T. Harper

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Historical Considerations of Current Dignity Discourse in Business Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History, Racism, and Dignity Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Racial Invisibility and Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dignity-in-Sacrifice: From Self-Interest to Self-Transcendence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Black Exploitation to Contribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

644 645 648 650 652 656 658 658 658

Abstract

Dignity discourse in contemporary business ethics has yet to incorporate an analysis of race. This conceptual study fills that gap in the literature by introducing the concept of dignity-in-sacrifice, which serves as a novel moral perspective on the contributions Africans and their descendants made to the flourishing of the United States’ economic, political, social, and cultural institutions. In this analysis, an exploration of the political and cultural techniques that have rendered Blacks socially invisible is accompanied by the acknowledgement of the resilience and agency Africans maintained under the conditions of enslavement. By shifting our philosophical understanding of dignity from a notion of rational selfinterest to sacrificial self-transcendence, a path forward will open for the country to fulfill its obligation to its African descendants. Keywords

Dignity · Race · Racial justice · Slavery · Sacrifice · Social movements P. T. Harper (*) Business Administration at Katz School of Business, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_72

643

644

P. T. Harper

Introduction July 13, 2013. Alicia Garza: black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter. Patrisse Marie Cullors-Brignac. declaration: black bodies will no longer be sacrificed for the rest of the world’s enlightenment. i am done. i am so done. Trayvon, you are loved infinitely. #blacklivesmatter

The #BlackLivesMatter social movement, which was created in 2013, reached its apex in June 2020. On May 25, 2020, a bystander video of Derek Chauvin and three other Minneapolis, Minnesota police officers brutally killing Mr. George Floyd, Jr. was circulated widely in social media and institutional news channels. Global community members that identified with and participated within the #BlackLivesMatter social protest movement demanded that public, social, business, and cultural institutions begin to treat racial, ethnic, and religious minorities with the respect they deserve but are often denied.1 During the days and weeks that followed, many corporate leaders pledged to confront the effects of systemic racism occurring within their organizations but soon discovered that they faced a deeper design problem. Specifically, business leaders were unsure about how to design appropriate and effective remedies to the racial justice complaints. The design issue was further exacerbated by the wide variety of racial injustice complaints. For example, some complaints targeted the ways hiring practices and policies continued to reinforce socioeconomic inequality because they discriminated against minoritized groups. Other complaints were based on publicly available data that demonstrated specific firms benefited economically from racial exploitation through their direct involvement with the African Slave Trade or the antebellum US Southern plantation economy (Commercial legacies 2021). These two examples present different warrants for the charge of racial injustice. Stakeholders expect business leaders to understand the nuance involved with unpacking these complaints along both maldistribution and misrecognition lines as they seek to design effective issue engagement strategies. Calls for racial justice have served to deepen the way stakeholders think about the corporate outcomes of social movement engagement. However, due to a paucity of race-based inquiry, business ethics discourse is limited in its ability to contribute to that conversation. This is a problem because of the ways social identity-based exploitation and discrimination served to inaugurate and propagate the institutional logics of many current socioeconomic arrangements and is ever poised to play the same role in legitimizing the generation and expansion of minoritized identity-based social movements (Chowdury 2021; Vachhani 2020). Business ethics and corporate social responsibility research has begun to account for the complex and shifting understanding of the relationship between a firm and society as expressed in its engagement with social movements (de Bakkar et al. 2013), and for the ways that these engagements can serve to motivate the creation of new organizational initiatives that change existing policies and procedures (Georgallis 2017). Critical approaches to the evaluation of the aims

34

Blackness as Dignity-in-Sacrifice: From Exploitation to Contribution

645

and goals of these corporate social responsibility initiatives is an important practice because both scholars and managers need to assess the outcomes and the impact they produce (Clark et al. 2021; Rhodes and Pullen 2018). Corporate racial justice claims are being communicated in a variety of different media platforms and discussed in a diverse array of formats, including many of the most established and prestigious intellectual arenas. The New York Times, for example, created a special section on racial justice following the George Floyd murder that included many stories referencing business organizations and their histories (see also Bloomberg 2021). In addition, Black Enterprise magazine and the Executive Leadership council led important conversations about corporate accountability (Black Enterprise 2021). And professional service firms, such as McKinsey & Co, have aided aiding in the process of normalizing the racial justice discourse for their corporate clients (Intersection 2021). The Business Roundtable announced aspirational goals for increasing racial diversity within their ranks (Advancing racial equity 2021; Corporate racial equity 2021; Data catalog 2021; McElwee 2021; Safdar 2020). There have also been signs of resistance, and some executives have publicly questioned the value of diversity, inclusion, and transparency. In California, for example, many technology firm executives have dismissed these values and explicitly forbid employees from having social and racial justice conversations at work (Bachman 2021). Though the #BlackLivesMatter movement was originally created to raise awareness around the persistent issue of police brutality, its message has broadened in scope to include inquiry into the treatment of Black people in all sectors of society. What the business examples expose is a more general problem of the abusive exercise of power against Black people. Further, the witnessing of the physical victimization of Black people by bystanders raises questions that are not just about how legal responsibility attaches to powerful actors but also moral questions about how society is implicated in these abusive and deadly encounters. The #BlackLivesMatter movement is fundamentally about human dignity. More specifically, the perceived social tolerance for persistent abuse against Black people raises the concern that whatever theory of dignity that currently serves to undergird prominent human rights agendas has failed to protect racial minorities from abuse and humiliation. From this perspective, #BlackLivesMatter is an attempt to make visible in policy what remains invisible in practice: Black dignity. It will be argued that the unacknowledged dignity Black people possess is grounded on a different conceptual foundation than for other groups. Black dignity derives from the historical sacrifice of life and labor by the community’s African ancestors during the African Slave Trade, institutional slavery, and legal segregation in the United States.

Historical Considerations of Current Dignity Discourse in Business Ethics There is increased interest by scholars in revisiting the historical understanding of the African Slave Trade. Its legacy helps to explain the current momentum of the corporate racial justice movement. Building on Eric William’s Capitalism and

646

P. T. Harper

Slavery (1944), several recent historical accounts of the corporate structures and relationships within the African Slave Trade, such as the relationship between the founding of America the institutionalization of slave ownership and the continuity of race-based exploitation by business and civic organizations long after the end of the American Civil War have garnered public attention and prestigious awards (Beckert and Rockman 2016; Baptist 2014; Blackmon 2008; Huston 2003). For example, Caitlin Rosenthal’s Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (2018) has become essential reading for many corporate diversity officers. There are also recent examples within business and management scholarship that examine the historical connection between the African Slave Trade and specific corporations (Chowdury 2021; Smith and Johns 2020; Logan 2019). But signs of resistance within academia have also appeared (Onion 2021). By raising awareness of racial justice issues, the #BlackLivesMatter social movement gave corporate leadership and academic business communities a reason to pause and reflect on how race has been taken up in their respective policies, practices, and organizational cultures. The centrality of “dignity” in the movement’s message connects with a particularly vital research theme in the business ethics literature (Pirson 2019; Pless et al. 2017; Lucas 2015), one that serves to undergird more respectful and humanistic conceptions of management practice and organizational structure. None of the current dignity studies make an in-depth analysis of race, the history of anti-Black racism, the enslavement of Africans in the United States, Caribbean, and Latin America, or the African Slave Trade – though some do mention race in passing – leaving for others the opportunity to fill that gap in this important research stream. By developing the concept of “dignity-in-sacrifice,” the current study aims to exploit that opportunity by suggesting a novel perspective from which to view racial justice claims. A brief engagement with three prominent examples from contemporary dignity discourse will provide support for the claim that race has not been taken seriously by the field of business ethics. Lucas’ (2015) insightful study of the distinctive dimensions of the function of dignity in the workplace places a substantial emphasis on the instrumentalism of economic exchange relationships that define employment (pp. 623–624). She highlights studies related to job position stigma, the variety of forms of resistance to indignation, and the methods employees use to reject offensive organizational cultures. Dehumanizing treatment is considered along with targeted forms of dignity threat (p. 625). But, in the end, she admits that the study of race, among other social and collective identities, is something that remains neglected (p. 643). A consideration of historical slavery could augment substantially her views concerning dignity and exchange relationships given that enslaved people literally have a market price and are purchased and sold. Pless, Maak, and Harris’ study aims to fill a gap in leadership, creativity, and organizational change literature by linking those concepts more closely to dignity (p. 224). They concentrate on Schiller’s aesthetic definition of dignity and his association of it with the attribution of beauty and grace as properties of a person’s character and disposition (p. 226). On these aesthetic grounds, dignified action can

34

Blackness as Dignity-in-Sacrifice: From Exploitation to Contribution

647

take the form of “tranquility in suffering” or “beauty of character” that lends an aura of beauty to one’s performance. Unfortunately, Schiller placed substantial faith in the field of physiognomy and, as a result, believed that a person’s character could be surmised from their physical appearance (Schiller 2020[1793]). By not considering the full source and historical context, Pless et al. are unwittingly promoting a conception of dignity that is complicit with the scientific racism and anti-Blackness of the Enlightenment period. Pirson provides perhaps the most comprehensive review (2019). Like Lucas, Pirson is concerned about the influence of the “economistic” perspective on all management theories because, he claims, it has disconnected the research from the examination real of societal of needs and has focused instead on narrow and mechanistic utility maximization (pp. 40–41). Pirson aims to foment a humanistic turn in management theory through an examination of dignity (p. 40). In his study, he acknowledges historical slavery by highlighting Rosenthal’s (2018) research that connects plantation management techniques to current management pedagogy and practice. What is troubling about this study is the reliance on Kant’s definition of dignity as “that which has no price” (p. 41), even as Kant himself considered the sale of Africans morally permissible, clearly creating a wall between Blacks and dignity within his theory. Kant’s problematic stature in the history of dignity discourse will be addressed below. Three emergent questions drive the argument of this chapter. First, imagine how current conceptions of dignity must appear to Black people given the invisibility of race, racism, and historical slavery, and the African Slave Trade in the development of the concept within the discipline of business ethics. Second, imagine how the concept of dignity might look differently if that same academic community were to take racial Blackness seriously. And finally, imagine how claims for racial justice would be addressed if Black sacrifice was acknowledged. In the following, I will offer my initial thoughts on these scenarios without claiming they are the right answers or even the best. My purpose is to spur the consideration of anti-Black racism, and its institutionalization within an area of business ethics where historical links between the foundational theorists and their rationalization and participation within racialized economic structures ought to compromise the value of thier intellectual contribution to moral theory. The constructive portion of this study is framed by a discussion of the theory of social recognition and the role dignity plays within it. I argue that dignity discourse has yet to fully incorporate considerations of race. The publicly expressed anti-Black racism of Kant, Hegel, and other foundational philosophers for dignity discourse is also somewhat troubling. My goal is to introduce a novel interpretation of the contributions enslaved Black people made to the American and global economy and, in so doing, re-orient our understanding of the conditions of slavery and the position occupied by enslaved people as having unexpected, invisible, and powerful forms of agency. By not making a serious accounting for race, racism, Blackness, historical slavery, and the African Slave Trade, business ethics dignity discourse misses a valuable perspective from which to analyze business organizations and academic scholarship.

648

P. T. Harper

History, Racism, and Dignity Discourse Every age rewrites history, but particularly ours, which has been forced by events to re-evaluate our conceptions of history and economics and political development. (Eric Williams 1944, p. xi)

There are at least two important reasons for dignity discourse to account for the social, political, and economic legacy of the African Slave Trade: the magnitude and impact of the slave economy and the anti-Black sentiments publicly expressed by the Enlightenment and modern philosophers whose work much of dignity discourse relies. In this section, I will use historiographical sources to elucidate these two claims, both of which speak to the need for more history in contemporary ethics analysis (on the uses of history in business ethics, see Phillips et al. 2020). Though there is not enough space in this chapter to provide a comprehensive study of the topic, a few points of data should demonstrate the importance of the inclusion of a racialized perspective. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the African Slave Trade in the development of the modern global economy. There are numerous ways to measure the impact of the institution of slavery and account for its legacy. Recently, several historians have taken on the task of ascribing economic value of the slave trade and the institution of slavery to the American colonies and the European metropoles (Huston 2003; Baptist 2014; Beckert and Rockman 2016). As early as the 1930s, historians were advancing the significant thesis that the profits from the “Triangular Trade” between Europe, the Western Coast of Africa, and America and the West Indies served to finance the industrialization of major European cities, such as London (Williams 1994, p. 98). James Huston and Edward Baptist, building on this historiographical tradition, provided evidence that there was a similar tie between the United States’ northern and southern economies (Baptist 2014, pp. 35–36). Baptist’s narrative shows how the many financial innovations that were the result of public policy and entrepreneurialism depended on the legally protected right to own, sell, and exchange African people (see an example of slavebacked securitization in Baptist p. 245). Huston focuses on the national wealth generated by the southern slave economy in the United States. His summary statement concerning the scale of the slave economy in the United States is worth quoting at length. Slavery was a huge institution. Its size may not have been in some ways comparable with its counterparts in the Caribbean and Latin America where slaves outnumbered free people, but in the context of daily life slavery was omnipresent and unavoidable. . . The slaveholding states in 1859 had a total of 12,240,300 people; 65.7 of these were white, 2.0 percent were free blacks, and 32.3 percent – some 3,950,511 or about 4 million – were slaves. . . [The] key point is first to recognize the size of the institution: nearly 4 million out of a [national] population of 12 million is large in both relative and absolute terms. Outside of the obvious fact that in terms of wealth the United States was an overwhelmingly agrarian nation, it has to be underlined that slaves accounted for approximately 18.75 percent of the national wealth [in 1860]. (Huston 2003, p. 27)

34

Blackness as Dignity-in-Sacrifice: From Exploitation to Contribution

649

To further contextualize the importance of slavery to the US national economy, Huston goes on to compare the overall value of the investment in slavery with other important and growing national industries. The value of slaveholding in 1859 was $3 billion, while the value of investments in railroads and manufacturing was only $2.2 billion combined (Huston 2003, p. 24). Given the prominence of the institution of slavery during the entrepreneurial stages of the United States and up through the growth, expansion, and transformation of the national economy, it would be hard to argue that there were sectors that did not depend on the possession and trade of Africans (see also Rosenthal 2018, p. 6). The legal trade and possession of Africans had their cultural and social impacts as well. One cannot gainsay the role “enslaver,” “owner,” and “overseer” played in the development of white racial self-identity, moral development, and political and philosophical outlook. Within Huston’s examination of religious, political, and intellectual proslavery arguments, one strand that is relevant to the relationship between race and dignity discourse concerns the explicit plea for the continuity of African slavery because of the positive effect it had on producing “white equality” (Huston 2003, p. 40). Huston goes on to argue that the enslavement of Black people served the creation of liberal egalitarian doctrines in the intellectual and political spheres in a similar way that slavery created the grounds for global industrialization in the economic sphere. Property rights in Africans – the bulwark of all southern white society – established the ways southerners accumulated wealth, earned income, enjoyed prosperity, enunciated egalitarian doctrines among themselves, boasted of the ideals of free labor advancement, and thrived under free institutions and representative government. Without property rights in black people, all these social pathways crashed to the ground. (Huston 2003, p. 41)

As with considerations of economy, the social and cultural benefits that accrued to white populations from African slavery and the legacy of the African Slave Trade in North America led many intellectuals and political leaders to develop conceptions of human dignity that explicitly seperated Blacks from any moral consideration as human beings. Turning to the common intellectual roots of dignity discourse in business ethics (Pless et al. 2017; Pirson 2019), it is important to follow these historical insights regarding the economic, cultural, and political importance of American Slave institutions and slave owning culture with additional insights garnered from an analysis of Immanuel Kant’s work. Kant is widely considered to be the progenitor of the modern and secularized conception of dignity most closely associated with universal human rights arguments (Pless et al. 2017, p. 226). In his Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, Rosen (2012) points out Kant used the term dignity to denote that which has no price or that part of human nature that is beyond the market. For Kant, humans have dignity insofar as they are moral agents, meaning that they have and confer the status of respectfulness to other human beings and are committed to resolving interpersonal matters in a deliberate and rational fashion. It is dignity that makes one worthy of respect and dignity that motivates a person to treat

650

P. T. Harper

others respectfully (Brandom 2019, p. 39; Rosen 2012, p. 26). What is perplexing about these statements is that they emanate from the same person who also promulgated white supremacy and rationalized anti-Blackness in his social philosophy. Consider the following statement by Kant in his essay “On National Characteristics (1764).” Father Labat reports that a Negro carpenter, whom he reproached for haughty treatment toward his wives, answered: “You whites are indeed fools, you first make great concessions to your wives, and afterward you complain when they drive you mad.” And it might be that there was something in this which perhaps deserved to be considered; but in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid. (Quoted in Eze 1997, p. 57)

Earlier in the same essay, Kant characterizes Black culture as bereft of cultural significance while also claiming that the white race has been conferred by nature with “superior gifts,” making them worthy of respect from around the world (Eze 1997, p. 55). It turns out that Kant’s attribution of universal human dignity was, in fact, race-based and conditional. How do business ethicists deal with such a tantalizing contradiction? Given the opportunity to pause and reflect on disciplinary norms from a perspective of racial justice, the Kantian contradiction is a perfect representation of the intellectual problem #BlackLivesMatters is challenging the field to consider. It is the problem of the disrespect of Blackness. Disrespect, in this particular case, is represented by the invisibility of Blackness in current business ethics dignity discourse.

Racial Invisibility and Agency The debate between Axel Honneth and Avishai Margalit (2001) concerning the politics of social recognition is a model dignity discourse business ethicists can use when taking race seriously in their work. Honneth based his social commentary on a study of the Invisible Man, a novel by Black American author Ralph Ellison that was the winner of the 1953 United States National Book Award in fiction. From a perspective of racial justice, it is significant that Honneth directly addressed the condition of Black people in the United States and, further, that he appealed to a Black writer who had become an esteemed public intellectual on the topic. Honneth considered Ellison’s novel a “phenomenology of invisibility” (p. 114) and used his thougths about the experiences of Blacks in the United States as the paradigmatic case of social invisibility. Margalit’s commentary focused more on a traditional explication of Hegel’s so-called master/slave dialectic. His emphasis on the “practical reason” of the metaphorical slave performance recovers a form of agency in the subordinate status that is ofttimes neglected in theory (see also Rosenthal 2018, p. 8). This passage from social invisibility to the recognition of agency in the Black experience will subsequently be used to structure my own argument for racial Blackness as dignity-in-respect.

34

Blackness as Dignity-in-Sacrifice: From Exploitation to Contribution

651

Honneth makes a distinction between “figurative” and “cognitive” forms of invisibility and then demonstrates how the two are related in the process of social recognition and the performance of disrespect (p. 112). Unlike cognitive invisibility, the figurative form does not refer to the ability we have of perceiving another person sensually. Instead, it refers to a state of affairs where someone who is physically present has been rendered socially invisible due to the enactment of customary social interaction norms, which would have been understood by the disrespected person (p. 112). Honneth, following Ellison, considered the performative aspects of social encounters where it is customary for the higher status person to leave the presence of the lower status person unacknowledged. . . .Specifically the white masters, intentionally seek to make clear to blacks, who are physically present, that they (the blacks) are not physically present to them. The colloquial expression for such active forms of intentional invisibility is ‘looking through’ someone. We possess the capacity to show our disregard to persons who are present by behaving towards them as if they were not actually there in the room. In this sense, ‘looking through’ someone has a performative aspect because it demands gestures or ways of behaving that make clear that the other is not seen not merely accidentally, but rather intentionally. It probably makes sense to differentiate the degree of injury as a result of such invisibility. . . This can extend from the harmless inattention displayed in failing to greet an acquaintance at a party. . .all the way to the demonstrative ‘looking through’ that the black person affected can understand only as a sign of humiliation. (Honneth and Margalit 2001, p. 112)

Intending to disrespect, to leave a person’s dignity unacknowledged, is only for the perpetrator satisfying if the target of the disrespect knows she is a target. Honneth goes on two describe the importance of the expressive symbolic gestures that generally accompany the act of affirmative social recognition between two people, describing the positively valued gestures – such as smiling – as signalling the motivation and capacity to enter or renew a respectful relationship. When the affirmational gestures and language are not extended during an encounter, the disrespected person “must prepare for hostile action” (p. 120). For Honneth, respect is an “active power” (p. 121). To be “worthy” of respect is to be identified as someone for whom consideration must be made (p. 121). A show of respect through customary gestures and speech is a “social validation”, one that affirms the standing and the status of the other person along with signaling the intent to make some accommodation of that person’s “intelligibility” (p. 122). In this Kantian formulation, Honneth says that there is a “decentering” that occurs where intellectual space is created to allow for other perspectives. In the end, Honneth returns to the distinction between figural and cognitive invisibility to offer the haunting conclusion that the figural precedes the cognitive form. Thus, disrespect commonly experienced by Blacks can be explained by a “deformation of the capacity for perception with which recognition is connected. . .” (p. 126). In the end, he returns to a direct analysis of Ellison’s novel and places the genesis of the problem of social disrespect on the pre-perceptual plane, where it is rooted in values, culture, and custom. Margalit picks up directly on the notion that social respect is an awareness of and an accommodation to another person’s intelligence or rationality. He claims that his

652

P. T. Harper

perspective differs from Honneth’s because he is more concerned with what counts as humiliation than respect or recognition. To Margalit, “it is much clearer what counts as humiliation, namely treating humans as non-humans – e.g., as animals, as instruments, as mere statistics, as sub-humans – than what counts as respecting them” (p. 127). Within the dialectical encounter of masters and “slaves” – Margalit uses the traditional and somewhat dated translation of the terms – it is the rationality and intentionality of the slave that he emphasizes (p. 132). According to Hegel’s theory, the enslaved person exhibits what Margalit translates as “practical reason” while at work (also see Islam 2012). While the enslaved person may suffer from a degraded form of intelligence under this description, which raises important questions about his respectability or respect worthiness, both the master and the enslaved person are dependent on each other for their own respective types of selfunderstanding. This mutual dependence is explained in relationship to the concept of respect, which is attached to the idea that “every person is equally capable of supplying a point of view.” It is the acknowledgment of the ability for rational and autonomous thought that remains the basis of respect-worthiness for both Honneth’s Kantian and Margalit’s Hegelian accounts. But, under Margalit’s analysis, social domination does not lead to social invisibility. The master does not simply “look through” the enslaved person but instead deeply desires to “see” himself reflected in the enslaved person’s adoption of his own desires, e.g., to be recognized as master by the enslaved person (p. 132). In other words, the master needs for the enslaved person to have his own point of view and for the content of that point of view to be that he is a worthy master. The lack of a guarantee, and the insecurity of the master, is an indicator that the enslaved person maintains some form of agency and intellectual independence. Honneth’s distinction between cognitive and figural invisibility helped to surface an important complexity within the theory of social recognition by demonstrating the primacy of concept over percept. It is the concept of race that modulates whether a person in view is worthy of being seen. In Ellison’s example, it was customary for Blacks in the United States to be disrespected – treated as if they were not present – and for them to suffer humiliation and indignity. Honneth makes the important connection between social identity and dignity and shows how respect-worthiness as a personal or group trait is dependent on the valence of an identity within a particular society more generally. Margalit’s, on the other hand, discussion opens the way toward the possibility of mutual respect between members of different social statuses by recovering and emphasizing the notion of subordinate agency. Given Black’s customary experience of disrespect and invisibility, it is worth considering if the performance of subordinated agency could serve as the grounding for a group’s worthiness of respect.

Dignity-in-Sacrifice: From Self-Interest to Self-Transcendence For Kant, whose use of the term dignity was one of the earliest influential evocations of this idea, what commanded respect in us was our status as rational agents, capable of directing

34

Blackness as Dignity-in-Sacrifice: From Exploitation to Contribution

653

our lives through principles. Something like this has been the basis of equal dignity ever since, though the detailed definition of it may have changed. . . Thus, what has been picked out as of worth here is a universal human potential, a capacity all humans share. This potential, rather than anything a person may have made of it, is what ensures that each person deserves respect. (Charles Taylor 1994, p. 41)

A common thread between the Honneth and Margalit’s commentaries is the reliance on some sort of rationality, reasoning, or thoughtfulness in a person as the philosophical grounding of their respect worthiness. I want to suggest that an intelligence test for respect is problematic. The requirement of rationality – undiminished and unattenuated – has historically been advocated for by members of privileged cultural or social identities at a specific time and in specific places (for several examples from the history of philosophy see Bernasconi and Lott (2000), and Eze (1997)). Both Kant and Hegel are exemplars of this tradition. This raises important ethical questions about how the target of respect, e.g., what the active power of respecting acknowledges in another person, is conceptualized. If the notion of rationality has historically proven morally insufficient as a guarantee of equal treatment in modern and contemporary societies that hold equality as a fundamental and organizing value, what other alternative ground for dignity can be given? I argue that the sacrifice a group makes to support the flourishing of an organization or state provides a different, and in some cases complimentary, grounding for the attribution of dignity and respect worthiness. Following Margalit’s reading of Hegel, if enslaved groups exhibit an unacknowledged but necessary rationality of their own, it would be fair to reconsider the meaning of their lives and labor from that internal perspective, one that makes sense of their self-understanding in the face of their abhorrent living conditions. Further, social invisibility is the condition of Blackness, as understood by Honneth in his reflections on Ellison’s fiction. Combining these two insights leads to the suggestion that a form of Black social and political performance under conditions of enslavement, segregation, and discrimination is “a giving without expectation of recognition” posture. It is this posture that serves as a novel basis for the attribution of dignity. Civic sacrifice is the specific form under consideration. Moshe Halbertal’s exploration of sacrifice in the service of the state (2012, pp. 90–113) helps to conceptualize how the condition of slavery can be seen as a social analogue to the position of conscribed military service women and men. Though there are distinctive religious resonances, the civic version of sacrifice proceeds under the assumption of secularism and, as Halbertal explains, is one of the ways that the state as a political mechanism came to perform what is traditionally a religious function (p. 108). He makes the distinction between two different meanings of sacrifice: “sacrificing to” and “sacrificing for.” The former refers to the act of making an offering, which has as its purpose the desire to initiate or maintain a relationship that is not predicated on mere instrumental motives. He goes on to show that the distinction between an offering and a payment underscores the idea that the offering is not meant to procure any direct benefit and, in some ways, is an affirmation of the belief that meaningful relationships can be established that are not merely strategic. Halbertal summarizes the motive behind “sacrificing to” as an attempt to “forge a bond of solidarity that transcends the logic of market exchange” (p. 114).

654

P. T. Harper

“Sacrificing for” differs in both motivation and performance. In its mode as a “sacrificing for,” the sacrifice of the self is an effort to act above and beyond self-interest, aiming at the realm of self-transcendence. It is for this reason that the human capacity to give up and sacrifice self-interest for the sake of another human or ideal seems, to many people, a constitutive dimension of the moral life as such. (Halbertal 2012, pp. 114–115)

As we have seen, Kantian notions of dignity emphasize the capacity for rational decision-making as the grounding for respect. That argument assumed that a part of the performance of rationality included the recognition of other rational persons with their own set of interests and points of view. Halbertal’s definition of “sacrificing for” emphasizes a different human capacity, one that some might view as anathema to rationality itself. Self-transcendence is the capability to be motivated by something different and greater than one’s self-interest. It is this capacity that will be emphasized when making the connection between civic sacrifice, agency under enslavement, and dignity. Halbertal appeals to early social contract theorists and is particularly interested in the change of approach to the conceptualization of self-interest that occurs between Hobbes and Rousseau (p. 104). Hobbes, he reminds us, the motivation for individuals to leave the so-called “state of nature” and enter the modern political order of the state was grounded on their rational self-interest. Hobbes assumed rational citizens would prefer to live under conditions of cooperation rather than having to exist with the social threat of constant competition. The common bond of political allegiance was based on a collection of individual judgments that it is better to be in the state than outside (p. 104). Hobbes believed an appeal to individual assessments of selfinterest would prove to be a more reliable motivational grounding of political bonds than empathy (p. 105–106). While he recognized the traditional power and allure of religious beliefs, customs, and institutions, Hobbes thought it best if the political sphere were insulated from non-rational influences (p. 106). But the competition between states complicated the nature of the state and its relationship to its own citizens. The demand for citizens to take up arms and risk their lives in defense of their sovereign state produced an ironic twist because warfare imperils the very individuals that the state was created to protect. The state’s right to enforce military conscription is the limit-case of the Hobbesian vision of a purely rational and selfinterested community, and the act of giving one’s life for the protection and flourishing of the state functions in Halbertal’s analysis as the paradigmatic case of civic sacrifice. Rousseau, on the other hand, understood that the state is most effective when it provides a basis for social and personal identification, e.g., that individuals within the state consider the political bond as constitutive of a collective identity (p. 109). When citizens identify with the state, the state becomes an avenue for selftranscendence, which demands the adoption of the “concern of the well-being of all citizens” rather than simply one’s own self-interest (p. 109). Under Rousseau’s description, the state takes on a quasi-religious function, thereby embracing its connection to the emotional and non-rational sentiments Hobbes wanted to avoid (see also Marvin and Ingle 1999). Unlike Hobbes, Rousseau had no problem

34

Blackness as Dignity-in-Sacrifice: From Exploitation to Contribution

655

accounting for the need for military conscription because the citizen was not making the sacrifice for something external to the self, such as the state, but instead fighting to protect a concept of political identity that had been internalized. Under Rousseau’s description, military service was not so much about protecting the state as it was about protecting oneself. Further, under the self-interest motivated Hobbesian description, individuals were assumed to be in search of safety from danger and death. Rousseau’s self-transcendent version allows for the citizen “to locate their life beyond the constraints of their own life span” (p. 108). In other words, through political identification citizens could work to “overcome death” rather than simply work to avoid it (p. 108). In the case of mandatory military service, citizens believed that the sacrifice of self for the preservation and flourishing of the state was the pathway to everlasting life. Further, Halbertal emphasized how a greater sense of personal meaningfulness motivated by self-transcendence and available through civic sacrifice differed from Kant in its intended scope. Rousseau’s general will is understood to consist in the common good of the other citizens in the body politic. It is neither synonymous with humanity as such, nor comparable to the some imagined community of all rational creatures, as in Kant’s moral theory. (Halbertal 2012, p. 111)

This passage serves to reconnect the preceding discussion back to the project of developing an alternate conception of dignity. With his emphasis on rationality as a trait that is universally possessed by all humans, Kant makes a universalist argument that all humans have dignity – at least in theory – and that they are worthy of being treated respectfully as a result. Rousseau, on the other hand, limits the scope dramatically to the state because the sense of community is predicated on the political bond of identification with a particular state. This shift in scope is significant in that it affirms consideration of the establishment of more localized grounds for dignity. Civic sacrifice is a requirement of a state, and the obedience a citizen shows to their home state is not one they would show to every state. At the deepest level, it is about the quasi-sacred bond between a state and its citizens in opposition to other states and other citizens. Dignity is what the citizens possess because of their capability for self-transcendence, as ultimately expressed in their willingness to self-sacrifice for the common good of the political community. In the case of Black self-transcendence under the conditions of enslavement, an allegiance and identification with the common good superseded a requirement of citizenship, which both extends and complicates Rousseau’s vision (on non-sovereign identification see Rogers and Turner 2021, p. 22). In its simplest terms, dignity-in-sacrifice, as I am calling it, is the respectful acknowledgment of a group’s ultimate commitment when the sacrifice is based on a bond of common political or social identification. Armed with my new conception of dignity-as-sacrifice, it is now possible to move toward a different interpretation of the #BlackLivesMatter social movement. This is because of the unique sacrifice of life and labor made by African ancestors throughout the Slave Trade, the institutionalization of slavery, and racial segregation in the

656

P. T. Harper

United States and throughout the Western Hemisphere. For those who share in this genealogy, the Enlightenment philosopher’s use of racial hierarchies grounded in higher and lower forms of intelligence renders their notion of rationality questionable as a basis of universal human dignity. But if the veil of race were lifted and invisible Blackness made apparent, what would be revealed would not be some diminished form of humanity but instead a special form of resilience and honor that could serve as a model for self-transcendence within any human community.

From Black Exploitation to Contribution To think of Black enslavement and death as earned dignity-in-sacrifice demands one adopt the assumption that enslaved people maintained some form of personal or spiritual agency. Margalit’s reading of Hegel’s social struggle metaphor, which attributes an important form of intelligence to the enslaved person, injects a complexity into the nature of the relationship that cannot be explained completely through an analysis of power. The idea that the master depends on the enslaved person having an autonomous point-of-view (Honneth and Margalit 2001, p. 136) opens the pathway to theorizing a separation between one’s humanity and occupation (see Islam 2012 on the problem of reification), even in the extreme case of enslavement. Once the important interpretive recalibration takes place that transforms the object of observation from the status “slaves” to enslaved “people” occurs, an accounting of their motivations, feelings, and thoughts becomes available as a new grounding of Black agency. Dignity-in-sacrifice also helps to account for the possibility that enslaved people identified with the state, their plantation, their enslaver’s family, and had pride in work even though they were forbidden by state from becoming citizens. The transformation also allows for the framing of enslavement as both exploitation and, in an admittedly more limited way, contribution. Perhaps, Ralph Ellison models in more contemporary language the form of Black agency being ascribed here to the ancestors. In this passage, he is responding to favorable reviews of his novel: If Invisible Man is even “apparently” free from “the ideological and emotional penalties suffered by Negroes in this country,” it is because I tried to the best of my ability to transform those elements into art. My goal was not to escape or hold back, but to work through; to transcend, as the blues transcend the painful conditions with which they deal. The protest was not there because I was helpless before my racial condition, but because I put it there. (Ellison 2003, p. 183)

Evidence of these forms of Black agency under the conditions of slavery abound in recent scholarship on the cultural history of the United States. Ellison mentions a prominent form, e.g., the blues, which is a music genre that originated among Black Americans and spoke to their experience in a way that could be understood by those who did not share in it. On the literary plane, the emergence of trickster tales among enslaved Blacks and the unique rhetorical, compositional, philosophical, and

34

Blackness as Dignity-in-Sacrifice: From Exploitation to Contribution

657

performative traditions they entail has become a point of emphasis in discussions about the ways the encounter of European values mixed with a diversity of African cultures created distinctly new expressive amalgamations (Gates 1988; Levine 2007 [1977]). In fact, Ellison relies heavily on the trickster motif in his own literary work. On the commercial place, Butler chronicles a record of almost 150 patents and inventions credited to Blacks between 1860 and 1900 (pp. 56–60). He believes that the actual numbers would be in the thousands had they not been “lost to Whites who affixed their own names to the patent applications” (p. 56). Further, Butler notes, Blacks were legally barred from filing for a patent before the Civil War, which makes it difficult to provide a complete picture of Black invention and creativity under slavery (p. 55). The cultural innovations discussed here are meant to support my suggestion that coupling notions of agency and intelligence to the idea of Blackness under the harsh conditions of slavery and legal discrimination enriches our conception of dignity by grounding it in self-transcendence rather than mere self-interest. This enriched conception of dignity-as-sacrifice re-signifies the Black experience by moving it away from being understood as merely instrumental and purely traumatic. Racial justice claims warranted by evidence of an institutional and economic history of racial exploitation are important because they make visible again the lost or occluded history of the local and national economic benefits that have accrued to certain members of society based on a clear campaign of anti-Blackness and the resulting racial exploitation. In the face of the historical record, it remains important to avoid viewing the Black experience exclusively through an economic lens that neglects cultural and spiritual perspectives. Given the record of the Black community’s substantial cultural and commercial innovations, we can and should augment the important record of exploitation with a profound but neglected story of national contribution. The Black contribution of life and labor to the entrepreneurial, growth, and mature stages of the United States makes that group worthy of a special form of respect based on the logic of dignity-in-sacrifice I have presented here. Another benefit of moving toward the recognition of the Black contribution to national history is that it moves the operative metaphor for group interaction across racial boundaries from that of a struggle or a conflict toward one that emphasizes partnerships and collaborations. Under this reading, Blacks were among many important racial and ethnic groups of various social and political statuses who knowingly and intentionally contributed to the success of the American Project. As in all collaborative arrangements, there are privileges and duties that accrue to the partners. It may be fair to argue that Blacks have met their obligation to the partnership given the historical data concerning the economic and cultural impact of the institution of slavery. It would take substantial social and economic reparations for that community to be able to participate with parity (Fraser 2003, p. 46) in the success of the American project at a level commensurate with the value of their contribution. Now the duty falls on political, economic, and cultural institutions to be the mechanism by which those reparations are executed. Rather than thinking of this action along transactional lines, e.g., as the payment of a debt, the sacrificial paradigm would characterize the reparative actions as the returns on an investment

658

P. T. Harper

enslaved Blacks made into their Middle Passage frigate, to their tobacco/sugar/ cotton plantations, to the process of regional and national expansion, and to the industrialization of urban centers. In the end, this requires White Americans to follow the Black example by moving away from a self-interested rationale for dignity and toward self-transcendence. If this philosophical change were to happen, it would move the state and its institutions toward the conditions of mutuality, an action that could set the terms for forgiveness (Brandom 2019, pp. 60–61).

Conclusion The current study took an archeological approach to Patrisse Marie CullorsBrignac’s statement by demonstrating how her use of “black bodies,” “sacrifice,” and “enlightenment” possess meanings not readily apparent on the narrative surface. On what grounds can cultural Blackness be integrated into contemporary dignity discourse given its racial exclusions in the past? My introduction of the concept dignity-in-sacrifice builds on a traditional stream of political theory that ground arguments for dignity on the special attributes of particular groups rather than universal claims supposedly available to all humans. In the end, it is the social acknowledgment of Black sacrifice during the African Slave Trade, institutional slavery, and segregation that can serve to create the conditions through which racial justice and social cohesion can be achieved in the United States.

Cross-References ▶ Critical Moral Philosophy and Management

References Advancing racial equity and justice. Business Roundtable (2021). Viewed June 19, 2021, https:// www.businessroundtable.org/equity Bachman B (2021) Not all corporations are “woke”: In Big Tech, the boss wants you to shut up about politics. Salon. Viewed June 19, 2021, https://www.salon.com/2021/05/20/not-allcorporations-are-woke-in-big-tech-the-boss-wants-you-to-shut-up-about-politics/ Baptist E (2014) The half has never been told: slavery and the making of American capitalism. Basic Books, New York Beckert S, Rockman S (2016) Slavery’s capitalism: a new history of American economic development. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Bernasconi R, Lott T (2000) The idea of race. Hackett, Indianapolis Black Enterprise and Executive Leadership Council partner to present town hall series examining economic equity and racial justice issues. PR Newswire (May 2021). Viewed June 18, 2021, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/black-enterprise-and-executive-leadership-coun cil-partner-to-present-town-hall-series-examining-economic-equity-and-racial-justice-issues301300555.html

34

Blackness as Dignity-in-Sacrifice: From Exploitation to Contribution

659

Blackmon D (2008) Slavery by another name: the re-enslavement of Black Americans from the civil war to world war II. Anchor Books, New York Bloomberg equality. Bloomberg (2021), viewed June 26, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/ equality Brandom R (2019) Heroism and magnanimity: the post-modern form of self-conscious agency. Marquette University Press, Milwaukee Chowdury R (2021) From black pain to Rhodes must fall: a rejectionist perspective. J Bus Ethics 170(2019):287–311 Clark C, Riera M, Iborra M (2021) Toward a theoretical framework of corporate social irresponsibility: clarifying the gray zones between responsibility and irresponsibility. Business and Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/00076503211015911 Commercial legacies: Center for the study of the legacies of British slavery. University College London (2021). Viewed June 18, 2021, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/commercial/ Corporate racial equity tracker. Just capital (2021). Viewed June 19, 2021, https://justcapital.com/ reports/corporate-racial-equity-tracker/#the-corporate-racial-equity-tracker Data Catalog: Statements made by top tech companies on racial justice, BLM, and George Floyd. Wayne State University (2021). Viewed June 19, 2021, https://datacatalog.library.wayne.edu/ dataset/statements-made-by-top-tech-companies-on-racial-justice-blm-and-george-floyd De Bakkar F, den Hond F, King B, Weber K (2013) Social movements, civil society and corporations: taking stock and looking ahead. Organ Stud 34(5–6):573–593 Ellison R (2003) [1964] The world and the jug. In: Callahan J (ed) The collected essays of Ralph Ellison. Modern Library, New York, NY, pp 155–188 Eze E (1997) Race and the enlightenment: a reader. Blackwell, Malden Fraser N (2003) Social justice in the age of identity politics: redistribution, recognition, and participation. In: Fraser N, Honneth A (eds) Redistribution or recognition? a political philosophical exchange. Verso, London, pp 7–109 Gates HL (1988) The signifying monkey: a theory of African American literary criticism. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK Georgallis P (2017) The link between social movements and corporate social initiatives: toward a multi-level theory. J Bus Ethics 142:735–751 Halbertal M (2012) On sacrifice. Princeton University Press, Princeton Honneth A, Margalit A (2001) Recognition. Proc Aristot Soc Suppl Vol 75:11–139 Huston J (2003) Calculating the value of the union: slavery, property rights, and the economic origins of the civil war. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Intersection: Delivering on diversity, gender, equality, and inclusion. McKinsey and company (2021). Viewed June 19, 2021, https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Email/Intersec tion/2021/04/07/2021-04-07d.html Islam G (2012) Recognition, reification, and practices of forgetting: ethical implications of human resource management. J Bus Ethics 111:37–48 Levine L (2007 [1977]) Black culture and Black consciousness: Afro-American folk thought from slavery to freedom. Oxford University Press Oxford, UK Logan N (2019) Corporate personhood and corporate responsibility to race. J Bus Ethics 154(2019): 977–988 Lucas K (2015) Workplace dignity: communicating inherent, earned, and remediated dignity. J Manag Stud 52(5):621–646 Marvin C, Ingle D (1999) Blood sacrifice and the nation: totem rituals and the American flag. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK McElwee K (2021) The fortune 100 and #BlackLivesMatter. Brown analytics. Viewed June 19, 2021, https://www.brownanalytics.com/fortune-100-blm-report/site/report.html Onion R (2021) The real reason UNC-Chapel Hill is withholding tenure from Nikole Hannah Jones. Salon. Viewed June 19, 2021, https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/05/nikole-hannah-jonestenure-unc.html Phillips R, Schrempf-Stirling J, Stutz C (2020) The past, history, and corporate social responsibility. J Bus Ethics 166:203–213

660

P. T. Harper

Pirson M (2019) A humanistic perspective for management theory: protecting dignity and promoting will-being. J Bus Ethics 159:39–57 Pless N, Maak T, Harris H (2017) Art, ethics, and the promotion of human dignity. J Bus Ethics 144: 223–232 Rhodes C, Pullen A (2018) Critical business ethics: from corporate self-interest to the glorification of the sovereign pater. Int J Manag Rev 20:483–499 Rogers M, Turner J (2021) Political theorizing in black: an introduction. In: Rogers M, Turner J (eds) African American political thought. University of Chicago, Chicago, pp 1–29 Rosen M (2012) Dignity: its history and meaning. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Rosenthal C (2018) Accounting for slavery: masters and management. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Safdar K (2020) CEOs pledge one million jobs for Black Americans. Wall street journal. Viewed June 19, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/ceos-pledge-one-million-jobs-for-black-ameri cans-11607601610 Schiller F (2020) [1793] Aesthetical essays. Independent Publisher, Monee Smith A, Johns J (2020) Historicizing modern slavery: free-grown sugar as an ethics-driven market category in nineteenth-century Britain. J Bus Ethics 166:271–292 Taylor C (1994) The politics of recognition. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton, NJ, Princeton UP, pp 25–73 Vachhani C (2020) Envisioning a democratic culture of difference: feminist ethics and the politics of dissent in social movements. J Bus Ethics 164:745–757 Williams E (1994) [1944] Capitalism and slavery. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Part V Moral Philosophy and Management

Moral Philosophy and Management: An Introduction

35

Cristina Neesham

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moral Philosophy and Its Relationship(s) with Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Modes of Engaging Moral Philosophy in Management Scholarship: Some Examples . . . . . . . Contributions Included in Moral Philosophy and Management: An Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

664 664 666 667 673 673 674

Abstract

This chapter introduces the Handbook section entitled Moral Philosophy and Management. After briefly defining moral philosophy and its main subdomains (namely, metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics), it highlights the relevance of moral-philosophical ideas for management practice and outlines some of the more prominent modes of engaging moral philosophy in management scholarship. Building on these foundations, each of the 16 chapters included in this section is introduced and integrated into one of four areas (or stages in philosophical reflection): methodological considerations; foundational inquiries into the ethical nature of management; debates around particular ethical theories engaged in exploring management; and philosophical analyses applied to topical management issues. The chapter concludes with a call for new moralphilosophical ideas and methods to prepare managers for the grand challenges of the contemporary world.

C. Neesham (*) Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_36

663

664

C. Neesham

Keywords

Moral philosophy · Metaethics · Normative ethics · Applied ethics · Business ethics · Management ethics

Introduction If there is one single branch of philosophy that theorists and researchers have called to guide and counsel management practice most frequently, it is moral philosophy. Concerned with questions of ethics and morality, moral philosophy is the regular mentor of management activity. A simple explanation of this lies in the widely recognized fact that the vast majority of managerial decisions and actions in organizations have ethical implications. This fact is illustrated in the questions that management practitioners tend to ask themselves in their moments of quiet reflection about the meaning of their role (see Drucker 2005; Korten 2015) and in the large volume of applied philosophical analyses of ethical issues published by management and organization scholars every year. As an established area of inquiry in organization research, business ethics has built, over decades, one of the steadiest and richest connections that exist between philosophy and management scholarship. It is, therefore, no surprise that the Moral Philosophy section of the Handbook, introduced by this chapter, has had to claim some more space in the volume in order to do justice to the richness of publications in this field. It is still an elusive ideal. This chapter provides a brief overview of the place occupied by moral philosophy in management research by reflecting on the field’s past, present, and future. It starts by defining moral philosophy and its main subdomains – namely, metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics – and connecting it with management as a scholarly discipline preoccupied with the description, critique, and (re)construction of management as practice. It then proceeds to illustrate some of the more frequently used modes of engaging moral philosophy in management scholarship. The chapters of the section Moral Philosophy and Management are then individually introduced and integrated into an overall consideration of the significant role played by philosophical reflections in shaping the ethical judgments, decisions, and (hopefully) actions of present and future managers. The chapter concludes with a call for new moral-philosophical ideas and methods to prepare managers and management for the grand challenges of the world we live in.

Moral Philosophy and Its Relationship(s) with Management Moral philosophy has been defined, most broadly, as the branch of philosophy concerned with the Socratic question: How should one live? (Williams 1985: 1). It raises, therefore, some of the most general questions about human life – but it does so in a distinctive way. These are not purely contemplative questions about what

35

Moral Philosophy and Management: An Introduction

665

humans are like, what life is like, and so on. They are what we call normative questions, about what we ought to do and what actions and practices are involved in going about the often-confounding business of living our lives. And these are also profoundly social (and socializing) questions about how we are to live with each other in an increasingly complex and challenging world. Moral-philosophical questions entice our minds into formulating responses about what is worth doing. However, unlike esthetics (which engages us in the pursuit of beauty) or philosophy of science (which engages us in the pursuit of knowledge), moral philosophy draws our attention to what is good or bad, right or wrong – in the most fundamental sense. When we talk about choosing a particular course of action because “it is the right thing to do,” what we mean, without any further qualifications, is that we are appealing to our inner sense of justice and care, which includes ourselves and others, in relation, to give us advice and justify our choice. These are basic feelings that we develop, as socialized beings, into various forms of personal morality (Haidt 2001; Hume 1751; Smith 1759). Building on our instincts and emotions, investigations of right/wrong and moral agency have also formed intellectually disciplined, codified, and institutionalized forms of reasoning and practice – usually referred to as ethics. Much time and space have been spent on distinguishing between morality, usually understood as referring to personal choices and judgments about right/ wrong, and ethics, usually referring to principles and/or standards about right/ wrong established in communities or social institutions (see Arnold et al. 2020; Harper 2009; Skorupski 2008; Williams 1972). This is not the purpose of this section of the Handbook, which instead focuses on the moral life of the manager as a human being, in ways that emphasize the overlaps and intersections, rather than any particular differences, between ethics and morality. Moral philosophers tend to speak of ethics at three different levels of generality or abstraction. First, metaethics is concerned with the very foundations and justifications of ethical inquiry, raising questions about the nature of moral claims (Copp 2006) – for instance, are these claims about “objective” facts or relative to the subject’s worldview? Or how can we know if something is right or wrong? Second, normative ethics examines “the content of moral principles and virtues, and their justification in terms of the human condition” (Flew and Priest 2002: 127). It, therefore, produces moral claims (Copp 2006) that counsel us about what we ought to do: Its main outputs take the form of reasons for action. Third, applied ethics focuses on particular domains of human action and develops practice-guiding concepts and principles that are most relevant to those domains. It is about ethics applicable to “concrete moral issues” (Copp 2006: 2), often of interest to our everyday lives. By reference to this taxonomy, it is tempting to assume that examining the ethical dimensions of management as organizational activity should be the purview of applied ethics only. Indeed, business ethics – as scholarship, education, and practice – can be considered an example of applied ethics, in line with ethics of various professions or occupations, such as medicine, engineering, law, or journalism. Yet, as further illustrated in this section of the Handbook, the relationships between moral

666

C. Neesham

philosophy and management scholarship travel widely across these boundaries, making regular and reciprocal connections between management practice, ethical theory, and metaethical reflections. Moral philosophy and management interact not only in the direction of philosophical ideas informing management practice but also in the reverse direction of reflective management practice and research informing philosophical considerations about the moral life of human beings and their communities more broadly.

Modes of Engaging Moral Philosophy in Management Scholarship: Some Examples Management’s love-hate relationship with ethics is fueled by tensions between the omnipresence of ethical issues in academic debate, be they explicit or implicit, and a deep-seated suspicion of ethical discourse in management research (Wray-Bliss 2016). This suspicion is maintained not only by the implicit pursuit of the “valuefree” ideal in management science (see Tsui 2016 for a critique of this ideal) but also by the skepticism of critical management scholars about the effectiveness of business ethics when reduced to an instrument of corporate-managerialist control of life in organizations (Banerjee 2008; Eastman 2013; Jones et al. 2005; Rhodes and Pullen 2018). Applications of ethical theories to management, as well as critical perspectives deconstructing received wisdom about the scope and limits of management ethics, have been promoted through ethics-oriented peer-reviewed academic journals such as Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, Business & Society, and Business Ethics, the Environment and Responsibility (formerly, Business Ethics: A European Review). Philosophically informed ethical analyses also feature in generalist journals such as the Academy of Management Review, Human Relations, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, or in journals oriented toward radical critiques of management, such as Organization, ephemera, and Humanistic Management Journal. In particular, the Philosophy of Management journal has played a crucial role in promoting philosophical work on management as reason in practice. Debates and controversies proliferate in this contested space, bringing together very different – often opposing – philosophical and managementtheoretical traditions. The long history of moral-philosophical discourse in management research has established several broad approaches. First, there is the application of a wide range of ethical theories to an even wider range of management issues – far beyond what the space of this chapter can mention. Thus, key concepts and/or principles drawn from multiple philosophical traditions of utilitarianism, deontology, theories of rights and justice, virtue ethics, pragmatism, feminist ethics and ethics of care, postcolonial ethics, and discourse ethics (to mention a few) have been employed to guide managerial action in all of its functions, from managing individual and group behaviors within organizations to managing relations among (networks of) organizations and, further, to managing contributions of organizations to a better,

35

Moral Philosophy and Management: An Introduction

667

more sustainable society in a healthier global eco-system. One cannot cite particular studies here without feeling complicit in some sort of injustice done to the multitude that has been omitted. Second, there are critiques of established perspectives on ethics, which highlight the complex politics of organizations, management, and managerial roles, and even ask whether organizational ethics is possible at all (e.g., Jones and Fleming 2012; Parker 2003; Rhodes 2022). Third, and closely related to the second, there are ethics-based theoretical (re)constructions that urge us to redefine the role of management in human and social life beyond organizational functions (see, more recently, Bell et al. 2021, Domingo and Melé 2022, Hühn 2019, Peltonen 2021, Windsor 2016). Last but not least, there is work on the specific exigencies of moral reasoning in management theory and practice (see, more recently, Kim and Donaldson 2018). This section of the Handbook aims to contribute something of value to all of these trends, in overlapping and inter-supportive ways. Importantly, it does so neither by simply applying ethical-theory-supported norms to management practice nor by selecting philosophical ideas (as conclusions of previous philosophical arguments) to answer sociological or practical decision-making questions in context – but by further developing (or opening new avenues for) philosophical thought on management and managing in organizations.

Contributions Included in Moral Philosophy and Management: An Overview Together and apart, the philosophical explorations and analyses presented in this section of the Handbook are intended to unsettle the reader, create the discomfort needed to question entrenched views about ethical dimensions of management, and open the mind to disciplined critiques in search of the good in a world of plural values. The central aim is to initiate and stimulate philosophical reflections on the moral life of the manager as a human being, the meaning and purpose of organizations and management practice, and the role of managers and management in coordinating responses to the grand challenges of the contemporary world. It should not be surprising, therefore, to find different interpretations and analyses of similar issues, synergies next to contrasts and controversies, and comprehensive accounts next to unfinished projects – all united, however, in a commitment to philosophical inquiry and in respect for the possibility of alternative views. Taking an integrative perspective on all 16 chapters, the reader can distinguish four stages of this journey: methodological considerations; foundational inquiries into the ethical nature of management; debates on the effectiveness of various ethical theories in exploring management and the manager’s condition; and thoroughgoing philosophical examinations of topical management issues (applications). In the first stage, on methodology, Thomas Donaldson’s ▶ Chap. 36, “How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business,” illustrates several important ways in which moral-philosophical methods contribute to the study of “human actions, institutions, and practices in business.” The author warns us against the propensity to

668

C. Neesham

draw normative conclusions from purely descriptive premises (known as the naturalist fallacy) and shows us how to build and apply normative arguments correctly – in other words, what forms of reasoning we can use to connect “is” (statements about the state of the world, or what is the case) with “ought” (statements about what actions should be taken, or what should be the case). In offering philosophical methods (such as reflective equilibrium, regulative ideals, and thought experiments) to develop insights into business ethics, this chapter also prepares us for the exigencies of philosophical analysis required to engage with arguments presented in subsequent chapters. In the second stage, on foundational inquiries, three chapters take three different historical perspectives – philosophical anthropology, Smithian moral philosophy, and critical theory – to raise fundamental issues around what ethics and morality may mean in business and management practice. This is the space where most metaethical questions are likely to be found. Calling on post-Hobbesian philosophies to revisit assumptions about human nature, Arran Gare’s ▶ Chap. 37, “Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics,” connects the purpose and aims of moral philosophy with thoughts about the human condition: “[u]nderpinning all our judgments about how to live and how to act is our conception of what we are as human beings.” Gare engages with the ideas of late eighteenth century German idealism (in particular, Herder, Hegel, and Schelling) to challenge Hobbes and Locke’s theories of human nature as determined and, as a result, to question the notion that social institutions, including those defining what is ethical, are inevitable. What this stream of philosophical anthropology teaches us is that humans are creators of culture, and culture is the very medium in which meanings of self, other, community, and nature are formed. Liberated from definitions of human nature, we may feel less certain about working with fixed meanings but more empowered about creating new ones and keeping this creativity alive. The human task is then to develop wisdom, where wisdom is understood as the ability to remain open to new possibilities of (re)creating one’s human condition in light of new experiences and insights into one’s connections with fellow human beings, other living forms, and the universe. On the grounds thus prepared for humans able to create their own future, Gare further engages ideas from modern philosophical anthropology (in particular, Peirce, Mead, and Bourdieu) – to justify and stimulate a revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics. The aim is to evaluate the future of business ethics as a project whose chances of success are still uncertain. While MacIntyre’s virtue-ethical perspective is invoked in reflecting on the chances of human and professional practices in general, Solomon’s application of Aristotelian concepts of virtue in business ethics is critiqued for its treatment of virtues as given in a fixed human nature instead of regarding them as evolving, changeable cultural objects. Gare’s argument invites new research into how culturally dynamic conceptions of virtue (or of any other key ethical concept, for that matter) can be further developed to guide ethical reasoning and action in business theory and practice. During the next historical journey, Patricia Werhane and David Bevan’s ▶ Chap. 38, “Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy and Its Relevance for Modern Management,” reminds us that the roots of economics and business enterprise are,

35

Moral Philosophy and Management: An Introduction

669

in fact, to be found in moral philosophy. The authors challenge the wholesale appropriation of Adam Smith’s pioneering economic thought by neoliberal political economy and discuss the “complex interdependence of self-interest and social justice” observed in humans’ economic behaviors, showing how Smith’s economic and moral theories can inform socially responsible business management today. They illustrate how five key concepts of Smithian moral philosophy (the impartial spectator, the role of the virtues and moral sentiments in moral judgment and human action, the theory of justice, the theory of labor, and the concept of the invisible hand) can be combined to interpret markets as complex, dynamic human-social processes. Contrary to what Friedmanite positions on social responsibilities of business may recognize or accept, Adam Smith’s political economy is found fully compatible with Ruggie’s principles of business responsibility for human rights, for example, and can legitimately be invoked to support it. The third historical approach focuses on critical theorists of the Frankfurt School and the critical theory horizon shaped by them. In ▶ Chap. 39, “Critical Moral Philosophy and Management,” Edward Wray-Bliss examines how moral philosophy (in particular, Kantian principles of moral reasoning) informs critical theory – and, in turn, how critical theory informs moral-philosophical principles of relevance to management theory and practice. Critical theorists’ emancipation agenda takes issue with the repressive and oppressive effects of industrialization and modern industrial management – from Horkheimer’s warnings against the means-ends rationality that dominates the modern organization, and Marcuse’s analysis of commoditized mass culture and its devastating effects on human relationships, to Arendt’s characterization of loss (or lack) of independent thinking as an effect of instrumental rationality (as defined by Weber) and, in turn, as the root of totalitarianism. Noting that the management function is too involved in today’s problems to have the resources to generate radical solutions, the author identifies the main factors that prevent the modern manager from playing a truly transformative role in organizations and society, portraying a manager who is reactive to outside pressures and ill-equipped for independent moral agency. However, to stimulate the latter, he deconstructs the notion of inspiring, heroic, transformational business leadership that can do the thinking for us and show us the way out of all problems. In explaining why such leadership would not provide a genuine antidote to managerialism as “a mechanism of destructiveness and subordination,” Wray-Bliss implicitly returns the responsibility for moral agency to the individual in any position within the organization’s constellation of power, suggesting that any resources for resistance are within the grasp of the individual qua human being, beyond any institutional categorizations. In the third stage, on debates around specific ethical theories, ten different chapters explore philosophical ideas and principles related to utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics (bringing together Eastern and Western philosophies), feminist ethics, and pragmatism. Each chapter opens a new vista over what it means to manage ethically amid multiple pressures and interests. In ▶ Chap. 40, “How Utilitarianism Can Inform Decent Managers in Plural and Culturally Diverse Contexts,” Andrew Gustafson shows us what is involved in doing

670

C. Neesham

the hard work of applying utilitarian principles to management practice. The work is indeed harder than one may anticipate: applied in good faith, by maintaining humanist ends, seeking to maximize utility or happiness is a highly effective tool for advancing meaningful work, cooperation, diversity, autonomy, and respect for a plurality of values and beliefs. The author argues that distributing utility in the organization in accordance with these goals is indeed the most important humanist function of the contemporary manager. In ▶ Chap. 41, “A Good Manager Serves Two Masters: A Kantian Perspective,” Dubbink and Liedekerke explore the managerial function in terms of upholding deontological principles and preventing organizational misconduct. Furthermore, while morally active herself, the manager must also inspire employees to be morally active. She is thus responsible not only for preventing strictly illegal acts committed by individual employees (especially where the organization’s culture is likely to favor illegal behaviors) but also for unethical (though possibly legal) acts committed by the organization, which are likely to create significant dysfunctions in society. The authors’ plea for “active moral agency” invests the manager with the complex but essential purpose of building ethical organizations. The central role of moral agency in the managerial function is further emphasized by Eva Tsahuridu in ▶ Chap. 42, “Moral Agency and Decent Management,” where current management theory and practice are being criticized for insufficient interest in examining the rights and responsibilities of all those involved in a workplace of (both managed and managing) moral agents. In response, building on Kant’s categorical imperative about humanity as an end in itself, the author focuses on decency as the key attribute of a good person. Accordingly, decency characterizes someone who “prefers to suffer wrong rather than do wrong to others” (Heller 1988: 174). Tsahuridu asks whether decent managers are possible: Is this principle adequate and relevant for today’s managers, or is it asking too much, or too little, of them? By reference to Kantian respect for dignity, the author explores the inter-relationships between decent work, decency at work, decent employees, decent managers, and decent management. Her argument concludes that each actor in the workplace is responsible for protecting their moral agency at work, just as they do in their other life roles. Decent management is thus possible only when predicated on “the duties we owe, in the workplace, to people as our fellow human beings.” Delving further into the crucial role of moral character signposted by the previous two chapters, the discussion presented by Arran Gare and Cristina Neesham in ▶ Chap. 43, “Creating an Effective Business Ethics,” focuses on the virtue ethics project proposed by MacIntyre and Bourdieu for the professions and professional life, and by Solomon for the specific practice of business and business management. At a normative-ethical level, this chapter responds, to some extent, to the metaethical issues raised by Gare in his previous Philosophical Anthropology chapter. Arguing that the cultivation of virtues and character in organizational life is vital for engaging management practice to nurture better workplaces and shape a better world, the authors call for a revival of virtue ethics in management based on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and Solomon’s theory of business professionalism. The authors of this chapter conclude, optimistically, that good examples of people living in search for

35

Moral Philosophy and Management: An Introduction

671

wisdom and justice are still abundant enough to challenge the deepest inherited assumptions and transform organizations. Accordingly, there is hope for both reform and radical change around and beyond traditional managerial behaviors. On a more pragmatic note, in ▶ Chap. 44, “The Role of Virtue in Good Management,” Andrew West refers to the Aristotelian virtue ethics tradition to investigate the implications of practicing moral virtues in today’s moral dilemmas in the workplace. The author uses short case scenarios to distill ethical issues in specific managerial decision situations but uses them as a starting point to reflect on what ethics beyond rule compliance may look like when practiced by the virtuous manager, especially when applicable rules or principles are not available. Three kinds of virtue are emphasized in discussing contributions by Aristotelian virtue ethics to management in context: virtues that are directly relevant to managerial activity; virtues that can inform the good life of the manager as a human being; and virtues that guide management activity to contribute to the common good, both inside and outside the organization. After illustrating how virtue ethics can inform decent management in its core functions, it is time to turn to the key role of the subject in defining what constitutes virtue. In ▶ Chap. 45, “Organizations, Virtue Ethics, and Narrative Identity,” Chris Provis draws on MacIntyre’s philosophy to explore how employees’ identities (as humans, first of all) shape their notions of meaningful work and are, in turn, shaped by the organizations that employ them. Individual and group (social) narrative identities are interrelated to explicate the creation of meaning at work as part of one’s life considered as a whole. It is hoped that more effective recommendations for work-life balance and diversity policies can be derived from this analysis. Appealing to Ancient Chinese moral philosophy for alternative perspectives on virtue and character, Matthias Niedenführ and Alicia Hennig take turns, in two separate chapters, to introduce readers to – or remind them of – the richness of Confucian and Daoist thought, respectively. ▶ Chapter 46, “Confucianism and Ethics in Management,” examines the concept of an “honorable merchant” who uses virtues such as benevolence and reciprocity not only to do “business in an ethical way” but also to establish harmonious relationships with other people and support a harmonious society. Entrusted with care for others, much like in a family, the manager is thus responsible for reflecting on everyone’s interests, learning continuously, and role-modeling the behaviors needed to support ethical cultures in organizations and wider communities. In contrast, ▶ Chap. 47, “Daoism and Ethics in Management,” offers more opportunities for introspection, highlighting natural (rather than social) virtues that enable the individual – as manager and human being – to nurture a healthy connection with the universe. Self-realization and selfmanagement are prioritized in the quest for better leadership in organizations. Shifting focus from self to others and from ethics of character development to ethics of care and relationships, Marianna Fotaki’s ▶ Chap. 48, “Feminist Ethics,” proposes an ethical perspective based on the poststructuralist and psychoanalytical work of feminist thinkers such as Ettinger, Butler, and Benjamin to promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Embodied relationality is explored here “as an ethical proposition for rethinking how we might productively connect with each

672

C. Neesham

other in organizations and management, and in all walks of social life more generally.” The unifying thread is the “shared precariousness” of all human existence, which blurs traditional boundaries between public and private spheres, and establishes equality across irreducible differences. This equality can best be defined, the author argues, in terms of a fundamental right to a “liveable” life, a right that does not need to be justified by others’ capacity to recognize, understand, or share (in) the life such envisaged. Continuing explorations of ethics as a guide for living together in organizations, Frank Martela’s ▶ Chap. 49, “Is Moral Growth Possible for Managers?,” mobilizes Dewey’s philosophy to confront the challenge that “[e]very managerial choice is an opportunity to either grow or decline morally.” Denying the existence of “objective” moral facts, pragmatism teaches us that humans’ socialization into ethics generates ambivalent legacies, often prone to biases and lacking moral imagination. The free choice that managers have as moral agents is to commit their efforts to ongoing progress in their moral perspective – by allowing for plural perspectives, seeking critique, and focusing on becoming good rather than being good. In this context, management is described as an unfolding practical project of expanding ethical horizons. In the fourth stage, two chapters engage in philosophical analyses applied to specific issues: the management of responsible innovation and, respectively, the attribution of responsibility to organizations as artificial persons. Launching a radical critique of both virtue ethics and practical wisdom, Vincent Blok’s ▶ Chap. 50, “Innovation as Ethos,” explains the limitations of these theories for managing innovation in organizations. Evidence of inadequacies in traditional concepts of responsibility (both backward- and forward-looking) is deployed to support a new way of understanding responsible innovation. The author argues for innovation as ethos as an action-based alternative to principle-based ethics. Given that predetermined principles are not well-prepared to cope with the unpredictable nature of innovation processes and the ethical challenges associated with them and that previous experiences may be of limited normative value, it is essential that innovation managers establish a co-evolving relationship between innovation practices and societal needs. Innovations will have to provide timely and effective responses to these needs, in order to acquire and maintain legitimacy. Blok recommends that the innovation-society connection can best be maintained through a “vulnerability strategy,” which urges managers to remain open to assessing the social impacts of innovation, adapting to multiple approaches to innovation, and increasing their agility in correcting errors. Blok’s argument shapes a new ethical theory for innovation management. Finally, David Ardagh’s ▶ Chap. 51, “Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility of Organizations as Artificial Persons,” provides a detailed response to a recurrent question raised in business ethics research: do organizations have moral responsibility? if so, in what sense can it be attributed to them? The author takes on the challenging task of arguing against conventional theses that real existence, agency/action, and responsibility cannot properly be attributed to organizations qua organizations. He uses neo-Aristotelian analogies of attribution to liken

35

Moral Philosophy and Management: An Introduction

673

organizations to real persons in six important respects – namely goals, repertoires, evaluations, acts, outcomes, and society (GREAOS) – and to derive from here more specific ethical responsibilities directly applicable to organizations. Through a discussion of the Exxon Valdez case, he also illustrates how the GREAOS test can be administered in relation to executive decision-making in today’s corporations.

Conclusion While a necessarily incomplete account of what moral philosophy-informed inquiry can accomplish in the study of management, Moral Philosophy and Management offers its chapters as examples of the progress that can be made in enriching our understanding of the ethical dimension of managerial work as activity performed by humans with and through other (fellow) humans. Many more directions of inquiry could have been covered, such as social contract theory, discourse ethics, theories of rights and justice, and postcolonial ethics – and the list may go on. Working against limitations of space and time, the contributors of this first edition of its kind invite reflections on the included chapters as opportunities for expanding the interest of management practitioners, students, and scholars in continuing the project initiated here and adding new philosophical investigations of management as an ethically charged activity. The need for critically reflective managers who can grasp and assume the new, complex responsibilities assigned to them in a world troubled by global-systemic problems such as rising inequalities, intractable conflicts, pandemics, and climate change is greater than ever. We call for management scholarship to mobilize significantly more attention and resources toward meeting this need.

Cross-References ▶ A Good Manager Serves Two Masters: A Kantian Perspective ▶ Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy and Its Relevance for Modern Management ▶ Confucianism and Ethics in Management ▶ Creating an Effective Business Ethics ▶ Critical Moral Philosophy and Management ▶ Daoism and Ethics in Management ▶ Feminist Ethics ▶ How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business ▶ How Utilitarianism Can Inform Decent Managers in Plural and Culturally Diverse Contexts ▶ Innovation as Ethos ▶ Is Moral Growth Possible for Managers? ▶ Moral Agency and Decent Management ▶ Organizations, Virtue Ethics, and Narrative Identity ▶ Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics

674

C. Neesham

▶ The Role of Virtue in Good Management ▶ Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility of Organizations as Artificial Persons

References Arnold DG, Beauchamp TL, Bowie NE (2020) Ethical theory and business, 10th edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Banerjee SB (2008) Corporate social responsibility: the good, the bad and the ugly. Crit Sociol 34(1):51–79 Bell E, Winchester N, Wray-Bliss E (2021) Enchantment in business ethics research. J Bus Ethics 174(2):251–262 Copp D (2006) Introduction. In: McNaughton D, Rawling P, Copp D (eds) The Oxford handbook of ethical theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 1–35 Domingo V, Melé D (2022) Re-thinking management: insights from Western classical humanism. Humanist Manag J 7(1):1–21 Drucker PF (2005) Managing oneself. Harv Bus Rev 83(1):100–109 Eastman W (2013) Ideology as rationalization and as self-righteousness: psychology and law as paths to critical business ethics. Bus Ethics Q 23(4):527–560 Flew A, Priest S (2002) A dictionary of philosophy. Pan, London Haidt J (2001) The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychol Rev 108(4):814–834 Harper SJ (2009) Ethics versus morality: a problematic divide. Philos Soc Crit 35(9):1063–1077 Heller A (1988) General ethics. Basil Blackwell, Oxford Hühn MP (2019) Adam Smith’s philosophy of science: economics as moral imagination. J Bus Ethics 155(1):1–15 Hume D ([1751] 1983) An enquiry concerning the principles of morals. Hackett Classics, Indianapolis Jones MT, Fleming P (2012) The end of corporate social responsibility: crisis and critique. Sage, Los Angeles and London Jones C, Parker M, ten Bos R (2005) For business ethics. Routledge, London Kim TW, Donaldson T (2018) Rethinking right: moral epistemology in management research. J Bus Ethics 148(1):5–20 Korten DC (2015) Change the story, change the future: a living economy for a living earth. BerrettKoehler, Oakland Parker M (2003) Business, ethics and business ethics: critical theory and negative dialectics. In: Alvesson M, Willmott H (eds) Studying management critically. Sage, London, pp 197–219 Peltonen T (2021) Practical and theoretical wisdom in management scholarship: re-assessing the use and appropriations of Aristotle’s philosophy. Philos Manag 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s40926-021-00179-9 Rhodes C (2022) The ethics of organizational ethics. Organ Stud. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 01708406221082055 Rhodes C, Pullen A (2018) Critical business ethics: from corporate self-interest to the glorification of the sovereign pater. Int J Manag Rev 20(2):483–499 Skorupski J (2008) Ethics. In: Bunnin N, Tsui-James EP (eds) The Blackwell companion to philosophy, 2nd edn. Blackwell Publishing, Malden, pp 202–230 Smith A ([1759] 1976) The theory of moral sentiments. Clarendon Press, Oxford Tsui A (2016) Reflections on the so-called value-free ideal: a call for responsible science in the business schools. Cross Cult Strateg Manag 23(1):4–28

35

Moral Philosophy and Management: An Introduction

675

Williams B ([1972] 2012) Morality: an introduction to ethics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA Williams B (1985) Ethics and the limits of philosophy. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Windsor D (2016) Economic rationality and a moral science of business ethics. Philos Manag 15(2): 135–149 Wray-Bliss E (2016) Ethical philosophy, organization studies and good suspicions. In: Mir R, Willmott H, Greenwood M (eds) The Routledge companion to philosophy in organization studies. Routledge, London, pp 51–65

How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business

36

Thomas Donaldson

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Common Method: “Apply-a-Basic-Theory” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Naturalistic Fallacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Falsifiability Criterion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Connecting “Is” to “Ought” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Three Epistemic Methods for Business Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reflective Equilibrium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Guiding (or Regulative) Ideals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thought Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

678 678 679 681 682 685 685 686 687 689 689 690

Abstract

How can moral theory be applied to the human actions, institutions, and practices in business? Popular methods from sociology, psychology, economics, and other business school disciplines often fail because they aim at empirical truth rather than normative guidance. Researchers often err in simple ways that reflect the naturalistic fallacy and use descriptive evidence to arrive at normative conclusions. Moreover, simple methods of applying moral theories to business, methods that use standard theories such as consequentialism and deontology, fail for lack of precision. This chapter outlines three methods for successfully analyzing problems in business ethics, namely, (1) “reflective equilibrium,” (2) guiding (or “regulative”) ideals, and (3) thought experiments.

T. Donaldson (*) The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_12

677

678

T. Donaldson

Keywords

Naturalistic Fallacy · Empirical · Epistemology · Normative · Methodology · Thought Experiment · Moral Philosophy · Ethics

Introduction All attempts to acquire knowledge require means for doing so. Epistemological methods are procedural guides for truth, and whatever counts as “truth” forever stands in the shadow of its epistemological parents. Yet methods evolve, and different forms of method fall in and out of fashion. The rise and success of the “scientific method” in the modern era (Condorcet 1976) spawned in business schools and elsewhere an out-of-balance hegemony of empirical method that banished other research methods, including some whose epistemic power, while specialized, is undeniable. Against this background I examine the question of whether and how methods of moral philosophy can inform business. The question is different from the question of whether we might know if moral statements such as “genocide is wrong” are true and different from the question of how we should develop general theories of morality. It speaks instead to the fundamental challenge of applying moral theory to human institutions and practices, be they legal, political, medical, scientific, military, or educational.

A Common Method: “Apply-a-Basic-Theory” Consider the simple, ubiquitous method employed by some approaches that I call “apply-a-basic-theory.” This method is a paint-by-the-numbers strategy that overlays a basic moral theory onto a specific problem. The method has three steps: (1) pick a systemic account of the right or the good; (2) identify business choices; and (3) render a conclusion. Any systemic account of the right or the good will do, e.g., consequentialism, deontology, or virtue theory, or, for that matter, any of the more specific versions of them, such as utilitarianism (Mill 1859, 1965), Kantian rationalism (Kant 1788; Kant and Gregor 1996; Kant and Paton 1967), or Aristotelian teleology (Aristotle 1962, 1975). Hence, if one asks what CEO Chang should do when contemplating laying off 100 employees at her software services business in Detroit, one should follow the steps one-two-three, i.e., (1) pick a systemic account of the right or the good (say, “greatest happiness for the greatest number”); (2) identify business choices (a. layoff all 100 immediately or b. layoff all 100 with 6 months’ notice and access to company-funded outplacement services or c. lay none off); and, finally, (3) render the theoretically determined conclusion (such as “lay none off”). The method of apply-a-basic-theory is not wrong per se but is often a blunt instrument in practical contexts. For example, in complex business contexts that

36

How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business

679

display competing commitments and confusing facts, the method seldom marks off a clear answer. Even if one could make the Herculean factual interpretations necessary in the above real-world challenge for CEO Chang as she attempts to decide whether to layoff employees, and even if one could manage the relevant complex factual predictions, including the forecasted sum of “happiness,” sticky issues remain. There is, for example, the matter of competing commitments. Does Chang’s fiduciary duty to shareholders matter at all to her choice? If so, how much? Or how about the possible impact on gender and racial fairness arising from a layoff? Instead, while not denying the relevance of the apply-a-basic-theory approach, I want to move beyond it to other methods that promise practical insight. The common view about moral thinking is that it is “subjective” rather than “objective.” Yet, as we shall see, when considered inter alia, a number of methods – more so than the “apply-a-basic-theory” method – confer an important form of epistemic objectivity upon moral analysis in complex settings, including those of business.

The Naturalistic Fallacy To set the stage, recall what occupies it. Empirical methods take the center stage of business school research or, more accurately, take full stage save for marginal activity in the wings of law and ethics. The proximate historical reasons for this domination are well-known and understandable. The field of business, taken as a university discipline, came to anchor its respectability in the mid-twentieth century by following the call of critics for more research and rigor. In 1959 the Carnegie and Ford Foundations in the USA conducted influential studies, ones that prodded business schools to be less vocational and more research-oriented (Khurana 2007). “Research”-oriented was interpreted to mean “hard science”-oriented. The problem with this approach for solving the specific problem of how to move beyond vocational learning is that empirical methods display limited prescriptive or “action-guiding” flexibility. By themselves, empirical methods are islands of knowledge with views only to nearby islands, not to more distant and often interesting places. The boundaries of such methods coincide with the boundaries of our observable world, past, present, or future. All extant states of affairs in the world are fair game for such methods; but anything else, say the ideal of justice – as, interpreted by Plato in The Republic (1954) or by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971, 1999) – and behavior that demands normative interpretation for its meaning, such as the killing of the innocent, is out of the game and invisible. Aggressive empirical proponents take one more step and banish targets of research that fail to conform to very specific empirical methodological criteria, such as the extent to which these targets can be interpreted mathematically. Less aggressive proponents acknowledge alternatives to quantitative data gathering and analysis (Kim and Donaldson 2018), but even they are genuinely vexed over what might possibly count as an object of research other than extant states of affairs in the world. In sum, for the issue of the methods of business research, it is not so much that the medium of

680

T. Donaldson

empirics stands false or discredited but that it renders some things invisible. The use of eyesight does not so much discredit sound as it fails to comprehend it. The so-called naturalistic fallacy, at least in its more sophisticated version, helps explain the problem. The so-called fallacy, which in fact few theorists today believe qualifies as a formal fallacy, refers to the making of illicit inferences from natural facts to values. It has been discussed vigorously by moral philosophers (Frankena 1939; Hare 1993; Searle 1964; Sprigge 1964) and is identified both with the British philosopher G. E. Moore (1903), who coined the phrase “naturalistic fallacy,” and with the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume (1739). Moore argued that any attempt to define goodness in terms of natural properties such as pleasure constituted a fallacy (Moore 1903), while Hume (1739) argued, in a move famously known as “Hume’s Guillotine,” that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” That is to say, from the existence of killing (the “is”), one cannot derive the conclusion that killing is morally acceptable (the “ought”). One may deny that the naturalistic fallacy is a formal logical error while acknowledging that it correctly shows the misleading tendency to extrapolate from facts to values. A widely accepted version of the naturalistic fallacy holds simply that prescriptions, i.e., action-guiding propositions, cannot be reduced without remainder to factual propositions. Ideas that guide action are associated with imperatival force (Hare 1964). In other words, they are associated with ideas that instruct someone to do something rather than with ideas that state the way things are. An imperative such as “lay off 100 employees” does not state any fact about the employees. And a statement of fact, such as “all 100 employees are female,” cannot be used to tell somebody what to do. The latter becomes action-guiding or prescriptive only when it is combined with some general prescription, such as if a layoff has a disproportionate gender impact, avoid the layoff’. From this largely acceptable and generic version of the naturalistic fallacy, theorists draw different conclusions. On the one hand, they use it to underscore the need for seeking alternate methods of establishing the good or the right. Doing so is consistent with the possibility of genuine moral insight, and the negative injunction drawn from the naturalistic fallacy, i.e., “you can’t-define-good-in-terms-of-facts,” becomes a polite caveat recommending the avoidance of fact-exclusive methods to achieve insight. Moore put the naturalistic fallacy to precisely this use. For him, goodness is a nonnatural property that exhibits its own, internal logic. On the other hand, some use the is-ought divide more aggressively, to either deny all “rationality” to attempt to determine the good or the right or, still more aggressively, to condemn any attempt to make a substantive moral claim. In the former vein, David Hume raised the flag of empirics in opposition to reason when he wrote that “reason is, and ought only to be, slave to the passions” (Hume 1739, p. 415), and in the latter vein, the twentieth-century philosopher of science Karl Popper (1959) used the is-ought schism to interpret all moral propositions as unscientific. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume famously writes: If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain

36

How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business

681

any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. (Hume 1777, p. 166)

The Falsifiability Criterion In the twentieth century, Karl Popper defends the exclusivity of scientific truth and method through the “falsifiability” criterion. For Popper and many others, being “falsifiable” became the litmus test for separating true science from pseudoscience. Being “logically falsifiable” marks a theory as subject to falsification through observation or experiment, and “it must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience” (Popper 1959, p. 19). Popper puts emphasis on the sheer possibility of a proposition being true, not on whether the proposition is actually true. The claim that there is a tiger in my garden is falsifiable because walking into my garden could – with appropriate assumptions – falsify it, and this is true even if there happens to be a tiger in my garden. Hypothetical observation or experimentation will suffice to show that the claim is at least a candidate for scientific truth. Consider a question raised by astronomers prior to the advent of powerful rockets: “Are there craters on the far side of the moon?” The moon never turns its far side to us, so we cannot observe its obscured side directly. But even prior to rockets, we could hypothetically imagine visiting the far side of the moon and finding no craters. The power of the falsifiability criterion and related observation-centric accounts of epistemology is that they immediately clear rubbish from the landscape of knowledge. Astrology and palm reading vanish, deservedly so. Religious claims such as the medieval dictum “love moves the planets” are similarly banished: What, someone might ask, could ever count even as a hypothetical observation that would falsify such a claim about the force of love? But more respectable claims, notably claims about ethics, also raise questions. How could a statement such as “murder is wrong” be subject to falsification by observation or experiment? An extreme version of this view, enshrined in the early twentieth-century philosophical school known as “emotivism,” holds that all ethical claims are devoid of objectivity and amount to nothing more than emotional expressions. Emotivism and Popperian epistemology might be better accepted today were it not for the inconvenient extensions of their views. Those willing to give up the objectivity of ethics are not also prepared to give up the objectivity of mathematics, and mathematical propositions are notoriously immune to falsification by observation or experiment. No matter how many times the circus shark adds two peas in front of your eyes and then removes his hands revealing five peas, you will not believe your eyes. You cannot imagine the proposition “2 + 2 = 4” being falsified by observation or experiment because you know about the truth of this proposition in a non-experiential way, different, from how you know that things fall toward the earth instead of away from it. The same applies to logic, geometry, topology, game theory, and other versions of axiom-derived knowledge.

682

T. Donaldson

Still more inconvenient for the doctrine of falsifiability is that the claim of falsifiability itself is unfalsifiable. The proposition “the only propositions which can be said to be true are those subject to falsification through observation or experiment” cannot be falsified. We cannot imagine a set of observations or experiments that would falsify the falsifiability criterion. What, then, follows from this quick survey of the relevance and irrelevance of the naturalistic fallacy? Surely not that moral claims are nonobjective. That remains to be proven or disproven. Nonetheless, the considerations above make a simple point: if moral claims are to qualify as objective, then the objectivity must be of a different kind than empirical objectivity. If such claims are to be rooted in epistemic soil, then that soil cannot be purely factual. This simple conclusion, however, has ringing relevance for the study of ethics in business. The coin of the realm in academic business research, as we saw earlier, is hypothesis testing and data analysis. Perhaps for good reasons, observation and data are the very stuff of the contemporary business research. While not formally identifying themselves as “emotivists,” many contemporary business academics would find intellectual fellowship with the emotivists of yore. These modern-day researchers remain genuinely puzzled over what could ever count as anchoring ethical knowledge beyond data and facts. Perhaps because of their graduate-level training, their skepticism resembles more a simple, obvious intuition: claims about shoulds and oughts and rights and wrongs are subjective, untestable, and emotionally motivated expressions. Such researchers may be – and indeed most are – personally sympathetic to moral claims, e.g., to the importance of property rights and the need to avoid gender discrimination. As researchers, however, they put such claims outside the realm of objective truth. For them the skepticism about moral knowledge is not personal – it is business. Into this vale of confusion, our search for alternate methods must move cautiously. Clearly we must discover a better answer than the one that we have already criticized, namely, the “apply-a-basic-theory,” paint-by-the-numbers strategy that superimposes a basic moral theory onto a specific problem. But, if so, what might the answer look like?

Connecting “Is” to “Ought” Where should we begin? Consider the view of a more modern defender of empirics, Hilary Putnam. No stranger to the importance of empirical reasoning, although more pragmatic than Popper or Hume, Putnam explains why facts and numbers matter but should never impugn moral reasoning (Putnam 1978, 2004). The world of practice presents questions that demand answers (1978), and the granularity of practical contexts in which these questions arise cries out for answers that both “fit” those contexts and are “reasonable” (Ohtani 2010). We must attend to the details of practice, including institutionalized practice, in order to understand their moral meaning. We must understand that we work in the chaotic neighborhoods of

36

How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business

683

human interaction and not idealized realms of abstraction (Putnam 2004, p. 28). In this sense, Putnam sympathizes with the frustration of the applied ethicist, including the business ethicist, in trying to use the simple strategy of “apply-a-basic-theory.” Let us take Putnam’s notions of “fit” and “reasonableness” to search beyond the fences of current management epistemology. We shall find that his two notions can be unpacked in terms that are familiar to the philosophy of science. The contemporary philosopher of science James Blachowicz utilizes a notion of layered fit between experience and theory, where knowledge is tailored to fit experience (Blachowicz 1997, 2016): “Our knowledge separates into layers,” he writes. “Experience provides a base for a higher layer of more conceptual understanding” (Blachowicz 2016). His example of tailoring is the spectacular scientific achievement by Johannes Kepler of the shape and corresponding equations that depict the motions of the planets. Kepler, adopting the new heliocentric approach to the solar system, compared predictions for the positions of the planets implied by different shapes to actual, observed locations. He first considered the Greek assumption that heavenly motion constituted perfection and that, in turn, motion should follow the path of that most perfect of shapes, the circle. But careful observation of the movement of Mars showed this hypothesis to be false. The next shape he considered was that of a lopsided egg. This, too, failed to match observations. If not a circle or a lopsided egg, then what? Kepler next proceeded to compare predictions for the positions of the planets to the positions implied by the equation of an ellipse to the actual, observed locations of the planets. Presto! The ellipse was the best “fit” for the actual planetary locations.

For many reasons, the equation of an ellipse, while correct, still did not make for a perfect, data point-by-data-point match. As Blachowicz explains, Kepler could have created a more “precise” theory of the actual observed planetary locations by

684

T. Donaldson

abandoning the search for a simple, elegant formula and engaging in what scientists call “curve fitting.” This involves patching together a theory from discrete sets of independent data, such that each piece of the theory matches a unique datum or set of data. Blachowicz borrows a metaphor from the world of men’s clothing to explain why Kepler opted for the ellipse instead: “A tailor for whom fit is everything and style is nothing can make me a suit that will fit like a glove—but as a patchwork with odd random seams everywhere, it will also not look very much like a suit” (Blachowicz 2016). As philosophers of science are fond of pointing out, scientific ideals of parsimony, elegance, and simplicity require that the activity of fitting theory to experience involves craft and intuition as much as it does number manipulation. Figure 1 below depicts a layered development of knowledge that links physical science and moral philosophy. In each, second-order or “higher” concepts are fitted to experience, intuitions, and logical requirements. The diagram reflects an important similarity between moral philosophy and physical science. It shows that moral philosophy, while not aiming to confirm factual hypotheses, seeks, just as does physical science, to fit theory to experience, intuition, and logic. Figure 2 below illustrates this same general relationship with specific examples of theories in physical science and moral philosophy, namely, Kepler’s First Law and the theory of justice articulated by John Rawls (1971). With this comparison in hand, the obvious next question is: How can philosophical methods generate better “fit” and “more reasonable” solutions? In particular, what epistemic methods are appropriate to moral philosophy and can they illuminate problems in business? The question about philosophical method has been widely discussed. Given the presence of objective methods in the hard sciences, the Australian philosopher John Passmore (1961) asks: are there counterparts in the field of philosophy? In his book, Philosophical Reasoning, Passmore details some of the more widely used methods, including the infinite regress argument, the two worlds argument, self-refutation, arguments to meaninglessness (such as verifiability, excluded opposites, and paradigm cases), and allocation to categories. Passmore restricts himself to the broadest category of philosophical reasoning, one that includes metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and the history of philosophy.

• Physical Science

• Higher Conceptual Understanding

• Moral Philosophy

• Experience/ Intuition/ logic

• Experience/ Intuition/ logic

• Experience/ Intuition/ logic

Fig. 1 Moral philosophy and physical science

36

How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business

685

• Physical Science • The orbit of a planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci. (kepler’s First Law of Planetary motion)

• Higher Conceptual Understanding

• Moral Philosophy • Theory of Justice (Rawls)

• E.g., Data about planetary motion

• Experience Intuition/ logic

• E.g., Practical knowledge and intuitions about justice

Fig. 2 Moral philosophy and physical science: examples

However, in order to focus on ethics in organizations and institutions such as business, we must extend Passmore’s list into specialized branches and identify some non-Passmore linked methods that have proven successful in applied ethics. This is the purpose of the next section.

Three Epistemic Methods for Business Ethics Three epistemic methods have been especially successful in business ethics, namely: 1. Reflective equilibrium 2. Guiding (or “regulative”) ideals, which include: (a) Kant’s (1788) conception of regulative ideas or ideals (this mode of reasoning utilizes a pure concept which, in turn, is used to guide thinking in a lessthan-pure world) (b) An ideal speech situation derived from Habermas; and 3. Thought experiments We shall address each in turn.

Reflective Equilibrium Consider the widely accepted moral method of “reflective equilibrium,” often associated with John Rawls (1971, p. 61) but also found elsewhere (Goodman 1955). Reflective equilibrium is the name of an epistemic process that justifies moral values by seeking coherence through a dynamic process of reasoning. The process involves making incremental changes while going back and forth between, on the one hand, (a) considered moral judgments and (b) relevant background theories (Kim and Donaldson 2018). Consider a simple example. Someone

686

T. Donaldson

attempting to understand the nature of justice might begin with the background theory of justice as tantamount to treating everyone equally. And yet when I consider this idea against the backdrop of actual experience, I see instances where inequality, not equality, is the more just outcome. If a parent has two children, one of whom is much sicker than the other, justice may mean giving the sicker child more of a scarce medicine than the other. And yet the direction of my incremental changes must at some point reverse. Perhaps I realize that my day-to-day judgments tend to reflect favoritism toward people of my gender. Here my considered moral judgments may need to be altered to reflect my underlying idea that justice assigns equal worth to all people, regardless of specific characteristics. And so my epistemological method involves moving back and forth between my intuitive sense of justice in real-world contexts on the one hand and my broader ideas about justice on the other, until my comprehension reaches reflective equilibrium. The culmination of the reasoning process is an equilibrium point where incremental change is no longer necessary. The method has nearly unlimited scope and can be used in the present instance to inform decisions and moral theories relevant to marketing, finance, accounting, strategy, and government policy.

Guiding (or Regulative) Ideals This method of reasoning uses a pure idea as a guide to behavior without presupposing that there is an actual referent for the ideal. It is in step with Kant’s conception of guiding “ideals” (1788) used to inform reflection. Guiding ideals can be used to guide thinking in a less-than-pure world. They have been dubbed by Pasternack and Rossi (2014) as “regulative archetypes for reflection.” Pasternack and Rossi explain: “when considering whether or not to get a pet, one might envision an ideal pet, a pet with the optimal set of desirable attributes. Such an archetype for thought, however, is still not completely determined, for the ideal can still be neutral between various attributes that are not regarded as relevant. . .” Nonetheless, the ideal guides choice. Similarly, when considering a matter of conflict of interest in business and how to deal with a purported instance of conflict of interest by an employee who engaged in a transaction, one might be guided by an ideal in which a hypothetical actor engaging in a similar transaction has absolutely no affected interests whatsoever, even if having absolutely no affected interests is usually an unreasonable assumption in practice. An especially popular type of regulative ideal is the ideal speech situation articulated by Habermas (1973, 1984, 1996). This is referenced by Andreas Scherer in many analyses in business ethics (e.g., 2015, p. 492). The ideal speech situation can serve as a guiding procedural ideal to help define desirable characteristics of interactions between, say, the stakeholders of a company and the company’s management or between the company and government regulators. The practical presuppositions specified by Habermas specifies are that (1) no one capable of making a relevant contribution has been excluded; (2) participants have equal voice; (3) participants are internally free to speak their honest opinion without deception or

36

How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business

687

self-deception; and (4) there are no sources of coercion built into the process (Habermas 2008). While Habermas makes clear – and stressed this even more in his later writings – that we must make do in the real world with less than ideal conditions, an ideal speech situation can function as an organizational guide.

Thought Experiments Thought experiments have been employed widely in philosophy. Peg Tittle has detailed many of them in her book, What if–: Collected Thought Experiments in Philosophy (2005). Thought experiments can be powerful devices in ethical reasoning too, both at the practical and theoretical level. One may find this surprising. Because experimentation is typically associated with observing real events to uncover causal relations, the idea of experimenting in one’s mind may appear oxymoronic. How can imaginary experiments tell us anything about the real world? Ironically, one of the most famous thought experiments in history was used to establish a point not about ethics but about physics. It was conducted by the scientist Isaac Newton who in his well-known “pail of water” thought experiment examined the question of force beyond gravity and the presence of physical bodies. Newton began his analysis by referring the reader to an experiment in which he swung a pail of water tied to a rope around in a circle, with observable results. The pail exerted force on the rope (force exerted away from the axis of rotation that we now label “centrifugal force”). Next, he asked his reader to imagine the same experiment in outer space, where no gravity affected forces. We see that the pail would still exert force away from our hand. This powerful thought experiment convinced his readers and even his detractor, Leibniz, that centrifugal force operates relative to something other than simple physical bodies (O’Connor and Robertson 2004). Even simple thought experiments can be powerful guides in business ethics. Executives often champion the so-called front page of the newspaper test as a reliable guide to avoiding unethical behavior. They advise: ask yourself how you would feel if the action you are about to take were written up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times. This is one of the simplest forms of moral thought experiment, only slightly more complex than the simplest moral thought experiment of all, the Golden Rule. Some version of the Golden Rule is found in every one of the world’s major religions. Its basic advice is a simple thought experiment: imagine yourself in another’s shoes; then ask whether you would want to be treated in the same way. In the Analects of Confucius (Confucius 1989), the rule is phrased in the negative version, “Do not do to others. . .,” while the more common form is in the affirmative, “Do unto others. . .” Even Kant regarded his Categorical Imperative as a version of the Golden Rule, albeit an improved version (Kant and Paton 1967). But more complex and theoretical thought experiments are also successful in normative ethics. The most famous is doubtlessly Rawls’ hypothetical state in which persons in the “original position” are situated behind a “veil of ignorance,” where

688

T. Donaldson

they are nearly omniscient about world facts but perfectly ignorant of their personal characteristics. It is from behind this “veil” that Rawls asks the reader to imagine what principles of justice such people would choose; in other words, to choose not knowing how their particular interests would be affected (1999). The power of the thought experiment lies in its ability to direct our imagination toward moral properties that are relevant to the collective issue of justice and away from our natural inclination to favor our own interests. The entire corpus of “social contract” reasoning in political theory, from Hobbes (1651) to Locke (1948) and Rousseau (1997), may be viewed as a series of elaborate thought experiments designed to discipline and guide our moral intuitions about the state and its citizenry. It makes no difference whether the original contractors gathered long ago in a forest and proceeded to discuss and affirm a social contract with the Leviathan. What matters is that the thought experiments constituting the corpus of the social contract tradition in Western intellectual history help us discover what is relevant for understanding the relationship between the state and its citizenry. In the contemporary era, the social contract, accompanied by a variety of connected thought experiments, has been applied to business, e.g., by Michael Keeley (1988). In an early version of the social contract thought experiment, I described an imaginary state of nature (the state of “individual production”) in which each person must work alone and then later discussed how the terms of a social contract might emerge between entering productive organizations (in which people can work together) on the one hand and consumers and employees on the other (Donaldson 1982). Later, Thomas Dunfee imagined non-hypothetical “extant” contracts (Dunfee 1991), and his ideas helped spawn an amalgam of existing and hypothetical contracts in the thought experiment known as Integrative Social Contracts Theory (Donaldson and Dunfee 1994, 1995, 1999; Dunfee 2006). Other thought experiments about business ethics have been constructed. In one, an “algorithm” is advanced to help managers sort through difficult moral conflicts that arise in global settings outside the firm’s home country (Donaldson 1989). When norms between home and host country conflict – say, in matters of gender or working conditions – which norm should prevail? The algorithm proposes separate tests appropriate to two kinds of conflict, one in which the host country justifies the norm on the basis of its relative level economic development (Type I) and the other (Type II) where the justification for accepting the apparently lower norm is purely cultural. To guide the manager in the Type I case, the algorithm proposes a thought experiment in which he or she imagines her own society at a hypothetically lower level of economic development, one hypothetically positioned at the level of the host country’s development. If the manager can answer the question “would people in our country accept this norm if it were at a hypothetically lower level of economic development?” with a “yes,” then it offers a tentative green light to utilize the norm. Consider, for example, the thought experiment a manager in Sweden might use when wondering whether it is OK to pay workers in Angola a lower salary than Swedish workers are paid in Sweden for the same work. If the Swedish manager believes that, if Sweden were at a hypothetically lower state of economic development, his fellow

36

How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business

689

citizens under such circumstances would accept lower pay for the same work (e.g., in order to encourage eventual development and satisfy present needs), then the algorithm permits paying less to current Angolan workers. It is important to emphasize the hypothetical condition specified in the thought experiment. The algorithm does not ask the manager to search the historical record of what Sweden did. If the test were not hypothetical, it would, for example, condemn American managers to tolerate slavery at levels of economic advancement similar to that in the US Antebellum South. Even the broadest and most basic issues of ethics – ones alive both in and out of business – can be illuminated by contractual thought experiments. One widely acknowledged and well-respected example is T. M. Scanlon’s contractualist account of morality. For Scanlon, interestingly enough, the topic is the whole of morality, not a part of it. He proposes a hypothetical condition, namely, that “an act is wrong if its performance under the circumstances would be [hypothetically] disallowed by any set of principles for the general regulation of behavior that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced general agreement” (Scanlon 1998, p. 153). The idea that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced general agreement points our thinking in the direction of what is right and wrong but also to the bases of the authority for right decisions, e.g., that rightness and justifiability are two sides of the same coin.

Conclusion Here, then, is the place to begin the journey that connects moral philosophy to business. Here is the place to journey toward better “fit.” By using methods already tested successfully in philosophical thought, especially in moral thought, we can chart a course parallel to that taken in the empirical sciences. In both, we can arrive at a higher conceptual understanding on the basis of experience, intuition, and logic. Just as Kepler reflected on how to fit higher concepts to his experience by connecting curve equations to data and intuitions, moral theorists can reflect on how to fit higher concepts to experience and intuitions by connecting them to moral theories and practical advice. We do not come to the moral task conceptually naked. The very existence of objective methods in moral economic thought such as regulative ideals, reflective equilibrium, and thought experiments implies that, while possibly not “objective” in the same way as natural sciences, moral reasoning reflects its own form of rational integrity.

Cross-References ▶ Is Moral Growth Possible for Managers?

690

T. Donaldson

References Aristotle (1962) Nicomachean ethics (trans: Ostwald M). Macmillan Publishing Company, New York Aristotle (1975) The politics of Aristotle (trans: Barker E). Oxford University Press, Oxford Blachowicz J (1997) Reciprocal justification in science and moral theory. Synthese 110(3):447–468 Blachowicz J (2016) There is no scientific method. The New York Times, 4 July. https://www. nytimes.com/2016/07/04/opinion/there-is-no-scientific-method.html Condorcet N (1976) Condorcet: selected writings, 1st edn. Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis Confucius (1989) The Analects of Confucius (trans: Waley A, 1st Vintage Books edn). Vintage Books, New York Donaldson T (1982) Corporations and morality. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs Donaldson T (1989) The ethics of international business. Oxford University Press, New York Donaldson T, Dunfee TW (1994) Toward a unified conception of business ethics–integrative social contracts theory. Acad Manag Rev 19(2):252–284. https://doi.org/10.2307/258705 Donaldson T, Dunfee TW (1995) Integrative social contracts theory – a communitarian conception of economic ethics. Econ Philos 11(1):85–112 Donaldson T, Dunfee T (1999) Ties that bind: a social contracts approach to business ethics. Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge, MA Dunfee TW (1991) Business ethics and extant social contracts. Bus Ethics Q 1(1):23–51 Dunfee TW (2006) A critical perspective of integrative social contracts theory: recurring criticisms and next generation research topics. J Bus Ethics 68(3):303–328. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10551-006-9016-6 Frankena WK (1939) The naturalistic fallacy. Mind 48(192):464–477 Goodman N (1955) Fact, fiction, and forecast. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Habermas J (1973) Theory and practice. Beacon Press, Boston Habermas J (1984) The theory of communicative action. Beacon Press, Boston Habermas J (1996) Between facts and norms. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Habermas J (2008) Between naturalism and religion (trans: Cronin C). Polity, Cambridge Hare RM (1964) The language of morals. Oxford University Press, New York Hare RM (1993) Objective prescriptions. Philos Issues 4:15–32 Hobbes T (1651) Leviathan; or, the matter, form and power of a commonwealth, ecclesiastical and civil, 1946th edn. Basil Blackwell, Oxford Hume D (1739) A treatise of human nature being an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO?c=1&stp= Author&ste=11&af=BN&ae=T004002&tiPG=1&dd=0&dc=flc&docNum=CW118260024& vrsn=1.0&srchtp=a&d4=0.33&n=10&SU=0LRF&locID=balt85423 Hume D (1777) An enquiry concerning human understanding. A. Millar, London Kant I (1788) Critique of practical reason (trans: Beck LW, 1956 edn). Library of Liberal Arts, New York Kant I, Gregor MJ (1996) The metaphysics of morals. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/New York Kant I, Paton HJ (1967) The moral law; Kant’s groundwork of the metaphysic of morals. Barnes & Noble, New York Keeley MC (1988) A social-contract theory of organizations. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame Khurana R (2007) From higher aims to hired hands: the social transformation of American business schools and the unfulfilled promise of management as a profession. Princeton University Press, Princeton Kim TW, Donaldson T (2018) Rethinking right: moral epistemology in management research. J Bus Ethics 148(1):5–20 Locke J (1948) The second treatise of civil government and a letter concerning toleration. Basil Blackwell, Oxford

36

How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business

691

Mill JS (1859) On liberty. J.W. Parker and Son, London Mill JS (1965) Mill’s ethical writings. Collier, New York Moore GE (1903) Principia ethica. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge O’Connor JJ, Robertson EF (2004) Newton’s bucket. http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/ HistTopics/Newton_bucket.html, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/New ton_bucket.html. Retrieved 18 July 2016 Ohtani H (2010) Putnam’s moral realism. In: Paper presented at the 16th International meeting of Hongo metaphysics club, The University of Tokyo Passmore JA (1961) Philosophical reasoning. G. Duckworth, London Pasternack L, Rossi P (2014) Kant’s philosophy of religion. In: Zalta EN (ed) The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, Fall 2014 edn. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/ entries/kant-religion/ Plato (1954). The Republic of Plato (trans: Cornford FM, Bouwsma OK). Oxford University Press, London/New York Popper KR (1959) The logic of scientific discovery. Basic Books, New York Putnam H (1978) Meaning and the moral sciences. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London/Boston Putnam H (2004) Ethics without ontology. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Rawls J (1971) A theory of justice. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Rawls J (1999) A theory of justice, Revised edn. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Rousseau J-J (1997) Rousseau – the social contract and other later political writings (trans: Gourevitch V). Oxford University Press, New York Scanlon TM (1998) What we owe to each other. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Scherer AG (2015) Can hypernorms be justified? Insights from a discourse-ethical perspective. Bus Ethics Q 25(4):489–516 Searle JR (1964) How to derive “ought” from “is”. Philos Rev 73(1):43–58 Sprigge TLS (1964) Definition of a moral judgment. Philosophy 39(150):301–322 Tittle P (2005) What if – : collected thought experiments in philosophy. Pearson/Longman, New York

Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics

37

Reviving the Virtue of Wisdom Arran Gare

Contents Introduction: Recovering Ethics Through Philosophical Anthropology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Brief History of Philosophical Anthropology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Philosophical Anthropology to a New Business Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Philosophical Anthropology, Virtue Ethics, and Civilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

694 696 703 707 710 710 710

Abstract

Underpinning all our judgments about how to live and how to act is our conception of what we are as human beings. As discussed in “Creating an Effective Business Ethics,” entrenched assumptions about human nature deriving from the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke are embodied in business practices where neoliberal ideology is dominant. It has been reinforced and virtually placed beyond questioning, not only by the triumph of neoliberal managerialism, which identifies “good” with profitability in an unconstrained market, but by the fragmentation of philosophy itself, which, by accepting the separation of science and the humanities, excludes possibilities for challenging the assumptions on which neoliberal managerialism is based. This chapter continues the virtue ethics project by focusing on philosophical anthropology as the discipline that investigates questions such as “What are humans?” “What are their potentialities?” “Which potentialities should be realized?” and “How should we make these potentialities prevail?” It is argued here that philosophical anthropology, inspired by the quest for self-knowledge as central to developing the virtue of wisdom, challenges the Hobbesian/Lockean tradition and can replace it, with A. Gare (*) Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_6

693

694

A. Gare

better results for a more ethical society and more ethical business. Reacting against this tradition, leading philosophical anthropologists have argued that humans are essentially cultural beings, creating themselves and their institutions, their relations to others, to society, and to nature, through the concepts they develop, embrace, and assume in their actions. These concepts can be questioned and modified or replaced, in search for wisdom and for living wisely. Superior concepts are those that do more justice to the potentialities of humans and other life forms, and that can more successfully orient people to create the future. It is through philosophical anthropology that traditional virtues can be revived and effectively defended: Our challenge is not only to develop better concepts to orient ourselves but to show how these concepts can be acted upon and thus incorporated into social reality (and ultimately, physical reality). The implications of philosophical anthropology for business ethics are discussed in this context. Keywords

Philosophical anthropology · Business ethics · Virtues · Wisdom · Hobbes · Hegel · Institutionalist economics

Introduction: Recovering Ethics Through Philosophical Anthropology In “Creating an Effective Business Ethics: Is Virtue Ethics up to the Challenge?”, Robert Solomon’s project to found business ethics on the cultivation of virtues is evaluated in the context of society’s assumptions about business practices throughout history, the role of business ethics in modernity, the destructive effects of contemporary global business practices, and theories of action espoused in symbolic interactionism and in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. This chapter continues the argument by contending that developing a viable and effective business ethics, in theory and practice, for today’s world and for the future, cannot be a matter of simply adding to current philosophies of ethics or just returning to pre-modern traditions of thought. To replace the Hobbesian assumption of egoism, which now threatens the future of not only the economy but civilization and the current regime of the global ecosystem, it is necessary to question and then change the way we understand ourselves and our place in society, history, and nature. To this end, this chapter goes beyond the previous chapter’s proposal to found business practices on Solomon’s conception of business professionalism and virtue ethics. It proposes a wider project, in which Solomon’s project can be embedded with better results. This wider project is to found ethics itself in a conception of culture, using philosophical anthropology. The single most significant problem with MacIntyre’s and Solomon’s efforts to revive virtue ethics is that, by working within current disciplinary structures, they did not have the conditions to uphold the virtue which should be at the core of philosophy, the virtue of wisdom. The quest for wisdom always begins with the quest to know and understand oneself, one’s abilities, and limitations. However, this is inseparable from the quest to understand others and one’s relation to them; to

37

Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics

695

understand one’s communities, culture, institutions, and their history; to understand the history of civilizations; and, beyond that, to understand what humans are and the place of humanity within nature. From Plato onwards, wisdom is most often associated with the struggle to overcome partial, one-sided perspectives (Lamprecht 1946) and to appreciate the diverse roles played by different organizations, people, and other life forms in the flourishing, or otherwise, of life. It requires the development of not only a coherent worldview but a world-orientation for action, including an appreciation of what is valuable in society, life and the world; of the conditions for maintaining and augmenting ends that are worth striving for. That is, wisdom involves appreciating, on the basis of such a world-orientation, what are the highest values and what are, or should be, the ultimate ends of life. Wisdom also requires the ability to act and live wisely according to this world-orientation, formulating and achieving goals in pursuit of worthwhile ends, and gaining and maintaining the conditions for achieving such ends. This quest for wisdom, celebrated by Plato and central to Ancient Greek culture, as well as to other cultures such as the Chinese and the Indian, has been denied a proper place within the Hobbesian tradition of thought. As discussed in “Creating an Effective Business Ethics,” Hobbes’ conception of human nature assumed people as only driven by appetites and aversions (Hobbes 1985, p. 110), identified knowledge with means to control the world and eliminated any place for questioning this conception of humans and for thinking about what are the ultimate ends we should pursue. Pleasure and pain were treated as raw givens driving people, not something that could be questioned and replaced by better ends. In our current world, this Hobbesian view has been entrenched through the promotion of techno-science as the only true knowledge, and through the identification of reason with instrumental reasoning. Techno-science includes mainstream neoclassical economics, reductionist forms of psychology, and positivist sociology. It denies cognitive validity to forms of knowledge that aim at deeper, more complex self-understanding – forms of knowledge aspired to by the arts, the humanities and philosophy. Thus, the most important task for carrying through Solomon’s project of reviving virtue ethics is reviving the quest for wisdom, including the quest to identify the highest values and to work out what should be our ultimate ends. Above all, this requires of people that they reflect upon themselves and their beliefs, question their own as well as the prevailing conceptions of humans, examine the potentialities and limitations of these conceptions, and explore assumptions about which potentialities should be realized. In other words, it is necessary to give a central place to philosophical anthropology. Philosophical anthropology can serve as a reference point for defining and understanding reality; ourselves as individuals; and also institutions, communities, societies, civilizations, and the place of humanity within nature. Developing and defending a particular conception of humans involves engaging with cosmologies and characterizing science, its goals, and the relationship between scientific knowledge and our conception of humans. Questioning the identification of science with technoscience, some philosophical anthropologists have redefined the prime goal of science as part of the quest for wisdom, as understanding the world, of which technoscience is only a component. As such,

696

A. Gare

philosophical anthropology aims to provide the basis for deciding what future humanity should be striving to create. As Quentin Skinner showed, Hobbes himself and his epigones were mainly concerned to characterize the nature of humans in a way that opposed and replaced Aristotle’s conception. Aristotle characterized humans as zoon politikon, political animals – animals having higher potentialities than other animals, potentialities that can only be developed within society through education, and a telos or final cause to develop these higher potentialities in themselves and others. Realization of these higher potentialities makes humans zoon logikon, rational animals, able to speak, criticize, tell right from wrong and deliberate in public life in pursuit of the common good, and to engage in philosophical inquiry in the pursuit of comprehensive knowledge of the cosmos and the place of humans within it. Only by realizing these higher potentials, Aristotle argued in his Nicomachean Ethics, do humans achieve eudaimonia, a fulfilling and fulfilled life. The Hobbesian view, denying these higher potentialities and ends and reducing language, reason and knowledge to instruments serving appetites and aversions, was imposed dogmatically, along with the mechanistic metaphors on which it was based, leaving no place for it to be questioned (Skinner 2008). Reviving philosophical anthropology requires first and foremost rejecting Hobbes’ conception of reason and knowledge, and hence also rejecting the mechanistic conception of humans and nature underpinning it. Alternatives need to be articulated, simply in order to legitimate and provide a space for individuals to reflect upon themselves and the culture which has formed them, to reorient themselves in their current social and natural worlds, to engage with others and the world, and then to reflect on this engagement. Rather than taking their ends as just given by nature, human beings would thus be considered capable of at least some degree of free agency to question and revise their beliefs. Conceptions of humans should be recognized and appreciated by society and its members for their central role in informing the virtues required to practise business for a better world.

A Brief History of Philosophical Anthropology Philosophical anthropology was promoted as an area of study in Germany in the first three quarters of the twentieth Century, with Max Scheler, Ernst Cassirer, Helmuth Plessner, Arnold Gehlen, and Hans Blumenberg as its exponents. Scheler was particularly important for developing a theory of values as central to ethics and for defending what he claimed (echoing Plato) were higher values than satisfying appetites. In accordance with his conception of humans, these included life values such as courage, magnanimity and loyalty, and values of the intellect such as justice, beauty and truth. Important advances were made under this rubric elsewhere, for instance, by Mikhail Bakhtin in Russia, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur in France, by George Herbert Mead, Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, Joseph Margolis, and Lenny Moss in the USA, by Rom Harre in Britain, by Charles Taylor in Canada, and more recently, in Germany again, by Axel Honneth and Hans Joas. These philosophical anthropologists not only placed the question “What are

37

Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics

697

humans?” at the centre of discourse (Gare 2009, 2016a) but also argued that having conceptions of oneself is one of the most significant defining characteristics of humans. However, these conceptions can only be arrived at by going outside oneself, identifying oneself through the other – other people in one’s community, other cultures, other civilizations, other life-forms, other physical existents – and then finding oneself again. And this dynamic represents “a relationship which is difficult to grasp in logical terms” (Gehlen 1968, p. 15). Humans’ conceptions of themselves can be questioned and revised, and have been throughout history. Philosophical anthropology as developed in the early to mid twentieth Century, has facilitated a rethinking of the whole history of philosophy around efforts to answer this question and has rehabilitated the central place it had previously held, for example, in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Marx. In particular, philosophical anthropology has highlighted the significance and influence of Hobbes’ largely successful challenge to earlier thinkers’ conception of humans, and the corrosive effect of this influence on what were previously regarded as higher values. It has then recovered and built on pre-Hobbesian philosophy in order to establish a different conception of humans. The Hobbesian tradition of thought was rejected most forcefully in Germany, first by A. G. Baumgarten and then by Immanuel Kant, J. G. Herder, G.W.F. Hegel, and Friedrich Schelling. In his lectures originally published in 1800 as Introduction to Logic, Kant argued that the question “What is Man?” is the fundamental question of philosophy and the key to answering the questions “What can I know?” “How should I act?” and “What can I hope for?” (Kant 2005, p. 17). In arguing this, Kant was reviving the Socratic injunction to know oneself and, tacitly, along with it, the evaluative claim that the unexamined life is not worth living. Kant’s argument was embraced by his student Herder (1744–1801), whose core ideas have since been central to the tradition of philosophical anthropology, and thereby to the humanities and to humanistic social sciences opposed to the mechanistic conception of humans (Zammito 2002). Herder, arguing that we are essentially social beings, developed the concept of culture in its modern sense, i.e., as human self-creation in the context of cultivating things. Herder is also the first to have used the term “culture” in the plural. He argued that cultures have a history, and accepted that there could be different cultures. He focused on our embodiment in the world, but with an upright posture and language, which he took to be the core of any culture, and gave a place to our capacity to reflect and to transcend our immediate situations. With regard to reflection, he emphasized the importance of self-understanding in the self-realization of both cultures and individuals, and defined self-realization as what people live for, whether they are aware of it or not. He also gave a central place to emotions in all their complexity. In other words, in developing the notion of culture as the defining feature of humanity, Herder gave a place, in the study of cultures, to people reflecting on, criticizing and developing their cultures, including their conceptions of themselves, as part of their own self-realization. Drawing upon the insights of great philosophers of the past, including Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, Herder and von Humboldt, Hegel (1770–1831) developed this concept of culture (characterized as “Spirit”) in his early lectures, to explain how we are able to experience ourselves as subjects among other subjects able to use the

698

A. Gare

word “I” (Gare 2009). The use of the term “Spirit,” rather than “culture,” highlights the importance of inspiration, along with the emotions associated with being inspired. Spirit consists of three interdependent but irreducible dialectical patterns: the dialectic of labor, which operates through the “tool” and other produced instruments (cars, roads, houses, etc.); the dialectic of recognition, which operates through moral relations; and the dialectic of representation, which operates primarily through language. Tools, moral relations, and language have a universal side, transcending individual subjects, and it is through participating in these dialectics that subjects overcome their embeddedness in the surrounding worlds and participate in this universality, gaining identities as persons among other persons. That is, in using tools, in recognizing role relations between people and the rights and obligations these bestow, and in using language, individuals are not merely subjects satisfying appetites but social beings formed to some extent by their culture and involved in socially defined projects to control the world, to accord and be accorded recognition, and to more adequately represent the world. It is by virtue of their involvement in these quests that individual human beings become persons. Each of these three “dialectics” (namely, labor, recognition, and representation) was conceived by Hegel to be a component of the other two, while not being reducible to either of them. For instance, the struggle for recognition (that is, Annekenung, implying respectful acknowledgement), which can only be properly achieved when it is mutual, engenders the quest for justice, the full recognition of the significance of people. This is not reducible to but is inseparable from the quest for truth and wisdom (as comprehensive understanding of our world, its history and our place within it, including the significance of people) engendered by the dialectic of representation. People are engaged in a struggle for recognition in some way or other, whether they acknowledge this or not, but it is only through the dialectic of representation that people develop a conception of humans as necessarily engaged in this struggle, and come to fully appreciate that, for the struggle to be successful, there has to be mutual recognition. It is by virtue of these “dialectics” that humans have the capacity, and experience the imperative, to form institutions (defined by Hegel as Objective Spirit) and commit themselves to causes and long-term projects that can transcend generations. Individuals develop and gain meaning, realize their potential, and achieve fulfillment in their lives by participating in or engaging with such institutions and the dialectical processes they serve, augmenting their cultures and thereby the life of their communities. The whole of history was then characterized by Hegel as the process by which, via these dialectics, humanity (or Spirit) creates itself through the institutions that recognize the significance of people and (through religion, art and philosophy) achieves full self-understanding (i.e., Hegel’s Absolute Spirit) (Gare 2016b, p. 167 ff.). Initially aligned with Hegel, Schelling (1775–1854) privileged natural philosophy over idealism and defended an anti-mechanistic form of naturalism, arguing that humans conceived on this basis have to be seen as having evolved from and within the natural world that preceded their existence (Gare 2011). The capacity of humans for transcendence makes people feel that they are separate from nature –

37

Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics

699

but this is an illusion. Transcendence should be seen as an evolutionary product of nature, which, through humanity, is achieving new levels of self-consciousness. To explain the possibility of this, Schelling argued that the mechanistic worldview must be wrong and, instead, characterized nature as self-organizing activity or “productivity/products,” where higher levels of organization are achieved by limiting or constraining this activity. The important limitations are facilitative, or enabling: for Schelling, living beings are those processes that actively maintain their form, defining their environments with which they must continually engage as their worlds. Appreciating the distinctive nature of these worlds is the basis for understanding the specific nature of humans and of their worlds, as distinct from the worlds of other organisms and is associated with the development of culture. Schelling also conferred a more prominent role to individual freedom than Hegel. He argued that humans, by virtue of their origins, have brutal proclivities; however, people can choose to sublimate these and to strive to realize higher potentials. Schelling thereby upheld even more strongly than Herder or Hegel the idea that the quest for self-understanding is crucial for humans to achieve these higher potentials and to avoid being dominated by brutal proclivities. Knowing oneself, defining who one is in relation to others and to one’s communities and its institutions, defining what are humans and what is their place in the cosmos, and living accordingly, while being aware of the capacity of humanity for destruction as well as creation – all this is central to wisdom, and therefore such knowledge should permeate people’s lives. The application of such knowledge in human life represents the central injunction of Schelling’s philosophy. Schelling’s naturalism, by which he defended his conception of humans, inspired the modern tradition of process metaphysics and subsequent revolutions within science influenced by this metaphysics: Michael Faraday, James Clark Maxwell, C.S. Peirce, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and their followers have all been directly or indirectly inspired by Schelling (Gare 2011). The most recent developments of the conception of humans and their place in nature defended through process metaphysics have been associated with the privileging of ecology and human ecology over physics and economics in the sciences (Ulanowicz 1997; Gare 2016b, p. 199 ff.) and developing biosemiotics and ecosemiotics to bridge the gap between the sciences and the humanities. Each ecosystem exists by augmenting the conditions for the flourishing of its component ecosystems as well as broader ecosystems, insofar as these component and broader ecosystems are reciprocally augmenting the conditions for life of the particular ecosystem. Ecosystems that fail to do this effectively eliminate themselves. The evolution of terrestrial life is associated with increasingly complex ecosystems with multiple levels of symbiotic organization, transforming energy while constraining such transformations. As facilitative constraints, these transformations make possible hierarchical orders of great complexity, including anticipatory systems that respond to anticipated future conditions. Constraining activity based on anticipation is a semiotic process, that is, producing and responding to signs, and such semiosis is the condition for organisms to define their environments as their worlds and for ecosystems to develop complex forms of symbiosis and forms of synergy.

700

A. Gare

Semiosis has been investigated most thoroughly by the Schellingian philosopher C. S. Peirce, and by the biosemioticians and ecosemioticians he influenced. Semiosis, as theorized by Peirce, facilitates increasingly complex forms of constraint and thereby more complex forms of semiosis (Salthe 2005). Signs facilitate the regulation of energy transformations in order to create and maintain short-term energy gradients that can then be triggered by higher-order forms of semiosis. Organisms can be conceived as highly integrated ecosystems responding to signs in their environments, which are then experienced as their worlds. In these worlds, they can anticipate the future to some extent, and respond accordingly. Through constrained interactions mediated by signs, which thereby constrain what actions and interactions take place, organisms transform and store in various organs (most importantly, in muscles) usable energy that can be quickly transformed into other energetic processes or forms. A sound taken to be a sign of a predator, although itself involving a minuscule amount of energy, can then trigger a cascade of energy transformations regulated by various codes within the organism, with the final transformation being a leap into action to flee the predator. Or a flower can be a sign produced by a plant to constrain bees to collect the nectar it offers, thereby disseminating pollen to other flowers. Pollen itself is a complex of signs that can constrain the growth of new plants growing from germinated seeds that will then produce new flowers as new signs. Such signs contribute to the global semiosphere (Hoffmeyer 1996). Human communities, societies, and civilizations are also hierarchical organized ecosystems in which, through more complex forms of semiosis involving communication and reflexivity, or second order semiosis, common worlds are produced. In these common worlds, the future can be more fully anticipated and responded to collectively. These worlds can be transformed through such responses, facilitating more effective anticipation and action in response to more developed signs within them. The sign systems associated with such common worlds, which have to be learnt by each new generation, are the cultures of these communities, societies and civilizations. As Cliff Hooker argued, “[c]ultures are experiments – simultaneous experiments in survival strategies and in what it is to be human” (Hooker 1982, p. 19). As complex forms of semiosis, cultures both presuppose and are built upon more basic, pre-human forms of semiosis. Cultures so conceived, in all their dimensions, make institutions and reflexive self-consciousness possible, and create new possibilities for anticipation and action. In doing so, they have engendered the three dialectical patterns of labor, recognition, and representation, and the forms these take. The concept of culture where humans are conceived as part of nature was developed by George Herbert Mead. Influenced by Hegel, Schelling, and Peirce, Mead also belongs to the tradition of process metaphysics. He has also been identified as a major contributor to philosophical anthropology (see Mead 1934; Honneth and Joas 1988, p. 59 ff.), with a particular focus on the dialectics of representation and recognition. His philosophy can be interpreted and defended as such through Peircian semiotics (Gare 2009). Mead’s philosophy underpinned the work of the symbolic interactionist sociologists. Symbolic interactionism was

37

Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics

701

eclipsed by the development of systems approaches in sociology, which were better able to deal with macro-social phenomena, but its basic assumptions about the nature of humans were very similar to those of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose concept of fields offered an alternative to the concept of systems and could be extended to deal with macro-levels of social dynamics. Integrating symbolic interactionism and Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology enables Bourdieu’s core concepts (most importantly, the concept of fields) to be interpreted naturalistically through semiotics (and, in particular, through ecosemiotics). From the perspective of ecosemiotics, the complex forms of semiosis associated with the development of culture are seen to have engendered economic, political, and cultural fields characterized by their own partially autonomous logics. These can be seen as human ecosystems providing niches or homes for people in their struggles for liberty (which must include security in satisfying the necessities of life), proper recognition and representation, and orientation to augment the life of these fields, by developing more advanced forms of semiosis. For instance, in modern societies, literature forms a cultural field. By virtue of this field, individuals are able to strive for and gain recognition, and make a living as writers, critics, teachers, publishers, book manufacturers, and so on. In doing so, they do more than produce works of literature as complexes of signs through which people have been able to better represent the world and themselves. They also reproduce and institutionalize these fields with some autonomy from the logic of the market associated with the economy, or from the logic of power associated with politics. Philosophy, history, and the sciences have also emerged as institutionalized cultural fields, and it is through all such fields that the quest for truth, justice, and wisdom has been facilitated. The development of collective wisdom in turn has helped sustain the fields and institutions required for the effective pursuit of causes associated with the dialectics of labor, recognition, and representation. In doing so, collective wisdom has contributed to the advance of civilization. Forms of interaction, identities, and projects have been stabilized, critiqued, and developed through these cultural fields and their institutions. New projects have also been facilitated, and sometimes this involved transforming established forms and identities. Until cultural fields gain some autonomy from political and economic fields, representations are treated as mere instruments in the quest for power or money. It is only as cultural fields gain some degree of autonomy that the higher ends of justice, truth and wisdom come to define the goals of the participants within these fields. Developments in humanity’s selfunderstanding are the outcome of the quest for truth and justice immanent to culture and to those inspired by it. Unfortunately, this autonomy is frequently subverted or corrupted. Individuals are inevitably involved in multiple fields; they must be able to define their situations in diverse contexts and relate these to each other as part of their own lives and of the lives of their communities. As suggested in “Creating an Effective Business Ethics,” such definitions are generated through people’s habituses, i.e., their habituated ways of perceiving and acting, as Bourdieu pointed out. But, furthermore, people have the capacity to reflect on their habituses and to consciously modify them.

702

A. Gare

Philosophical anthropology, together with the human sciences inspired by these post-Hobbesian conceptions of humans, supports the revival of institutionalist economics. As shown by Erik Reinert, this is really a revival of Renaissance economics (Reinert 2007a, b). As the institutionalist ecological economist Arild Vatn (2005) notes, institutionalist economics rejects the prevailing image of homo economicus, upholding instead a view of humans better captured by the term “homo reciprocans” (p. 123). Institutions are not always organizations – but they are some of the conditions for human organizations, and are components of them. Institutions form the infrastructure of projects, performing their functions well or badly. Douglass North, the father of New Institutional Economics, defines institutions as “the humanly-devised constraints that shape human interaction” (North 1990, p. 3). How do institutions achieve this? According to John R. Searle’s argument (published in 2005 as the very first article of the first edition of Journal of Institutional Economics), institutions exist when collective intentionality assigns functions that confer “objects” or persons a status. Such status can have one or more functions. The notion of “objects” here should be understood very broadly to include social forms. It is a feature of institutions that these forms can be made to serve multiple functions, including (for good or ill) new functions that are different from those for which the institutions were created (Chang 2007, p. 5). Such collective intentionality is also embodied as a habitus. It is the habitus of people, and not reflective decisionmaking, which continually reproduces these institutions and their functions (Bourdieu 2005, p. 10). As noted, institutions can be organizations of roles, such as business organizations. However, language, practices, customs, forms of politeness, money, laws, families and cultural fields (including science) should also be seen as interpenetrating, interdependent, and interlocking sets of institutions. All these are essential for the continued functioning of healthy economies. All of the above institutions have to be seen as human creations that have histories, can undergo change, and can acquire new functions. There is an implicit commitment to modifying these institutions in order to overcome problems, to facilitate the achievement of communities’ goals and, most importantly, to maintain the health of these communities and their members. However, institutions can be hijacked and subverted to serve particular interests against the common good. This is what was understood in the Ancient world as corruption. And this is the reason why, prior to Hobbes, pleonexia (i.e., extreme desire for material goods) was regarded as a major vice. According to Hooker, “institutions are the key to our future – and they are also our Achilles heel. If the human race fails to survive (or survives without even the minimal dignities it now shakily possesses), it will almost certainly be because our social intelligence (i.e., our ability to create appropriate institutions to manage our collective abilities) is outrun by our mechanical intelligence (i.e., our ability to create ‘hard’ science and technology)” (Hooker 1982, p. 23). For institutionalist economists, economic institutions are existentially conditioned. They are only possible through (and need to be constrained by) political, legal, and cultural institutions. From this perspective, the market is, as Ha-Joon Chang puts it, “an exceptionally effective mechanism for coordinating complex economic activities across numerous economic agents, but it is no more than that

37

Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics

703

– a mechanism.” As such, it “needs careful regulation and steering” (Chang 2011, p. 253). Hence, political and cultural institutions need to be outside the market, governed by different criteria than profitability: the infiltration of these institutions by the profit motive is their major form of corruption. When institutionalist economists acknowledge that humans are components of ecosystems, as do institutionalist ecological economists, there is a commitment to developing institutions in order to limit or constrain economic activities so they not only uphold quests for human empowerment, liberty, truth, and justice but also constrain human activities to augment the health of the broader ecosystems, including the global ecosystem, in which humans must be seen as participants.

From Philosophical Anthropology to a New Business Ethics The conception of humans advanced through philosophical anthropology described here arises out of the revived injunction to know oneself. It also requires commitment to defining social reality through a conception of humans as developed through this quest to know oneself. Furthermore, it resurrects ethics that is considered in relation to philosophical anthropology as a foundational discourse central to all culture, including science. Philosophical anthropology associated with the quest to know oneself and to live accordingly should be central not only to the self-realization of individuals but to the self-formation and transformation of institutions, including business organizations, and to the self-realization of communities and civilizations. Ethics conceived in this way makes far greater demands on people than even the revived Aristotelian virtue ethics of MacIntyre and Solomon. As previously noted, both MacIntyre and Solomon failed to characterize and acknowledge the virtue of wisdom, its quest, and its foundation in self-knowledge. Consequently, they did not allow room in their ethics for questioning, challenging, and, if necessary, replacing our understanding of what we are as human beings and of the place of humanity in nature – failing to recognize that this understanding, in effect, determines how people act and live. The core ethical imperative to know oneself requires insight into one’s unique individuality, including one’s emotions, sub- or pre-conscious motives and values, relationships with others, roles, and organizations. It also requires insight into the socio-historical circumstances of oneself and of these organizations, into the culture where such circumstances have been generated, into the history of this culture and its relations to other cultures. It means appreciating that, in striving for this selfunderstanding, one is participating in the quests for self-understanding, self-creation and self-realization that occur at the levels of one’s institutions, community, society, culture, and civilization. Ultimately, one is participating in the whole humanity’s quest for self-understanding and self-realization as a participant in nature’s evolution. In this context, individual self-knowledge involves appreciating and situating one’s own efforts to achieve this self-knowledge in the context of past achievements and ongoing quests by both those engaged in practical affairs and those engaged in philosophical, historical, and scientific inquiry to advance humanity’s

704

A. Gare

self-understanding. This kind of enquiry requires favorable conditions, such as autonomous cultural fields along with the conditions for their flourishing, and, most importantly, the sustained emotional commitment to supporting this autonomy. This emotional commitment, which needs to be fostered by cultural fields, has to be seen as central to the cultivation of virtues. As previously mentioned, this means rejecting Hobbes’ identification of science with knowledge of how to control the world, and appreciating that scientific materialism and the Hobbesian conception of humans and economic thought based on these are products of cultures that can and should be challenged. Although these cultures are still vigorously defended by dominant ideologies of our time, they have in fact been found logically incoherent and rendered obsolete by contemporary advances in the natural sciences. Recognizing that one is a participant in the creative advance of humanity and nature through developing one’s self-understanding is itself a radically creative act. Through the conception one develops of oneself, one’s institutions and communities, and one’s place in history and nature, one is effectively participating in the production of oneself and one’s relations to other people, to society, and to the rest of nature. To recognize this, and to take responsibility for it, is itself an advance in culture, civilization, and nature. This requires not only understanding and molding one’s emotional engagements but also critically understanding the institutions in which one is participating, their history, and their relationship to other institutions and to the communities of which they are a part. This critical understanding involves defending some developments of these institutions and opposing others, and even creating new forms of these (or other) institutions. It doing so, it is necessary to understand institutions in relation to how other individuals and communities are being affected by their activities, to the problems faced by the communities to which they belong, to the roles played by these institutions in generating the respective problems, and to what role institutions could play, if reformed, in overcoming these problems. In this context, a genuine business ethic committed to addressing the problems we now face should involve the injunction to strive for better self-understanding, not just as individuals or as members of firms or other organizations, but as participants in culture, society, and nature. This will require rejecting the whole Hobbesian tradition of thought and replacing it with the more defensible tradition of dialectical and speculative naturalism established through the ideas of Herder, Hegel, and Schelling and process metaphysics. Instead of people seeing themselves and others as complex machines, they will understand themselves as essentially cultural beings capable of self-reflection and (thereby) of taking responsibility for themselves and their institutions, organizations, communities and cultures. Business ethics should involve interpreting business activity through this different conception of humans, a conception which recognizes people’s quest to realize themselves by participating in the dialectical struggles of labor, recognition, and representation within a dynamic, creative nature. This means rejecting the Hobbesian image of homo economicus and interpreting the economy through institutional economics based on this different, naturalist conception of humans. The economy, in turn, will then need to be understood in its natural context, through human ecology, situating humanity as a participant within a dynamic nature rather than treating nature as merely a pool of resources.

37

Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics

705

To participate ethically in business and other economic organizations means to define these institutions, their practices, and their goals from the integrated perspective argued here. This involves major challenges. Often, there are conflicting definitions of these institutions and practices, and the most important power struggles occur around which definitions of reality are to prevail. Ethics requires that the most rationally defensible definitions of reality, based on the most defensible conception of humans, should prevail. These definitions should then be institutionalized so they are embodied as habituses. From the perspective of institutionalist economics, the core goal of business organizations is to produce goods and services and to avoid producing “ills” – that is, to avoid harming people, communities, societies, and nature. The whole economy should be organized through its institutions, to facilitate genuinely productive activity. However, business organizations do more than this. For example, they provide employment to people, and therefore should create conditions for augmenting employees’ creative powers and their identities, instead of undermining them. By granting recognition to employees for their work and by augmenting their identities, businesses should contribute to the enrichment of their employees’ lives. Businesses also interact with other institutions and with the rest of nature and should do so in a way that augments the health of society as a whole and the ecosystems of which they are a part. A good market is a set of institutions facilitating healthy business activity in this sense, allowing actors to utilize market signals to guide their decisions. To remain viable in the marketplace, it is indeed necessary for business organizations to be profitable but this is only a means and not the end. The end should be guided by a naturalist, collective and reciprocal conception of humans as discussed above. Far from impossible, this approach is illustrated by many highly successful Japanese companies in the second half of the twentieth Century. Uninfluenced by Hobbes and his epigones, Matsushita ran his company, Panasonic, in order “to recognize our responsibilities as industrialists, to foster progress, to promote the general welfare of society, and to devote ourselves to the further development of world culture” (Pascale and Athos 1982, p. 51). Work was meant to be spiritually fulfilling, and management were expected to “serve as trainers and developers of character, not just as exploiters of human resources” (p. 50). Employees were encouraged to see that “progress and development can be realized only through the combined efforts and cooperation of each member of our Company” (p. 51). This involved significant decentralization of decision-making, with very few head-office staff. There was less difference in salaries between different levels of staff and, in crises, instead of workers losing their jobs, managers had their incomes reduced. In accordance with this way of conceiving the company, profits were seen as “a vote of confidence from society that what is offered by the firm is valued” (p. 49). All this contrasts dramatically with the new management philosophies that have been implemented from the 1980s onwards through an individualistic and managerialist liberalism, based on the assumption that egoism is the only motive driving humans. Japanese management, as described by Pascale and Athos (1982), assumes the conception of humans defended by the tradition of philosophical anthropology from Herder and Hegel to Mead, Honneth and Joas. Managers assume the possibility of loyalty and commitment by employees and seek to foster these while, in return,

706

A. Gare

constraining their own egoism and increasing their responsibility towards employees. While managers are expected to be granted respect, they are also expected to act in recognition that employees require economic security, support, and development of their potential. A relatively egalitarian distribution of income in the company reinforces this mutual respect. Consequently, there is a great deal of trust so that decision-making can be decentralized, allowing initiatives to be taken by workers without constant monitoring by management. Dibben (2000) shows that this level of trust is in fact essential to effective management. A company’s structure, as well as the relations between its members and external stakeholders, incorporates a conception of humans that is fundamentally social. This social conception requires and responds to respect, and pursues objectives that are ultimately related to the development of people’s character and the full realization of their potential to contribute to society. Managers operate not by turning people into predictable instruments of their narrowly defined goals but through indirect action, cultivating the best conditions for people to flourish as people and do their best work (Chia and Holt 2009). Incorporating the insights of philosophical anthropology into businesses also requires redefining their relation to other institutions, communities, and the rest of nature; and, in the process, redefining these other institutions and communities as well. The Hobbesian tradition enjoins individuals and organizations to strive to dominate, defeat, and exploit rivals, equating success in doing so with superiority and progress. With its focus on individuals and the conflicts between them, this tradition barely acknowledges the reality of institutions, at least in theory. In practice, followers of Hobbesian ethics strive to modify non-market institutions in order to neutralize their independence and make them serve the quest for expanding private profits. The tradition of philosophical anthropology, by contrast, leads to a focus on institutions as fundamental to social reality and required to constrain markets. This was manifest in the work of the twentieth Century philosophical anthropologists: institutions were given a central place by Gehlen, and then by Berger and Luckmann (1966). “Institutionalization occurs,” Berger and Luckmann wrote, “whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors” (p. 72). They argued that such institutionalization is the foundation on which complex social forms are built. This concurs with the philosophy of Hegel and his followers, who characterized the realm of institutions as Objective Spirit and gave a place to markets while also showing how these markets should be limited by (and subordinated to) the family, trade unions, professional bodies (which he referred to collectively as “corporations”), and those institutions of government committed to the common good. From this perspective, businesses, money, and markets are one set of institutions among many others required for productive economic activity. It should be immediately obvious that these economic institutions require legal institutions of some form, and legal institutions require political institutions. And it should also be obvious that all these institutions require cultural institutions, including educational institutions, in order to reproduce, regulate, and reform themselves. Economic institutions can take different forms; these forms should be questioned, and possibly modified, to serve broader social causes and projects. Therefore, a business ethic based on philosophical

37

Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics

707

anthropology and extolling the virtue of wisdom must consider what are these causes and projects, and how they are being furthered or undermined by current institutional forms and business activity. In turn, these causes and projects should be evaluated according to whether they are advancing the ultimate ends of humans as defined through philosophical anthropology: liberty in both work and politics, full mutual recognition and justice, and comprehensive understanding and orientation to live, each pursued in such a way that they augment each other, the communities to which they belong, and life generally. Most importantly, an order needs to be created such that economic activity augments rather than undermines the ecological systems of which humans are a part. People who do advance these ends, after such reflection, should incorporate this conception of humans in themselves and in their orientation to the world as a habitus. If successful, this conception should be embedded in institutions, more precisely in the forms these take and the functions they serve. In other words, the actors playing roles in, or in relation to, these institutions are defining reality so that the philosophical-anthropological conception of humans is assumed in the definition of each particular situation and action, and thereby determines how these situations and actions are evaluated. The institutional forms developed in Western Europe and the USA after World War II were designed to prevent a repetition of the depressions and wars of the previous era. Neoliberals set out to subvert or destroy these preventive institutions (Plehwe et al. 2006). Keynesian and institutionalist economists confronting the consequences of this regression are struggling to resuscitate these institutions in order to avoid another global financial collapse, and possibly another Great Depression. Central to this struggle is the quest to revive the autonomy of political and cultural fields from control by business enterprises. Institutionalist ecological economists, aligned with Keynesian, neo-Marxist, and institutionalist economists, are striving to find or develop institutions that can constrain economic activity so businesses that augment the health of ecosystems can prosper while those that damage these ecosystems are rendered unprofitable. As these economists have shown, there are alternatives to neoliberal policies that produce superior results for countries in virtually every respect (Chang 2004; Pettifor 2017). It is an ethical imperative of those engaged in business to be aware of this: corporate managers will play a crucial role in determining whether or not such alternatives are implemented, and whether or not the required institutions are developed and made to function properly.

Philosophical Anthropology, Virtue Ethics, and Civilization How do the arguments for a business ethics based on philosophical anthropology relate to efforts by MacIntyre (2007) and Solomon (1993, 1994) to revive virtue ethics and to Solomon’s efforts to apply virtue ethics to business? Ethics associated with philosophical anthropology is not only consistent with virtue ethics but in fact requires an ethics of virtues. But to achieve this, the most important problem for virtue ethics to solve is how to foster and habitualize the quest for selfunderstanding. The quest for self-understanding as a human being and as a particular

708

A. Gare

individual engaged in diverse contexts provides a broader framework for thinking about what is ethics and what is ethical activity. Philosophical anthropology is central to the quest for this self-understanding, which in turn is central to the quest for wisdom. Wisdom should be seen as the core virtue to be cultivated and then acted upon. This is required in order to overcome flawed assumptions about humans and their place in nature, to make virtue ethics a real challenge to the way businesses are currently managed, and to transform the way businesses operate. In defining virtues, MacIntyre focused on how they “enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices” (2007, p. 109). However, because MacIntyre did not situate these practices in relation to institutions and broader communities, the full implications of this characterization for institutions and communities were not spelt out. Virtues are necessary to sustain not only practices but also mutually supporting institutions, which in turn constitute the infrastructure of the causes and projects of individuals, communities, and communities of communities. Virtues should not only facilitate the achievement of goods that are internal to specific practices but also sustain and augment the health of institutions, organizations, and communities served by these practices. These communities can include nations, civilizations, the whole of humanity, and ecosystems of which humanity is a part, including the current regime of the global ecosystem, which has been so conducive to the flourishing of human life but is now threatened by modern civilization. Acquisition of virtues, as Aristotle argued, requires habituation. Thinking in terms of these broader contexts should become habituated in everything people do. This should include interrogating the adequacy of current institutions and questioning current beliefs in relation to these broader contexts. Along with taking responsibility for one’s institutions and beliefs, thinking in terms of broader contexts so as to value the flourishing of the diverse institutions of society, and to promote the healthy functioning of communities is central to wisdom and needs to become habituated and cultivated. Further virtues are required to act successfully on the basis of such beliefs, and it is here that the importance of virtues other than wisdom becomes most apparent. Forming and validating such beliefs is not merely an intellectual exercise. In aligning oneself with the conception of humans developed through neo-Hegelian philosophical anthropology, in defining situations accordingly and then acting on the basis of such definitions of reality, one is emotionally committed to and attempting to prove the truth, the this-worldliness, of such definitions of reality, incorporating the neo-Hegelian conception of humans into reality. This is most likely to involve conflict and power struggles against those in positions of power who assume the Hobbesian way of thinking. And it may require other traditional virtues, such as courage and integrity. It can also require great ingenuity, perseverance, and resilience, and the development of qualities of excellence that are capable of inspiring others to act. Such qualities, as Solomon pointed out, are about going beyond duty; they are the virtues celebrated by Nietzsche in association with charisma (Solomon 1993, p. 247 f.). Through the recovery and reformulation of the very meaning of ethics, the turn to philosophical anthropology provides the basis for challenging the advance of neoliberalism as a subversion of democracy and, further, of civilization itself. While proponents of virtue ethics in its present form seem to not have been very successful in

37

Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics

709

advancing the virtues they have defended, they have nevertheless alerted us to the virtues that are disappearing. To summarize the argument driving this chapter, unlike the Hobbesian tradition of thought, philosophical anthropology gives a central place to the quest for self-understanding. While this begins with efforts to understand oneself as an individual, and then in relation to others and to one’s institutions, communities, and one’s culture and era, it then leads to engagement with other cultures and other eras. It leads to the quest for truth as a comprehensive understanding of the cosmos and the place of humanity and oneself within it, not only as a theoretical achievement, but as the basis for living and acting. To be fully developed, this self-understanding cannot be merely contemplative. It must be incorporated into how people define their situations and institutions, formulate their goals, live, and, in doing so, realize themselves, their communities, and their institutions. This is wisdom. The quest for self-knowledge or self-understanding, defined in this way, was seen as the essence of education by Wilhelm von Humboldt, the founder of the University of Berlin in 1810. In a section of “Man as Being Who can be Educated” entitled “Selfknowledge is the aim of education,” he wrote: “In order for an individual to extend and individuate his character (and this is what all character building comes down to), he must first know himself, in the fullest sense of the word. And because of his intimate contact with all his environment, not only know himself but also his fellow citizens, his situation, his era. In this wondrous way, now, does the whole business of education simplify itself, even if taken in its widest extent” (Humboldt 1963, p. 126). All people should value and strive to develop self-knowledge and aid others on this path to wisdom, which is central to being civilized. As an early professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin, Hegel equated this advance of self-knowledge, and the institutions that make it possible, with the advance of civilization. As a necessary condition for appreciating all other virtues, for understanding their relationship to each other and for upholding them in practice in their proper context, wisdom in this sense is even more fundamental than the virtue of justice. It is only with wisdom that what is just can be properly understood and justice can be made to prevail. Philosophical anthropology, by bringing into focus the quest for wisdom as self-knowledge and the value of this quest, enables people who are striving to uphold the traditional virtues to pinpoint the root of cultural and institutional decay, to alert us to its significance, and to affirm and defend higher values. Hopefully, this will inspire those who take on the challenge to maintain the autonomy of cultural fields and redefine the direction of institutions. To ensure that social institutions control markets so that they serve the common good, it is essential that those engaged in business understand the place of the economy, business activity, and these institutions in society – and also understand the significance of their own actions, as business decision makers, for these institutions and for society. As David Korten put it, “Money and a modest profit are means, not ends. Institutions, including financial service institutions, are properly valued for their contribution to the health and vitality of the communities they serve” (Korten 2015, p. 117). It is not enough for business managers to strive for virtue just within their organizations. Business managers have to be committed to effectively supporting institutions that ensure the economy functions for the benefit of

710

A. Gare

humanity and life. This is required in order to enable those business managers who are virtuous, in Solomon’s sense, and those business organizations that produce real wealth and advance the common good, to prevail over those that do not. To achieve this, business managers have to be engaged in the quest for wisdom as the selfunderstanding of individuals, institutions, communities, and humanity. The ongoing quest for a more adequate conception of humans and for the incorporation of this conception in institutions is essential to the advance of civilization, against the decadence of those who are undermining it (Bourdieu 1998, 2003).

Conclusion How we live and act is largely determined by our conceptions of what we are as humans. This is true whether we tacitly accept such conceptions embedded in our culture, or we explicitly embrace them. The Hobbesian conception of humans that dominates business culture today is so narrowly focused on identifying knowledge with means to predict and control that it leaves no place for reflecting on our humanity and challenging our assumptions about it. This conception has undermined traditional virtue ethics without providing a viable replacement. Furthermore, attempts to theorize and practice virtue ethics in this context have had very limited effects. For the proper cultivation of virtues in business, as in other domains of social life, we need to uphold the virtue of wisdom and, most importantly, the quest for self-understanding. Philosophical anthropology, concerned with defining what human are, is central to this quest for wisdom and selfunderstanding. It provides the space for questioning and replacing the currently dominant conception of humans, and the foundations for a new form of business ethics. The business ethics we are looking for is one that can change the way people live and act, so that we can effectively counter corrupt business practices that now threaten the health of economies, communities, societies, and the broader ecosystems.

Cross-References ▶ Creating an Effective Business Ethics

References Berger PL, Luckmann T (1966) The social construction of reality. Penguin, Harmondsworth Bourdieu P (1998) Acts of resistance: against the tyranny of the market (trans: Nice R). New Press, New York Bourdieu P (2003) Firing back: against the tyranny of the market 2 (trans: Wacquant L). Verso, London Bourdieu P (2005) The social structures of the economy (trans: Turner C). Polity Press, Cambridge Chang H-J (2004) Reclaiming development: an alternative economic policy manual. Zed Books, London Chang H-J (2007) Institutional change and economic development: an introduction, Chapter 1. In: Chang H-J (ed) Institutional change and economic development. Anthem Press, London

37

Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics

711

Chang H-J (2011) 23 things they don’t tell you about capitalism. Penguin, Harmondsworth Chia RCH, Holt R (2009) Strategy without design: the silent efficacy of indirect action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Dibben MR (2000) Exploring interpersonal trust in the entrepreneurial venture. Macmillan, Houndsmills Gare A (2009) Philosophical anthropology, ethics and political philosophy in an age of impending catastrophe. Cosmos Hist 5(2):264–286 Gare A (2011) From Kant to Schelling to process metaphysics: on the way to ecological civilization. Cosmos Hist 7(2):26–69 Gare A (2016a) The centrality of philosophical anthropology to (a future) environmental ethics (or La centralidad de la antropología filosófica para una (futura) ética ambiental’). Cuademos de Bioética (special edition on ‘The Future of Environmental Ethics’), Número 91, Revista cuatrimestral de investigación, XXVII, septiembre-diciembre, 299–317 Gare A (2016b) The philosophical foundation of ecological civilization: a manifesto for the future. Routledge, London Gehlen A (1968) An anthropological model. Hum Context 1(1):11–22 Hobbes T (1651/1985) Leviathan. Penguin, Harmondsworth Hoffmeyer J (1996) Signs of meaning in the universe (trans: Haveland BJ). Indiana University Press, Bloomington Honneth A, Joas H (1988) Social action and human nature. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Hooker CA (1982) Scientific neutrality versus normative learning: the theoretician’s and politician’s dilemma. In: Oldroyd D (ed) Science and ethics. New South Wales University Press, Kensington, pp 8–33 Kant I [ ] [1800] (2005) Introduction to logic (trans: Abbott TK). Barnes & Noble, New York Korten DC (2015) Change the story, change the future: a living economy for a living Earth. BerrettKoehler, Oakland Lamprecht SP (1946) Metaphysics: its function, consequences, and criteria. J Philos XLIII(15):393–401 MacIntyre A (2007) After virtue, 3rd edn. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame Mead GH (1934) In: Morris CW (ed) Mind, self, & society. University of Chicago Press, Chicago North DC (1990) Institutions, institutional change and economic performance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Pascale RT, Athos AG (1982) The art of Japanese management. Penguin Books, London Pettifor A (2017) The production of money: how to break the power of bankers. Verso, London Plehwe D, Walpen B, Neunhöffer G (eds) (2006) Neoliberal hegemony: a global critique. Routledge, Milton Park Reinert ES (2007a) How rich countries got rich . . . and why poor countries stay poor. Carrol & Graf, New York Reinert ES (2007b) Institutionalism ancient, old, and new: a historical perspective on institutions and uneven development, Chapter 4. In: Chang H-J (ed) Institutional change and economic development. Anthem Press, London Salthe S (2005) The natural philosophy of ecology: developmental systems ecology. Ecol Complex 2:1–19 Skinner Q (2008) Hobbes and republican liberty. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Solomon RC (1993) Ethics and excellence: cooperation and integrity in business. Oxford University Press, New York Solomon RC (1994) Above the bottom line: an introduction to business ethics. Harcourt Brace, Fort Worth Ulanowicz RE (1997) Ecology: the ascendent perspective. Columbia University Press, New York Vatn A (2005) Institutions and the environment. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham von Humboldt W (1963) Humanist without portfolio (trans and ed: Cowan M). Wayne State University, Detroit Zammito JH (2002) Kant, herder, & the birth of anthropology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy and Its Relevance for Modern Management

38

Patricia H. Werhane and David J. Bevan

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sociality and Self-Interest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Impartial Spectator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Virtues, Moral Sentiments, and the Modern Notion of Emotional Intelligence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Liberty and Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Labor, the Labor Theory of Value, and Free Labor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Invisible Hand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

714 715 716 719 720 722 725 726 728 728

Abstract

In this chapter we reconsider Adam Smith’s works The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1766), for evidence of his Enlightenment contribution to responsible management in the twenty-first century. Far from being the poster boy of unregulated, neoclassical market economics as falsely idealized by Milton Friedman and others, we sample more fully and patiently to reveal the overlooked, complex interdependence of self-interest and social justice that plainly results. We suggest that a more humanistic, just, and social economy

The authors gratefully acknowledge the opportunity to elaborate earlier ideas including Werhane (1989a, 1989b) and Bevan and Werhane (2015). P. H. Werhane (*) Darden Business School, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] D. J. Bevan St Martin’s Institute of Higher Education, Hamrun, Malta e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_26

713

714

P. H. Werhane and D. J. Bevan

could be developed from the themes sympathetically developed in these two complementary works. Keywords

Adam Smith · Invisible hand · Self-interest · Impartial spectator · Labor · Rights · Enlightenment values

Introduction Philosophical ideas from any era contribute to tracing the roots of contemporary ideas. Such a comparative or genealogical approach can further assist in debunking the stereotypes and mistaken axioms that may arise from misreading(s) and in developing new mental models appropriate to contemporary challenges. In this chapter we shall analyze five specific contributions from the Enlightenment philosopher and political economist Adam Smith, whose thinking contributes positively to some of the systemic problems of the twenty-first century. Smith has been regularly characterized as a key player, even the poster boy (Jackson 2003/2005), in the origins of the mature, post-industrialized, global market capitalism of today. Rereading Smith one rediscovers five themes that are, and remain, of particular importance for contemporary thinking. These themes recursively emerge from and advance Enlightenment and humanistic values. They suggest a reframing of the aims of commerce, through the Enlightenment principles of justice; the idea of the impartial spectator as the key in the development of organizational change; rethinking labor as free and independent from productivity; and reconsidering the metaphor of the invisible hand. Reimagining Smith through the framework that such themes inscribe suggests a reinterpretation of Smith’s alleged neoclassical and individualist economics as something quite different from, and more relevant to, twenty-first century organizational research and value creation. Smith (1723–1790) wrote only two substantive books, The Theory of Moral Sentiments [TMS] (1759; 1790) and The Wealth of Nations [WN] (1776). (Student lecture notes, taken from Smith’s lectures at the University of Glasgow, have also been gathered and published, without Smith’s explicit permission, under the title Lectures on Jurisprudence (1762–4, 1978).) Remarkably, he is one of the most quoted (and misinterpreted) political economists in the Western opus. Read in full, Smith is openly critical of some elements of contemporary capitalism – such as unregulated trade, monopolistic practices, and “me-first” greed – as they have evolved from his embryonic ideas about humanism and free enterprise. His critique is inextricable from any understanding of his development of a framework for functional commerce. Indeed, and on this basis, we assert, Smith would have been puzzled at why and how some forms of capitalism have evolved to so neglect human values and operate to disrespect the interests of many individuals.

38

Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy and Its Relevance for Modern Management

715

We shall briefly sample selected ideas from Smith and then concentrate on what we take to be the most important of these for the twenty-first century: the inescapable sociality of human existence; the role(s) of self-interest, sympathy, and the moral sentiments; principles of justice; the impartial spectator; Smith’s theory of labor; and the invisible hand. The first two of these ideas form the basis for much of Smith’s thinking: the “inexorable sociality” of human society that dominates Smith’s views and the often-unrecognized dualism of self-interest versus greed and of their roles in free markets. We consider these as a prelude to developing other themes.

Sociality and Self-Interest Although Smith has often been read as an eighteenth-century Enlightenment individualist, his alleged individualism repudiates any reading that takes him as a licence for me-first, or selfish, individualism. In the TMS he argues that: [i]t is thus that man, who can subsist only in society, was fitted by nature to that situation for which he is made. All the members of human society stand in need of each other’s assistance and are likewise exposed to mutual injuries. (TMS II.ii.3)

That theme of the inescapable interdependence of human beings on each other is a subplot for all of his thinking. For example, in the widely quoted passage about the butcher, brewer, and baker: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. (WN I.ii.2)

Here Smith is discussing the reciprocity of commercial behavior between people living in a community where the merchant is equally as dependent on customers as the customers are dependent on the quality of the bread, meat, and beer. There is a mutual and entirely interdependent set of self-interests embedded in these relationships. These reciprocal sets of community interrelationships belie any individualistic rational utility maximizer point of view as so often and wrongly attributed to Smith. Such relations contribute surely to what we should aspire to as a twenty-first-century post-rational utility maximizer perspective, where Enlightenment values of respecting others and their rights should be found in all commerce. In this context, how does one explain the assumption of the dominant role of selfinterest in markets and market economies (see, e.g., Stigler 1971)? (To quote Stigler (1971, 265), “The Wealth of Nations is a stupendous palace erected upon the granite of self-interest.”) The confusion stems from misidentifying self-interest merely with those interests that ruthlessly maximize my interests irrespective of the cost or

716

P. H. Werhane and D. J. Bevan

detriment to any other(s). However, for Smith, self-interest is a dual-edged phenomenon, as we clearly see in the butcher, brewer, and baker example. Smith begins the TMS with the following remark: [h]ow selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. . . (see TMS I.i.1)

All of our interests emerge from ourselves: we are the subject of our interests. The objective constitution and social construction of those interests may be oneself but invariably in some relationship with others. Even the selfish, greedy, butcher has to please her customers, or she will not be able to satisfy her own needs/greed and wellbeing. Similarly, by extension to collectivities, any organization that fails to take into account the interests of its primary stakeholders, e.g., employees, customers, suppliers, and shareholders, will create challenges for the organization in the marketplace: unhappy employees, dissatisfied customers, unpaid suppliers, and/or shareholders without adequate returns. Thus, self-interest is a complex set of reciprocal phenomena, and not a linear, one-way relationship. Both the inherent sociality of human beings and our genuine and unavoidable interest(s) in or dependence upon others together form the basis for the complex and interdependent nature of the so-called self. From these two central notions of sociality, and of self-interest, we suggest complementary key themes that are relevant to twenty-first-century management thinking: • The “impartial spectator” as the source of managerial and institutional adaptability and organizational change. • The role of the virtues, sympathy, and moral sentiments in Smith’s thinking and how these are precursors for the contemporary idea of emotional intelligence in management theory. • The centrality of principles of justice for individual and institutional moral behavior and for the viability of free enterprise. • Smith’s’ theory of labor that suggests to modern management that more complex thinking about work, working, and the alienability of one’s productivity could contribute to twenty-first-century models for employment. • The “invisible hand,” howsoever metaphorical, as implicit mediator between interests. As we now understand from twentieth-century complex systems thinking (Cilliers 1998; Senge 2006 (1990)), all flow is reciprocal, and any “cause” is itself also an “effect.”

The Impartial Spectator The contributions we have so far outlined are widely acknowledged in the literature on Smith, but, we argue, Smith’s idea of the impartial spectator is an underrated potential contribution to twenty-first-century management thinking. Smith introduces the concept of the impartial spectator as follows:

38

Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy and Its Relevance for Modern Management

717

We begin, upon this account, to examine our own passions and conduct, and to consider how these must appear to them [others]. . .We suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behaviour, and endeavour to imagine what effect it would, in this light, produce upon us. This is the only looking-glass by which we can, in some measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct. (TMS iii.1.5)

Smith is describing here the human ability to reflect, to metaphorically step back from a situation, and to study ourselves, our behavior, our histories, our cognitive and situational constraints, and even our theories about the self. This is what Smith refers to as taking a “spectator” perspective and argues that this is the source of our conscience. (Note that Smith’s idea of an impartial spectator is not to be equated with a “view from nowhere.” Smith never claimed that human beings could be perfectly impartial or completely divorced from the social context. Rather, the impartial spectator is an explanatory mechanism to clarify how we can study ourselves and our activities and to even develop a judgmental (albeit often flawed) conscience as a “watchdog” of ourselves.) This spectator phenomenon or epiphenomenon allows us not only to study ourselves and our histories but also to critique the behavior of others. It is also the source of moral judgments, of those principles which the preponderance of society would, from an impartial mode, agree are admirable behaviors. Thus, the idea of the impartial spectator comes from Smith’s argument that we are inexorably social. We cannot escape each other, and, because the spectator phenomenon is in principle universal (although Smith would be reluctant to make that generalization), we are constantly judging each other and creating moral rules. Moreover, and more importantly, this spectator perspective is the source of making choices and directing our lives and organizations, albeit within many constraints and often not favorably. We are not merely embroiled in our own mental models but can evaluate our own and others’ theoretical perspectives and, indeed, revise our theories and arguments. Thus, as Griswold writes, “Smith’s view is, rather, that we always see ourselves through the eyes of others and are mirrors to each other” (1999: 105). Organizations, too, are not merely embroiled in their cultures or dominant logics, but can revise, alter, and change their direction, goals, and focus. And organizations, like the individuals who comprise them, can morally judge themselves and their competitors as well (see Raphael 2007; Bevan and Werhane 2015). This spectator point of view, which Smith regards as uniquely human, opens possibilities for evaluating the principles underlying our behavior and the activities of organizations and for review and change. By analogy, since organizations are human creations, they too can step back and examine themselves, critique their dominant logics, and adapt to changing environmental and economic conditions. This accounts for organizational change, or what some theorists have called institutional entrepreneurship, i.e., “activities of actors who have an interest in particular institutional arrangements and who leverage resources to create new institutions or to transform existing ones” (Maguire, Hardy and Lawrence 2004: 657). Thus, individuals, managers, and organizations who appear to draw on principles of justice as the basis for their decision-making (or as a “stopping rule” for what they engage in) can introduce Enlightenment values of consistent respectfulness. As Peter Senge writes,

718

P. H. Werhane and D. J. Bevan

the problems with mental models [with which we socially construct our experiences] . . .arise when the models are tacit—when they exist below the level of awareness. (2006: 166)

At this implicit level, models are not examined and thus not challenged. Hence managers in organizations can often simply go along with that organization’s dominant logic, never questioning its applicability. Senge offers a systems thinking, or learning organization, cognate of the impartial spectator in a passage on the “reflective practice” that he considers essential to organizational excellence. Echoing Smith’s reciprocity of action, Senge’s generative model of learning brings together both distinctly managerial and interpersonal skills. In the course of developing these, you may need the help of another person – a “ruthlessly compassionate” partner. In this quest to develop skills in reflection, we are each other’s greatest assets. (Senge 2006: 178)

The consequences of the inability to reform can be seen in daily updates of commercial news. Currently, the American retailing company Sears is working its way out of bankruptcy. This is a company that dominated the retail market for many decades primarily through catalog sales, which allowed outdated and outmoded “catalog dominant logic”-based decision-making to persist long after that format ceased to meet, or to reciprocate with, the needs and interests of modern consumers (Associated Press 2019). Such dominant logics flaws can be detected across the evolution of technology and manufacturing: Kodak film and cameras; competing formats of audiovisual technology (DVD, Blue-ray, etc.); and smartphones (see Apple vs BlackBerry). Smith (echoed by Senge) would argue that every individual and organization can step back and engage in a more disinterested “spectator” point of view – but sadly, many do not. One of the reasons for not questioning one’s own or organizational situation and perspective may be due to a parochial involvement in a socially constructed organizational culture from which managers often have difficulty extricating themselves. Smith would recognize this as the social construction of science and, more fundamentally, of all experience and thinking. In his early essays, Smith questions the pure objectivity of science and argues that even Newton’s theory, whose “principles, it must be acknowledged, have a degree of firmness and solidity that we should look in vain for in any other system” are like “all philosophical systems [. . .] mere inventions of the imagination” (Smith 1750/2010: 384, “History of astronomy,” as cited in Hühn 2019: 5). And in another essay, “The history of ancient physics,” Smith concludes that the roles of scientists are to: introduce order and coherence into the mind’s conception of the seeming chaos. . .[and to] render, therefore, the lower part of the great theatre of nature a coherent spectacle to the imagination. (Smith 2010: 386)

According to this reading of Smith, science, like all knowledge, is socially constructed. So, just as science was trapped in a Newtonian point of view before

38

Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy and Its Relevance for Modern Management

719

Einstein’s breakthrough theory of relativity, so often organizations are “trapped” in an obsolete mind-set that precludes adaptation to changing economic or social conditions. Part of the parochialism can also be traced to ignoring our inexorable sociality, i.e., the fact that we are all mutually dependent. As Smith writes, [w]e should view ourselves. . .in light in which any other citizen of the world would view us. What befalls ourselves we should regard as what befalls our neighbour, or, what comes to the same thing, as our neighbour regards what befalls us. (TMS III.3.II)

The impartial spectator, who can recognize and judge this sociality, is therefore a critical element. This insight is particularly relevant in the volatile twenty-firstcentury global political and economic environment, when thinking about and operationalizing organizational change.

Virtues, Moral Sentiments, and the Modern Notion of Emotional Intelligence Early on in the TMS, Smith argues that, while reason plays a role in moral judgments, these are primarily initiated by moral sentiments triggered by what he calls sympathy. Sympathy, in Smith’s use of the term, is not merely pity or compassion. Rather, sympathy is a “fellow-feeling with any passion whatsoever” (TMS, I.i1.5) that one recognizes in another. So I can sympathize with (i.e., understand) the feelings of even a hardened criminal without at the same time approving of that feeling or of her behavior. It is the approval or disapproval of those feelings that is one of the sources of moral judgments or the arbiter of what is good or evil. The origins of our own moral sentiments (and virtues, as we shall demonstrate) come from what Smith claims are three sets of natural, or innate, individual passions, although the quality of each is different in each person. These are the selfish passions, those emotions and interests directed at oneself, while the unselfish passions are those directed at others, and the unsocial passions are those negative reactions to our social relationships, such as envy, hate, or revenge. Each of the first two sets of passions contributes to our virtues as well as our vices. The selfish passions can produce prudence and selfrestraint or selfishness and greed. The social passions are the source of the virtues of benevolence and justice as well as the vices of malevolence and unfairness. It will turn out that, while benevolence seems to be the highest virtue, it is justice, both on the individual and institutional levels, that is the most basic. As Smith argues, this is the case because no society can exist or survive for very long, or develop properly, without the practices of justice. More about Smith’s position on justice will be discussed in the next section. All of these ideas, we now argue, are precursors to the notion of emotional intelligence (EI), a concept that appears in contemporary literature on management theory. Emotional intelligence is a term created by drawing on the field of psychology by Peter Salovey and John Mayer, who define it as follows:

720

P. H. Werhane and D. J. Bevan

emotional intelligence [is] a set of skills hypothesized to contribute to the accurate appraisal and expression of emotion in oneself and in others, the effective regulation of emotion in self and others, and the use of feelings to motivate, plan, and achieve in one’s life. (Salovey and Mayer 1990: 185)

EI has been popularized by Dan Goleman in his 1996 book of the same name. Acknowledging Salovey and Meyer, he defines EI (or EQ) as the ability to recognize, understand and manage our own emotions, and recognize, understand, and influence the emotions of others (Goleman 2005). Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to identify and manage one’s own emotions, as well as the emotions of others. Though there is some disagreement among psychologists as to what constitutes emotional intelligence, it is generalized to include three skills: emotional awareness, or the ability to identify and name one’s own emotions; the ability to harness those emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking and problem-solving; and the ability to manage emotions, which includes both regulating one’s own emotions when necessary and cheering up or calming down other people. In practical terms, this means being aware that emotions can drive our behavior and impact people (positively and negatively), and learning how to manage those emotions, both our own and others, especially when we are under pressure. In brief, Goleman develops and distinguishes five dimensions of EI: self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, motivation, and social skill (Goleman 1995). Reflecting on Smith, the ability to control one’s emotions (and passions) is a function of a fourth virtue Smith adds in the last edition of the TMS: self-command. About this virtue Smith writes, The man of the most perfect virtue [self-command]. . . is he who joins to the most perfect command of his original and selfish feelings the most exquisite sensibility of both to the original and sympathetic feelings of others. (TMS III.3.34)

Moreover, Smith continues, “self-command is not only itself a great virtue, but from it all the other virtues seem to derive their principal lustre” (TMS VI.iii.11). We suggest, then, that the contemporary idea of EI emulates from a well-organized ability to command oneself and one’s passions and a well-functioning impartial spectator that reminds us not only of ourselves but also of others and our interrelationships. Thus, Smith’s early ideas on self-command fit nicely into the current El thinking.

Liberty and Justice Self-interests are not the only drivers in market economies. Both self-interest and interest in others can function well in commerce only if there is freedom to conduct business. In WN, Smith links what he calls natural liberty to commerce. The term “natural liberty” is taken from Puffendorf’s theory of basic rights, spelled out in the unedited student notes from Smith’s lectures, and published in Lectures on Jurisprudence (1764–64/1978) (LJ). Borrowing from earlier philosophers, Smith argues

38

Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy and Its Relevance for Modern Management

721

that human beings have basic natural rights, including the right to freedom, simply by virtue of being human. He adopts the principle that every person has rights to her person, to her property, and to her reputation: these are what Smith refers to as perfect rights. Such “[P]erfect rights are those which we have a title to demand and if refused to compel an other to perform” (LJ[A] i.14). We note that, for Smith, these rights are, by and large, what today we call negative rights (such as the right not to be coerced or harmed), rather than positive duties to perform. Smith continues, the right to commerce and the right to freedom in marriage, when infringed are all evidently encroachments on the right one has to the free use of his person and in a word to do what he has a mind [to do] when it does not prove detrimental to any other person. (LJ[A] i.14)

Smith further develops this idea of justice in TMS and in WN. In both, justice is axiomatic, i.e., a basic principle, perhaps the most significant, in Smith’s thinking. Arguably, throughout TMS, Smith founds his moral psychology on his idea of mutual sympathy and human sentiment. Nevertheless, the Enlightenment principle of justice remains the foundation for all morality. This most basic virtue is a principle without which society cannot function, or function well, for long. Smith is often read as claiming, in TMS, that benevolence is the highest virtue, but this is not exactly the case. According to Smith, while benevolence is an admirable virtue, one need not always be benevolent or kind. But to be unjust is always wrong. In TMS, Smith is at pains to explain at every turn that fairness is indeed the most basic of virtues. In this context, we suggest that me-first, individualist proponents and commentators (see, e.g., Rand 1974, 1999) would selectively read only the first of these three sentences: In the race for wealth, and honours, and preferments, he may run as hard as he can, strain every nerve and every muscle, in order to outstrip all his competitors. But if he should justle, or throw down any of them, the indulgence of the spectators is entirely at an end. It is a violation of fair play, which they cannot admit of. (TMS I.ii.2.1)

Smith defines the virtue of justice as “consciousness of ill desert” (TMS II.ii.3.4). It is both a negative principle proscribing any harm toward another and a positive quality of engaging with another in reciprocal fair play. He reinforces the positive quality of this reciprocity by making an analogy between the virtue of justice and societal well-being: Society may subsist, though not in the most comfortable state, without beneficence (kindness and benevolence or altruism) but the prevalence of injustice must utterly destroy it. Justice is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice of society. (TMS II.ii.3.4)

In LJ, Smith argues that the purpose of justice is to protect every individual’s perfect rights, that is, “to protect without exception the rights to liberty and property we outlined above” (LJ I.i.9). Furthermore, “the rules of justice are accurate to the highest degree, and admit no exceptions or modifications” (TMS III.6.10).

722

P. H. Werhane and D. J. Bevan

In WN, Smith links natural liberty both to commerce and to justice. He contends that: ideally in commerce all systems of preference or restraint, therefore, be completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. (WN IV.ix.51)

Smith advocates that the market in which the butcher and his comrades operate will function, and function best, if each shopkeeper has the liberty to hire and dismiss his employees, freedom of movement to close the shop or move to another village, and the liberty to compete without overburdening legal restrictions (Werhane 1989a, 1989b). However, Smith continues, “. . .every man, as long has he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interests in his own way, and bring his industry and capital into competition with other men. . .” (WN IV.ix.51, our italics). This is a critical point, both for Smith’s theses and for contemporary commerce. The laws of justice mentioned by Smith here are critical to commerce, because, as he asserts, “. . .commerce and manufactures can seldom flourish along in any state which does not enjoy a regular administration of justice” (WN V.iii.7). A political economy without these principles of justice, often framed in the form of laws, cannot succeed or survive for very long. Reframing commerce with that principle in mind changes the dynamics of business by refocusing its priorities and intentionality on a more humanistic dimension. In repostulating this most important aim of commerce, we suggest that stakeholder value creation, fairness, and human rights cannot be ignored.

Labor, the Labor Theory of Value, and Free Labor An important contribution Smith makes to contemporary management thinking is his idea of labor. Smith is well-known for his labor theory of value (with its origins in John Locke). This is the thesis that human labor input creates value, and the division, organization, and mechanization of labor create, or can create, exponential value through mass production. Thus, Smith is often called the “father” of the industrial revolution, a revolution that indeed turned agricultural economies into industrial growth economies. Such growth economies improved the plight of most of their population as well as the wealth of owners and communities. Indeed, it is Smith, before Marx, who first argued that agricultural economies, because of their limited production, are unable to create new wealth. Without industrialization, most of us would remain mired as tenant farmers or serfs, farming small plots, almost always in debt and thus dependent on large landholders for our subsistence. What is less cited from Smith’s opus is his claim that while the right to liberty is a natural right (LJ (A) I.i), for most it is a rather abstract idea, only realized when laborers are freed from serfdom and allowed to select their employment:

38

Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy and Its Relevance for Modern Management

723

The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his neighbour, is a plain violation of this most sacred property. It is a manifest encroachment upon the just liberty both of the workman, and of those who might be disposed to employ him. As it hinders the one from working at what he thinks proper, so it hinders the others from employing whom they think proper. (WN I.x.c.11)

The act of working is inexorably personal – an inalienable, particular right. Thus, for Smith, any interfering with that is an “encroachment upon just liberty” (WM I.x.ii. 12). Still, although Smith is less clear on this point, what a laborer produces with her work, her productivity, is to be distinguished from the worker and her labor. Smith is equally a strong critic of slavery, both because it violates these natural, personal rights and because it is extraordinarily inefficient. Slavery is inefficient because in a slave or serf economy, owners usually do not distinguish the laborer and her laboring from her productivity. Wealth was measured in the number of slaves or serfs, not according to what each can actually accomplish. According to Smith, at least in England, when slave owners and landed gentry began to realize the inefficiencies of slavery and tenant farming, and recognized the value of differences in productivity, they began to reward those slaves, serfs, or tenant farmers who were more productive. Eventually, these productive laborers were able to buy their freedom. Whether or not Smith’s account is historically accurate, his theoretical point is clear: freeing slaves or releasing serfs and tenant farmers acknowledges their basic rights and the value (or disvalue) of their productivity. The abstract idea of a basic right to freedom becomes realized when former slaves are free to choose their employment, and when their productivity is measured and rewarded as output, not as simply the existence of the slave or her body. In an industrial setting where there are no restrictions on employment (In eighteenth-century England and Scotland, one had to have permission to travel and permission to accept employment or to leave one’s job [permission from whom?]. Worse, workers often had to endure long, almost payless apprenticeships, all of which Smith railed against. He argued that abolishing these, as well as free trade, was necessary for what today we call industrial development and economic growth (WN I.x.c.41–61).), the availability of job opportunities in industry allows individuals to exercise their freedom of choice, thus introducing the idea that freedom is a concrete right for everyone. Furthermore, the laborer herself realizes that she is not merely her productivity. Individual laborers are independent beings who can sell their productivity as commodities (or become wage earners) without enslaving themselves (WN III.iv.14). Thus, productivity (but not the laborer herself) is an alienable property, like other forms of property. To put it another way, as Werhane (1991) argues, The separation of productivity from the laborer results in both economic liberty and the valuing of labor. In any economy the realization that labor has value becomes apparent

724

P. H. Werhane and D. J. Bevan

when productivity and efficiency as well as skill become either necessary or desirable. . ./ . . . As the productivity of labor becomes valued as a commodity, it becomes a property with value to the laborer as well as to the employer. When labor is analyzed according to what it produces or does not produce, labor is separated from the laborer, for it is the value of what is produced, both in quantity and quality, that is at issue, not the laborer herself nor her labor-as such. . .. The transformation of labor productivity into a commodity is progress, according to Smith, since the laborer, when considered to be distinct from her productivity, is free to barter this commodity and, at least in theory, to determine how much she will command for her productivity. (Werhane 1991: 386; see also WN III. iv.10-18)

Therefore, the introduction of wage labor, as opposed to serfdom, can act as a trigger to activate what Smith finds as “natural” in each of us, namely, the activation of the impartial spectator: our ability to step back, examine and critique ourselves and others, and indeed recognize and realize our freedoms. Smith recognizes the tribulations of being a laborer. In WN, Book V, he notes that assembly-line repetitive work can be debilitating and mind-numbing: In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations; frequently one or two. . .. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too, are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become . . . (WN V.i.f.50; see also WN I.xi.p.9)

Smith’s response to this problem is to advocate universal education to help free our minds from the drudgery of our work, although that is hardly a comfort to workers (WN V.I.f.61.). And while Smith recognizes that masters, or employers, often collude against workers, he has no theory of what a fair wage might be. Where Smith’s thinking is important to contemporary management is his recognition of the humanity of workers who are not themselves commodities. While this may seem obvious, one is reminded that in 2018, globally, there are approximately 40 million people held in virtual slavery (Global Findings 2018). In the United States, in particular, there are still workers, approximately 2000 to 5000 per week, who suffer from wage theft, that is, from not being paid or paid fully what was promised in wages (see Bobo 2009). More importantly, Smith proposes a way of thinking about work, a mind-set, that invites us to recognize the inalienability of the laborer and of her dexterity while acknowledging the alienability of her productivity. This mind-set was challenged by Marx, who contended that the worker, her work, and her productivity are all inalienable, and therefore wage earners are alienated because owners do not recognize this inalienability. Today, most management thinking works from the idea that workers and managers are paid for their output. However, and this is the lesson from Smith, contemporary management does not always acknowledge or respect workers and managers as individuals.

38

Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy and Its Relevance for Modern Management

725

The Invisible Hand According to Smith: Every individual [in commerce]. . . intends only his own security and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends his own gain, and he is, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. . .. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. . . (WN IV.ii.9)

Despite the fact that Smith mentions the invisible hand exactly once in WN (and also once in TMS), this notion has been the subject of volumes of commentary, interpretation, and extrapolation. To take one example, Alexander Macfie (a well-known commentator on Smith) argues that, in TMS, the impartial spectator, general (moral) rules, an internal sense of fair play, and the virtue of prudence, all serve as regulators of human behavior. By contrast, in the “impersonal market” (Macfie 1967: 104) of WN, prudence is replaced by the desire to better one’s condition. There is no mention here of the impartial spectator, or of moral rules other than as “free and fair competition” (Macfie 1967: 103). The natural social order is replaced by the “natural harmony of the economic order” (ibid), and there is no guarantee that economic actors will practice internal self-restraint. Therefore, Macfie appears to suggest that the invisible hand replaces the impartial spectator in WN as controller of the economic order. For him, the invisible hand becomes “the ultimate governor which controls the self-love of individuals . . . the ultimate natural harmony of individual interests” (Macfie 1967: 101). Other examples of what we claim here as misreading, or misstating, the invisible hand idea arise frequently in management literature and commentaries. For example, William D. Grampp argues: (T)he invisible hand . . ./. . . is simply the inducement a merchant has to keep his capital at home, thereby increasing the domestic capital stock and increasing military power, both of which are in the public interest and neither of which he intended. (Grampp 2000: 441)

At the other pole of interpretation, we have arguments that it is “the universal reign of the impartial spectator, the invisible but rational hand, which rational producers for their self-interest must obey” (Lamb 1974: 681; see also Werhane 1989a for this analysis). Examining such interpretations of the invisible hand on the basis of Smith’s concept of the impartial spectator, we cannot agree, as Macfie argues, that in WN Smith simply replaces the prudent person of TMS with a desire to better one’s condition. Smith clearly refers to both concepts of the prudent person and bettering one’s condition in both TMS and WN. Moreover, there are crucial differences between the impartial spectator and the invisible hand. The impartial spectator functions from within a human being or, in the case or organizations, within groups of human beings, where judgments are deliberately and self-consciously made by individuals disengaging from their own biases by taking on the roles of spectators. In WN, this role of personal impartial

726

P. H. Werhane and D. J. Bevan

judgment making is replaced not by the invisible hand but by laws of justice. It is these laws that govern economic behavior. Although, as we have shown, the invisible hand has been interpreted to be the market as it acts impartially to regulate economic behavior, we suggest that this occurs as the result of economic exchanges which cannot possibly function independently. The invisible hand is not the self-conscious deliberate “ultimate governor”; it is neither the “rational hand” of economic activities nor a creator of economic good. It is rather an explanatory term to describe how the collective results of marketplace behavior in mutually competitive and cooperative exchanges can produce unintended economic well-being (or not) (Werhane 1989a). It is neither an impartial nor an autonomous “hand” that steps back, grasps the economic situation, and dispassionately decides how economic activities should be balanced and restrained to create economic good. Economic good may arise as a result of competition. But, in our reading of Smith, there is no evidence of any intentional process that deliberately makes moral judgments about economic good or regulates self-interests because there is no “entity” or real being akin to an impartial spectator who would initiate and regulate this process. If the invisible hand is merely the outcome of economic behavior in a free market, one take-away for contemporary thinking would be to suggest caution with the language we use to talk about markets. For example, in the April 17, 2019, The Wall Street Journal, commenting on Qualcomm’s settlement with Apple, the journal editor writes: “The market may have deemed Qualcomm the biggest winner. . .” (2019, B14). But, in reality, the “market” itself did nothing. Traders made decisions that affected Qualcomm’s stock. There is no independent entity of the market. Rather, the market, as the invisible hand, is an outcome from a series of activities from various trading, commercial, company, and/or government actions. So, as we can learn from a considerate reading of Smith, we must take care in how we use the language referring to complex and interdependent phenomena such as markets.

Conclusion Smith’s ideas resonate today, beyond the persistent misrepresentations, and there is still much to be gleaned from his writings. We have focused on five themes: his idea of the impartial spectator, the role of the virtues and moral sentiments in moral judgment and human action, his theory of justice, his theory of labor, and the concept of the invisible hand – each of which, interdependently, functions in a dynamic social process. The importance of Smith’s analysis is evident in his extensive examination of the market and in his development of principles of justice (such as justice entailing equal respect for everyone) that are appropriate for the twenty-first century globalizing political economies. This unifying idea is reflected in the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (2011), also known as the Ruggie Principles. In brief, [t]hese [voluntary] Guiding Principles are grounded in the recognition of

38

Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy and Its Relevance for Modern Management

727

(a) States’ existing obligations to respect, protect, and fulfil human rights and fundamental freedoms, (b) The role of business enterprises as specialized organs of society performing specialized functions, required to comply with all applicable laws and to respect human rights. (UN Guiding Principles 2011: 1)

To extrapolate for business practice, we might argue from Smith that, if managers and organizations stepped back from their operative mind-sets and reexamined their behavior to modify it in alignment with Enlightenment principles of justice, the practice of the Ruggie Principles might actually come to fruition. Of course, this is speculation on our part, but it seems plausible to suggest that this could be achieved with persistent reflective practice. The impartial spectator, Smith claims, is a phenomenon within each of us (although more operative in some than in others) and thus, by extrapolation, available in organizations and institutions as well. Its significance in organizational research cannot be overestimated. It is an explanatory medium that can account for those individual and organizational creative capabilities that come into play when we reimagine the direction of human and institutional behavior, namely, when we or others create adaptable mechanisms to deal propitiously and dynamically with the ever-changing global political economies. Organizations, or at least many commercial organizations, engage in such entrepreneurial activities quite often. Smith’s idea of the impartial spectator explains how this responsible dynamic is possible and why outmoded institutional habits, or claims like “we have always done it this way,” are simply excuses to avoid adapting to changing economic conditions and to continue on well-worn paths that can lead to organizational failure. As contemporary managerial systems and complexity authors continue to remind us, the process is continuously changing. Smith’s analysis of labor, his distinctions between the worker and her working and her alienable output, while seemingly obvious, reminds contemporary management that labor production in all forms (including the output of managers and executives) is alienable property, and therefore the worker has the right to trade or barter it with the employer for remuneration. Hence, this right has the same status as any property ownership rights, which are considered cornerstones of free enterprise and, at the same time, basic (but alienable) human rights. Unfortunately, to this day there are some residual nineteenth-century practices that continue to treat employees, be they laborers or managers, as if they were merely commodities. In his play The Firebugs, Max Frisch’s protagonist executive declares: “I hired workers but people came instead” (Frisch 1958/1990). That mind-set – that a person is merely a unit of labor – persists in some management thinking, if only tacitly: but Smith reminds us that such a perspective is in fact a violation of basic human rights, akin to theft of property. Associated with this is a tendency, at least in the United States, to measure the value of any kind of property, including employment and professions, in terms of its monetary value rather than the value it creates for the society and/or the economy. Smith’s thinking about labor helps us understand that measuring productivity in terms of its monetary value in the employment market, rather than by reference to its

728

P. H. Werhane and D. J. Bevan

full value to society, wrongly identifies labor value only with money. The contemporary practice of measuring value in terms of monetary worth, treating labor as an end in itself, brings us to a closing point that should not be neglected in considering Smith’s Enlightenment values for this century. Smith respected the value of money as a means for investments designed to create jobs and economic growth. Money is merely an “instrument of commerce” (WN IV.i.I), a commodity like any other, to be traded or exchanged. If we regard money as an intrinsic value, however, Smith is clear that this move would return contemporary political economies to the regressive zero-sum mercantilism of eighteenth-century England that encouraged hoarding gold and thus precluded investments for economic growth. (Mercantilism was not so much an economic theory as a set of practices and laws in eighteenth-century England that restricted domestic movement and commerce and controlled trade with other nations. Its main assumption was that there is only so much wealth in the world (we live on a zero-sum planet). Thus, nations had to hoard their wealth and make trade only when such trade benefited the country. It was Smith who introduced the idea that wealth can be created by the division and processes of labour – thus developing a labor theory of value (see Werhane 1989a: 156–161 and Book IV Sect. I of WN).) If today’s emerging, as well as mature, political economies can remember that money is only a means, albeit an essential one, to create wealth through investments, then we, as global citizens, can continue on a path of more humanistic economic development. This path can be traced within the provisos of equal basic rights and fairness for everyone, as illuminated for us by Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith, if – as we have shown – they are carefully considered.

Cross-References ▶ Creating an Effective Business Ethics ▶ How Utilitarianism Can Inform Decent Managers in Plural and Culturally Diverse Contexts

References Associated Press (2019) Sears saved from bankruptcy liquidation, stores to remain open. https://www.nj.com/business/2019/01/sears-saved-from-bankruptcy-liquidation-stores-toremain-open.html. Accessed 15 Feb 2019 Bevan D, Werhane P (2015) The inexorable sociality of moral agency and the indelible role of other(s) in Adam Smith. J Bus Ethics 27:327–335 Bobo K (2009) Wage theft in America. The New Press, New York Cilliers P (1998) Complexity and postmodernism: understanding complex systems. Routledge, London Frisch M (1958, rev. 1990) The firebugs. Trans. Bullock M. Hill and Wang, New York Global Findings (2018) www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/Findings/global-Findings/. Accessed 18 Nov 2019 Goleman D (1995) Emotional intelligence. Bantam Dell Books, New York Goleman D (2005) Emotional intelligence. Bantam Dell Books, New York

38

Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy and Its Relevance for Modern Management

729

Grampp WD (2000) What did Smith mean by the invisible hand? J Polit Econ 108(3):441–465 Griswold CL (1999) Adam Smith and the virtues of enlightenment. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Hühn M (2019) Adam Smith’s philosophy of science: economics as moral imagination. J Bus Ethics 155:1–15 Jackson I (2003/2005) Out-take and interview media from the corporation. In Achbar M, Abbott J, Bakan J (eds) The corporation. Metrodome, Canada Lamb RB (1974) Adam Smith’s system: sympathy not self-interest. J Hist Ideas 35(4):671–682 Macfie AL (1967) The individual in society: papers on Adam Smith. George Allen & Unwin Ltd, Abingdon Maguire S, Hardy C, Lawrence TB (2004) Institutional entrepreneurship in emerging fields: HIV/AIDS treatment advocacy in Canada. Acad Manag J 47:657–679 Qualcomm (2019) Wall Street Journal. April 19. B14 Rand A (1974) Philosophy: who needs it? Address to the graduating class of the United States Military Academy at West Point Rand A (1999) Atlas shrugged. Plume. Penguin, London Raphael DD (2007) The impartial spectator: Adam Smith’s moral philosophy. Oxford University Press, Oxford Salovey P, Mayer J (1990) Emotional intelligence. Imagin Cogn Pers 9:185–211 Senge P (1990/2006) The fifth discipline. Random House, New York Smith A (1762–4/1978) The lectures on jurisprudence. Oxford University Press, Oxford Smith A (1759/1976) The theory of moral sentiments. Oxford University Press, Oxford Smith A (1776/1998) The wealth of nations. Oxford University Press, Oxford Smith A (1750/2010) Essays on philosophical subjects. Kessinger Publishing, Whitefish Stigler G (1971) Smith’s travels on the ship of state. Hist Polit Econ 3:265–277 United Nations (2011) Guiding principles on business and human rights: implementing the United Nations “protect, respect and remedy” framework. United Nations Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner, New York Werhane P (1989a) Adam Smith and his legacy for modern capitalism. Oxford University Press, New York Werhane P (1989b) The role of self-interest in Adam Smith’s wealth of nations. J Philos 86:669–680 Werhane PH (1991) Freedom, commodification, and the alienation of labor in Adam Smith’s wealth of nations. Philos Forum 22:383–398

Critical Moral Philosophy and Management

39

Edward Wray-Bliss

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Critical Theory on Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reason and the Moral Philosophy of Critical Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Management, Critical Theory, and Moral Reason . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

732 733 735 739 741 741

Abstract

This chapter considers the contribution which critical moral philosophy can make to an understanding and appreciation of management. It concentrates principally upon works in the Critical Theory tradition – authored by such figures as Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno. It also draws in contributions of other critical writers such as Hannah Arendt who, while not identifying as part of this tradition, nevertheless shared its abiding concerns and Kantian philosophical heritage. The chapter is structured as follows. Section One, Critical Theory on Management, outlines Critical Theory’s take on our administered, rationalized, managed society. Section Two, Reason and the Moral Philosophy of Critical Theory, considers the moral philosophy which informs and underpins Critical Theory. A number of Critical Theory’s philosophical debts are noted, including its fundamental indebtedness to Immanuel Kant’s conceptualization of a reasoned morality. The final section of the chapter, Management, Critical Theory, and Moral Reason, considers what implications the critiques and concepts discussed in this chapter have for management and managers today. E. Wray-Bliss (*) Formerly Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_5

731

732

E. Wray-Bliss

Keywords

Critical Theory · Hannah Arendt · Immanuel Kant · Instrumental rationality · Managerialism · Reason

Introduction In writing a chapter exploring the contribution of critical moral philosophy for our understanding of management, there are numerous moral philosophies and works with philosophical relevance that could figure. To give this short chapter a specific and achievable focus, however, it will concentrate upon one main body of work, the Marxist-informed tradition of Critical Theory. Critical Theory refers to writings that originated at, or were later strongly influenced by, scholars at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (often reduced to the “Frankfurt School”). It is most associated with Max Horkheimer, and writers such as Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno who worked at the Institute in Frankfurt under Horkheimer’s directorship during the 1930s, and in exile in the USA when the Nazi government made continuing their critical work untenable in Germany. Under Horkheimer’s direction, the Institute undertook to revise orthodox Marxist thought, which was considered to reproduce a problematic economic determinism and reductive classbased analysis, and to develop Marx’s project through genuine interdisciplinary work involving philosophy, psychology, law, economics, history, and the study of culture. Supplementing, then, its Marxist foundations, Critical Theory was strongly informed by other conceptual resources including Weberian critiques of rationality, Hegelian philosophy, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Kantian moral philosophy. Critical Theory’s influence spread far outside its geographical and temporal origins, defining or dovetailing with the concerns of other influential writers such as C. W. Mills, W. H. Whyte, Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman, Robert Jackall, Robert Putnam, Erich Fromm, and Walter Benjamin – and its ideas and concerns continue to have a strong influence on the field of critical management scholarship (Alvesson and Willmott 1992). From its beginnings Critical Theory sought to produce social critique that trod a line between what it regarded as two inherently problematic approaches to knowledge. The first was a positivistic empiricism, which was understood as a gathering of ‘facts’ that failed to subject these to moral critique or philosophical appraisal, thereby foregoing the critical role of considering how reality ought to be and not just how it is. The second was that of an idealist or abstract philosophy, which was regarded as a retreat from the conditions and difficulties of the real to the realm of pure speculation and ungrounded ideals. In treading this line between the sterility of empiricism and the futility of abstraction, Critical Theory was strongly informed by the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant – on whom Horkheimer wrote his postdoctoral thesis – and in particular Kant’s critique of reason. The Kantian moral philosophical concept at the heart of Critical Theory is explored in a later

39

Critical Moral Philosophy and Management

733

section of this chapter. First, however, the chapter considers what Critical Theory would have to say about management today.

Critical Theory on Management Management, in general, is not viewed positively by Critical Theorists. For instance, in the opening of One-Dimensional Man, perhaps the most famous paragraph in all of Critical Theory, we do not have to look hard to see the hand of management implicated in each of Marcuse’s laments: A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress. Indeed, what could be more rational than the suppression of individuality in the mechanization of socially necessary but painful performances; the concentration of individual enterprises in more effective, more productive corporations; the regulation of free competition among unequally equipped economic subjects; the curtailment of prerogatives and national sovereignties which impede the international organization of resources. (Marcuse 1964 [2002], p. 3)

Themes in the above critique are each carried forward by other critical writers. Vance Packard, in The Hidden Persuaders (1957 [2007]), would highlight managers’ use of psychological research and subliminal tactics to market products in ways that captured and subverted individual drives and desires. For Erich Fromm (1976 [2007]), consuming came to displace other expressions of self or creativity, and a ‘having’ mode of life comes to dominate and diminish a more ‘being’ orientation. For Marcuse and Horkheimer, commoditized mass culture would “dissolve traditional forms of art, literature, philosophy” (Marcuse 1941, p. 158) and “. . .human relationships tend to a point wherein the rule of economy over all personal relationships, the universal control of commodities over the totality of life, turns into a new and naked form of command and obedience” (Horkheimer 1941, p. 39). Within the workplace, psychology again was to be deployed by managers, this time to more effectively capture not consumers but employees. Taylorism’s monopolization of managerial control over work would be cast as liberating employee potential; productivity would be increasing through exploiting the individual’s social needs and ‘human relations,’ or their desire for a sense of personal achievement and ‘self-actualization.’ More recently, individuals’ contradictory drives for group acceptance and individual uniqueness would be exploited to maximum advantage within corporate culture; and employee identity would be reconstructed around discourses of entrepreneurialism and self-management. For critics such as C. W. Mills (1951, p. 235), techniques and tactics such as these would be regarded as managerial “attempts to conquer work alienation within the bounds of work alienation.” While citizens were being seduced by consumerist fantasies, dreams of selfactualization, or latterly maximizing their portfolio of job-ready skills, organizations would consolidate and grow, and this would change their relationship to the people within them.

734

E. Wray-Bliss

In a world crowded with big ugly forces, the white collar man (sic) is readily assumed to possess all the supposed virtues of the small creature. . . The white collar man is the hero as victim, the small creature who is acted upon but who does not act, who works alone unnoticed in somebody’s office or store, never talking loud, never talking back, never taking a stand. (Wright Mills 1951, p. xii)

Administering, controlling, and psychologically manipulating white collar and blue, consumer and employee, were the tasks assumed by the growing ranks of managers: “at the top, society becomes an uneasy interlocking of private and public hierarchies, and at the bottom, more and more areas become objects of management and manipulation” (Wright Mills 1951, p. 77). These managers would conceive of themselves as “morally neutral characters whose skills enable them to devise the most efficient means of achieving whatever end is proposed” (MacIntyre 1985, p. 74). Such ‘means-ends’ rationality diffused throughout the organization (Bauman 1989) and beyond: into the rationality of everyday life (Lefebvre 1947 [2008]; Hancock and Tyler 2009). “Its features can be summarized as the optimum adaption of means to ends. . . It is a pragmatic instrument oriented to expediency, cold and sober” (Horkheimer 1941, p. 28). As a result, the ability to reflect critically upon the ultimate desirability of ends is diminished for all sections of society: for political classes and academics (Marcuse 1964), for the population at large, and for management itself. “Reflective thought and theory lose their meaning in the struggle for self-preservation” (Horkheimer 1941, p. 38). Managers themselves become dulled and risk-averse (Whyte 1956). Entrapped within a claustrophobic milieu of organizational politics and riddled with anxiety over the efficacy of their own actions, they replace decision-making in the long-term interests of the organization – let alone society, humanity, or the world at large – with a focus on individual careers (Jackall 1988). One of the major casualties of this is morality itself. Rising up the organizational hierarchy replaces consideration of substantive moral issues. At all times this is a deleterious situation. And at the worst moments in history, such focus on career advancement and instrumentality can enable atrocity. Hannah Arendt’s (1963 [2006]) account of the mind-set of senior Nazi administrator Adolf Eichmann, reported from Eichmann’s 1961 trial for war crimes, is the landmark study here. “Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement,” she would observe, this war criminal “had no motives at all” (ibid, p. 287). Drawing us closer to the present, and to the last elements of Marcuse’s opening quote, contemporary critical writers highlight the narrow wealth-maximizing economics, the instrumental rationalities, and the usurping of the state which define neoliberalism (Harvey 2005). This has produced “quantitatively extreme” (Picketty 2017, p. 367) inequality, where disparities in income in a context such as the USA now match those of the late Victorian era. Management is deeply implicated here too. The dramatic inequality is largely the result of “the emergence of extremely high remunerations at the summit of the wage hierarchy, particularly among top managers of large firms” (ibid, p. 374). Thus the “primary reason for increased income inequalities in recent decades is the rise of the supermanager in both financial and non-financial sectors” (ibid, p. 398), representing the “veritable separation of the

39

Critical Moral Philosophy and Management

735

top managers of large firms from the rest of the population” (ibid, p. 32). Extending Picketty’s analysis further, Duménil and Lévy (2015) go so far as to argue that economies such as that of the USA are now in a new mode of production, a “managerial capitalism.” As we have seen in this section then, management in general is not favored by Critical Theory nor, indeed, by a broader pool of critical writers. As purveyor of an instrumental economic rationality, management is regarded as the harbinger of an administered, disenchanted, and fundamentally unequal world. What though is the central moral philosophical concept that Critical Theory is drawing upon to fuel their disavowal?

Reason and the Moral Philosophy of Critical Theory The fundamental concepts of civilization are in the process of rapid decay. . . The question of how far these concepts are at all valid clamors more than ever for answer. The decisive concept among them was that of reason, and philosophy knew of no higher principle. (Horkheimer 1941, p. 27)

As Horkheimer avers in these lines from his essay The End of Reason, the central moral philosophical concept of Critical Theory – if not Western philosophy more generally – is reason. Reason and its corollaries – rationality, thinking, and (what to our modern rationalized world may seem unlikely bedfellows) the formation of ideals and the notion of freedom and of moral self-determination – form the backdrop to the critiques of advanced managerialist/capitalist society presented above. Much of the work of Critical Theorists would focus upon the capture of reason in modern society. Marcuse, for example, would argue in his 1941 essay, ‘Some social implications of modern technology,’ that liberal society was founded upon the ideal of the human individual “as the subject of certain fundamental standards and values which no external authority was supposed to encroach upon. These standards and values pertained to the forms of life, social as well as personal, which were most adequate to the full development of man’s faculties and abilities” (pp. 139–140). As a rational being, the individual “was deemed capable of finding these forms by his own thinking and, once he had acquired freedom of thought, of pursuing the course of action which would actualize them. Society’s task was to grant him such freedom and to remove all restrictions upon his rational course of action” (p. 140). Free competition was enshrined as the basis upon which such individuals could best pursue their own interests. However, competition led to consolidation of property and an imperative to grasp the competitive benefits of machine production and mechanistic organization. As a result, there was a progressive eradication of the ‘costs’ of nonproductive, noninstrumental (or non-machinelike) behavior and attitudes. This was accompanied and preceded by a subordination of reasoning – first of the owner of production, then the

736

E. Wray-Bliss

employee, and eventually all citizens – to the logic of machine production, to the structures of mechanistic large-scale organizations, to a technological rationality. As large-scale, mass production, and mechanistic organizations dominated the landscape, what seemed reasonable was for individuals to work out how best to survive in the face of apparently overwhelming structures: “. . .through reason the individual asserts or adapts himself and gets along in society. It induces the individual to subordinate himself to society whenever he is not powerful enough to pattern society upon his own interests” (Horkheimer 1941, pp. 28–29). “He is rational who most efficiently accepts and executes what is allocated to him, who entrusts his fate to the large scale enterprises and organizations which administer the apparatus” (Marcuse 1941, p. 157). There was, as such, no lack of reason in modern society. On the contrary, there was a surfeit, an overwhelming and deadening abundance. We live and die rationally and productively. We know that destruction is the price of progress as death is the price of life, that renunciation and toil are the prerequisites for gratification and joy, that business must go on, and that the alternatives are Utopian. This ideology belongs to the established societal apparatus; it is a requisite for its continuous functioning and part of its rationality. (Marcuse 1964, p. 149)

For all its technological rationality and seemingly irresistible reasonableness – and the objective irrationality of pausing in the individual pursuit of productivity and success to think critically, to reflect, or to question – the nature of reason embodied by advanced capitalist society was only a faint shadow of what was once hoped for it. Some idea of what reason could be can be gleaned by looking again at Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the trial of Nazi war criminal Eichmann. Arendt would write that there was no radical or profound evilness to this orchestrator of mass murder. On the contrary, “the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative. . . a curious, quite authentic inability to think” (1971, p. 159). In works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Life of the Mind (1971), Arendt would argue that the systematic destruction of thought, “the eradication of thinking in human beings, their ceasing to think for themselves, and their willingness to obey superiors who gave them orders” (Kristeva 2001, p. 148), was at the center of totalitarianism. Could, she posed, “the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass, regardless of specific content and quite independent of results, could this activity be of such a nature that it ‘conditions’ men against evildoing?” (Arendt 1971, p. 160). The link between reason and morality would go further still in Critical Theory. The rational, for Marcuse (1964, p. 145), “is a mode of thought and action which is geared to reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality, and oppression.” What is rational is that which furthers human and other life, and what is irrational is that which harms or cheapens that life. Reason, in this understanding, has a ‘subversive power,’ the power to subject the ‘facts,’ or what seems oppressively inevitable, to a higher set of ideals. If the present is found wanting, then that same reason can work toward changing the present and thereby seek to establish “the truth for men

39

Critical Moral Philosophy and Management

737

and things – that is, the conditions in which men and things become what they really are” (ibid, p. 127). Reason, in this sense, is far more than what it has become, namely, a narrow economic rationality or an individual’s accommodations to a brutal or overbearing corporatized world. Reason is unashamedly utopian, imaginative, and idealistic. As such, it represents both the unique nature of humankind and the way to realize that nature by creating a society that accommodates it. In holding to this broader conceptualization of reason, Critical Theorists are joined to a long lineage of moral philosophy. This would include Max Weber, for instance, whose distinction between different rationalities – in particular, zweckrational (or instrumental rationality) and wertrational (or substantive rationality) – and his critique of the increasing disenchantment of society, its reduction to instrumental rationality, its privileging of calculation over substance, and its bureaucratization and mechanization all figure strongly. Karl Marx, whose formative influence on Critical Theory is well established, conceived of humankind as having a particular species nature founded upon the way we execute our labor in the world: that is, our unique potential to conceive of something in imagination before we execute it into reality (Marx 1867). Building on this, central to Marx’s ideas was the notion that people can transform or revolutionize both the physical and the social world to eradicate the imperative to exploit others or the world itself for individual gain: thereby to make a world that more readily conforms to the conditions and relations that foster human fulfillment. In his focus on the transformation of the real world toward a more rational ideal, Marx was to make an important break from his teacher, Hegel. Where Hegel would see an idealized and abstracted logic or spirit working its way through world events, Marx would emphasize the progressive transformation of the world as a direct result of human agency (Marx 1843). For Marx, reason, including our longing for an ideal and less oppressive future, is not just abstract force or philosophical speculation (Marx 1845). Rather, reason is normative and materialist: we project ourselves out of the present and direct ourselves to make that projected future a reality. In Marcuse’s (1964, p. 145) words, “Reason becomes historical Reason.” While Critical Theory’s conceptualization of reason would owe much to Weber and Marx, they in turn owed a debt to a far longer lineage of philosophical thought. Indeed, understanding reason as the defining human quality goes back to Hellenistic philosophy and Plato. And this privileging of reason was carried, in the neo-Platonic writings of St. Augustine, into the development of Christianity. Notwithstanding the intellectual lineage going all the way back to Plato though, it was the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant who was to undertake the most concerted and radical examination of reason in the realm of moral philosophy, and it was to Kant that Critical Theory owed its greatest philosophical debt. Kant was to make the crucial distinction between reason and understanding. Understanding is cognition of experience, the knowledge of how things currently are. Such understanding is necessary and valuable, of course. But it is only a kind of accounting or tabulation of the present. Reason, in contrast, is the capacity to determine ends – and to subject experience to these ends. That is, in order to not be dictated to by the limits of how things currently are, and in order to decide how things ought to be, reason “declares its right to make demands upon experience in a

738

E. Wray-Bliss

manner forbidden to understanding” (Neiman 1994, p. 5). For Kant, proposing ends – practical ideals that are determined through judgments of morality – is the fundamental human activity. This capacity, not to be dictated to by the world as it is now but to envisage and work toward the world as we reason that it should be, defines human freedom. It is such reason that makes us human (Kant 1902, VII, p. 70). Kant’s conceptualization of reason is both philosophically and politically radical. It was a conceptual position that freed human beings from being subordinated to the present, to facts, or to any ruler or state that did not conform to the highest ideals of morality – of equality, justice, the good, and the freedom of individuals to determine their own ends. Indeed, such was the radical nature of Kant’s ideas that he has been described as the philosopher of the French Revolution (Arendt 1982). Neiman (1994, p. 111) draws out Kant’s revolutionary concept of reason well: Every revolutionary proposal is vulnerable to those critics who claim that freedom and equality may be very nice in theory but are invalidated by the “hard facts” of experience. The greatest achievement of Kant’s moral theory is the metaphysical foundation of moral theory itself. . . That moral theory contradicts experience is no surprise: it is precisely reason’s role to deny nature’s claims to be definitive and to assert its authority by providing laws to which experience ought to conform.

Kant’s ideas, as Arendt (1982) was to argue, are also radically egalitarian. If knowledge and understanding are held to be the highest virtues, then those claiming superior knowledge may defend the right to make political decisions for others. However, while there can certainly be people with better knowledge and understanding about particular areas than others – scientists, politicians, doctors, and perhaps managers, for example – no person has a monopoly on judgments about moral ideals and ends. For instance, the fact that we may soon have the knowledge to create artificial intelligence that could make many jobs redundant does not necessitate that we should do so. That is a judgment of moral reason, over which no one has an authoritative claim – not least because any such judgment would lead to futures that we cannot yet experience or accurately predict. Given the radically egalitarian and indeterminate nature of moral reasoning, we come to Kant’s famous ‘categorical imperative’: as there are no legitimate claims to authority over moral issues, no one can legitimately subordinate another’s moral reasoning. Indeed to do so would be to deny the very humanity of the other. We can see in this Kantian refusal to countenance the subordination of individual reason the philosophical roots of Critical Theory’s opposition to an orthodox Marxist position that reduced people to mere bearers of social classes, economic location, or indeed to the determination of a Hegelian world spirit. Though they were acutely aware of the totalitarian assault on individual liberty and the totalizing effects of massive organizations, mass production, and mass culture, we can appreciate too how these Kantian philosophical ideals enabled Critical Theory – and other critical writers such as Hannah Arendt – to retain a central and abiding interest in the concept of the individual and the potential of individual reason.

39

Critical Moral Philosophy and Management

739

Management, Critical Theory, and Moral Reason What might the above discussion of Critical Theory and its engagement with reason as a moral philosophical concept have to tell us about the possibilities of moral action on the part of contemporary management? First, it needs to be recognized that Critical Theory would view the managerial function as structurally implicated in the problems of the present. Management is entrenched in calculative and instrumental rationality, and it cannot be relied upon to produce the kinds of changes that societies will need to make to avert the major crises we face. At a local level, the lived realities of working as a manager in contemporary society would similarly tend to preclude individual managers from exercising the kinds of critical reason privileged by Critical Theory: that is, radical reflection on the ultimate moral desirability of organizational ends and concerted action toward changing these ends outside the limits set by the organization, markets, or share market. The pace of managerial work, its fragmented character, its unpredictability, the constant demands, the brevity of tasks (Mintzberg 1971), the anxieties of hierarchical judgment (Jackall 1988), and the fatigue that accompanies many incumbent’s experience of the managerial role – coupled with the prior socialization, education, and training to think in a managerialist, calculative, and instrumental manner – all act against managers having the inclination and energy to question their employing organizations in radically reflective and transformative ways. As Arendt (1964, p. 37) expresses it in her essay ‘Personal Responsibility Under a Dictatorship,’ “how unwilling the human mind is to face realities which in one way or another contradict totally its framework of reference. Unfortunately, it seems to be much easier to condition human behaviour and outrageous manner, than it is. . . to start thinking and judging instead of applying categories and formulas which are deeply ingrained in our mind.” It would seem to follow from this that effective moral demands for changes in the function and behavior of modern corporations, if they are to be heeded at all, will most likely be forced upon managers from outside of the instrumental rationality of the organization: from recurring climate crises, major political instability from rising inequality, and the pressures of the mass movement of climate-political-economic refugees, for example. Critical Theory, and the moral philosophy that it draws upon, would then tell us that managerial contributions to making the world more rational, in the sense of Marcuse’s ‘that which furthers human and other life,’ are likely to be minimal at best. Management as a function and managerialism as a form of rationality are far more likely to continue as a mechanism of destructiveness and subordination. In addition to informing us of the above, critical works and texts can also help us to recognize some of the false ‘alternatives’ to managerialism and managerial rationality that are offered. For example, the idea of transforming mundane, instrumental management into some form of inspiring or heroic ‘leadership’ and the premise that the ‘business leader’ can solve just about any intransigent problem we face are continually mooted in popular and business texts. While we might understand such a discourse of leadership as being in part born out of dissatisfaction

740

E. Wray-Bliss

with the stultifying rationality of managerialism, it does not follow that ‘leadership’ is a progressive response. In ‘What is enlightenment?,’ Kant would highlight the abdication of responsibility for the world that we live in, a process he characterizes as civilization’s immaturity. It is so convenient to be a minor! If I have a book that understands for me, a spiritual advisor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who decides upon a regimen for me, and so forth, I need not trouble myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay; others will readily undertake the irksome business for me. (Kant 1784, p. 17)

To this list of those all too willing to take responsibility from us, we could certainly add the modern ‘business leader,’ a figure we might understand as a bearer of instrumental managerialism clothed in an earlier rhetoric, one that assures us that salvation is near if only we follow them. Critical Theorist Erich Fromm, always attuned to the ways that elements of human psychology dovetailed with the long shadow of mid-twentieth-century authoritarianism (Fromm 1942 [2002]), would have had much to say about the call to venerate business leaders today. These sober conclusions regarding the limits of managerial moral agency might evoke Adorno’s (1951) famous quote, “es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen” (which we may loosely translate as “there is no right way to live when everything is wrong”). However, there are still individual managerial actions of moral note that we can glean from critical texts. Watson (2003), for example, has argued that some, particularly ethically assertive, managers can find ways to bring their personal ethical considerations into their professional roles. Drawing upon Weberian ideas regarding the irrationalities and moral ambiguities of the world, Watson argues that there is no pure ethical position available for individuals operating in complex organizational roles. Instead, individual managers may draw upon situated moral and ethical discourses to attempt to organize their professional activities in ways they find more morally acceptable. One gets the sense, from Watson’s article, that these attempts may be rather piecemeal. However, the work does depict at least some attempt to bring to bear wider noninstrumental considerations within the orbit of the managerial role. In other work, Alvesson and Sveningsson (2003) have argued that it is in what we might regard as the everyday and mundane interactions between the manager and the managed that feelings of care, respect, and acknowledgment may be engendered. Such mundane interactions – time spent chatting with and listening to individual employees and caring enough to remember and ask after family members by name, for example – will not transform advanced capitalism, for sure, or combat the acute issues of corporate power that we face. Nor will they counter the instrumental rationality that remains embedded in the other technologies and targets that the managerial task routinely carries. However, they can impact upon the experience of working lives and may help to ameliorate some of the harshness of individuals’ interactions with the modern organized world. This in itself has some moral merit. Turning to what managers might do in the face of the more acute issues that we are confronted with in advanced capitalist society – the environmental crises, the

39

Critical Moral Philosophy and Management

741

unprecedented and accelerating inequality, the radical diminishment of state governance over corporations, and the continual spread of a destructive instrumental neoliberal rationality across every sector of society – one small but significant comfort that Hannah Arendt took in her examinations of atrocity in the twentieth century was the unpredictability of who would refuse the order or the expectation of immorality: And when you have made it through such times as those. . . the first thing you know is the following: you never know how someone will act. You always experience the surprise of your life! This is true at all levels of society concerning the greatest differences between people. (Arendt 1996, in Neiman 2002, p. 260)

As Neiman (2002, p. 260) observes, Arendt’s words reveal again her very clear sympathies with the Kantian idea of the freedom of moral reason: “only the hardest choices reveal absolute freedom. If nothing in your past determined whether you collapsed in the face of fascism or whether you defied it, you are free in a way no tyrant can control.” While we should not by any means compare the call to complicity in the organized mass murder of fascism with the sort of demands placed upon the modern manager – notwithstanding the fact that managerialism and its rationalities are implicated in a number of planet-wide crises we currently face, from radical inequality to species-threatening climate change – the moral lesson, indeed the gift, that Arendt, Critical Theory, and Kantian moral philosophy offer is that of freedom. This freedom is an awareness that all the excuses we may engage in, or that are offered to us, or that are structured into our professional roles, all the invitations to ‘go along to get along,’ the pressures to sacrifice what is right for what is profitable or expedient, or the claims that this is ‘just the way things are,’ are just thin rationalizations. As a manager, as a human being, the moral choice to exercise individual reason and refuse to be complicit in whatever problematic behavior seems expected or inevitable is still, despite all the machinations of organized, rationalized, managed society, ours to make.

Cross-References ▶ A Good Manager Serves Two Masters: A Kantian Perspective ▶ Moral Agency and Decent Management

References Adorno T (1951) Minima Moralia. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt Alvesson M, Sveningsson S (2003) Managers doing leadership: the extra-ordinarization of the mundane. Hum Relat 56(12):1435–1459 Alvesson M, Willmott H (eds) (1992) Critical management studies. Sage, London Arendt H (1951) The origins of totalitarianism. Schocken Books, New York Arendt H (1963 [2006]) Eichmann in Jerusalem. Penguin Classics, New York

742

E. Wray-Bliss

Arendt H (1971) The life of the mind. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, San Diego Arendt H (1982) Lectures on Kant’s political philosophy. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Arendt H (1964) Personal responsibility under dictatorship. In: Kohn J (ed) Arendt H (2003) Responsibility and judgement. Schocken Books, New York, pp 17–48 Bauman Z (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. Polity Press, Cambridge Duménil G, Lévy D (2015) Neoliberal managerial capitalism: another reading of the Picketty, Saez, and Zucman data. Int J Polit Econ 44(2):71–89 Fromm E (1942 [2002]) The fear of freedom. Routledge, London Fromm E (1976 [2007]) To have or to be? Continuum, London Hancock P, Tyler M (eds) (2009) The management of everyday life. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke Harvey D (2005) A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, Oxford Horkheimer M (1941) The end of reason. In: Arato A, Gebhardt E (eds) (2005) The essential Frankfurt School reader. Continuum, London, pp 26–48 Jackall R (1988) Moral mazes: the world of corporate managers. Oxford University Press, Oxford Kant I (1784) An answer to the question: what is enlightenment? In: Gregor M (ed) (1996) The Cambridge edition of the works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 11–22. Kant I (1902) Kants gesammelte Schriften, herausgegesben von der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Walter de Gruyter Verlag, Munich Kristeva J (2001) Hannah Arendt (trans: Güberman R). Columbia University Press, New York Lefebvre H (1947 [2008]) Critique of everyday life, Volume 1. Verso, London MacIntyre A (1985) After virtue, 2nd edn. Duckworth, London Marcuse H (1964 [2002]) One dimensional man. Routledge Classics, London Marcuse H (1941) Some social implications of modern technology. In: Arato A, Gebhardt E (eds) (2005) The essential Frankfurt School reader, Continuum, London, pp 138–162. Marx K (1843) Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right. In: O’Malley J (ed) (1970) Marx’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Marx K (1845) Thesis on Feuerbach. In: Marx K (ed) (1969) Marx/Engels selected works, vol 1. Progress Publishers, Moscow, pp 6–8 Marx K (1867) Capital, Volume One. Progress Publishers, Moscow Mintzberg H (1971) Managerial work: analysis from observation. Manag Sci 13(2):B-97–B-110 Neiman S (1994) The unity of reason: regarding kant. Oxford University Press, Oxford Neiman S (2002) Evil in modern thought. Scribe Publications, Melbourne Packard V (1957 [2007]) The hidden persuaders. Ig Publishing, Brooklyn Picketty T (2017) Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Watson T (2003) Ethical choice in managerial work: the scope for moral choices in an ethically irrational world. Hum Relat 56(2):167–185 Whyte WH (1956) The organization man. Simon & Schuster, New York Wright Mills C (1951) White collar. Oxford University Press, Oxford

How Utilitarianism Can Inform Decent Managers in Plural and Culturally Diverse Contexts

40

Andrew Gustafson

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Power and Benefit of Business Activity to Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Utilitarian Ethical Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Long-Term Benefit and the Utility of Keeping Promises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Utility of Justice, Fairness, and Other General Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Utilitarian Calculus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Utilitarian Approach to Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Utilitarianism Applied . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Utilitarian Management, Pluralism, and Diverse Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

744 744 746 746 747 747 748 749 752 754 754 754

Abstract

Utilitarianism, the theory that one should do what will bring about the greatest happiness for the many, is an excellent ethical theory to guide managers. Thoughtful management practices could benefit everyone – not just the shareholders, employees, and the managers but society as a whole. Management directed by utilitarian ethics keeps focused on long-term consequences, and here we will see that it provides a basis for ethics which can apply to all, while providing a basis for meaningful work and teamwork rooted in justice and fairness, respect for individuals and freedom, and the rights of minority groups. Mill’s utilitarianism claims that industrious commerce and fair competition in a well-administered free market economy will bring benefits indispensable to society’s progress. A. Gustafson (*) Creighton University, Omaha, NE, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_11

743

744

A. Gustafson

Keywords

Utilitarianism · Greatest happiness · Management · Community · Liberty · Capitalism · Competition

Introduction What is utilitarianism? Can it help inform managers, and if so, how? Finally, how in particular might it help in contexts which are culturally diverse, or which involve a plurality of values? These are the three questions which direct this chapter.

The Power and Benefit of Business Activity to Society The principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee . . . But in the end the major part of the gain has gone to the whole people. Frederick Winslow Taylor (1911)

Frederick Winslow Taylor is known as the father of modern management theory. He had great hopes that thoughtful management practices could benefit everyone – not just the employees and the managers but society as a whole. He was right. Taylor saw some means of improving efficiencies to make workers lives better, improve processes for management, and ultimately enhance the prosperity of the whole world. But he would likely be pleasantly dumbfounded if he saw today’s benefits from the efficient access to knowledge through the internet, the improved efficiencies of operations seen in today’s e-commerce, or the leaps forward in efficiency for all of us by way of computers and smartphones. Business and the management of it have brought innumerable benefits and incredible prosperity to society and the whole world, as Taylor saw it could. Utilitarianism is a results-oriented theory of ethics claiming that one should do that which brings about the greatest amount of utility – which is usually defined generally as pleasure and avoidance of pain – for the most people possible. Utilitarians behave in ways that promote the general welfare of society. Utilitarianism as an ethical theory is both a consequentialist theory and (typically) a hedonistic one. It is consequentialist because it judges acts to be right or wrong based on what consequences result from the act, rather than why the person did it, or whether the right rule was followed (Gustafson 2018). Utilitarianism is hedonistic in that pleasure is the end we aim for. Doing the right thing brings long-term benefits to society, and the right thing to do is exactly whatever will bring long-term benefits to society. Of course, an ethical decision may be difficult – it might cause me shortterm difficulty or harm – but it is made with the good of all in mind, because we should make our decisions based on what will bring about the greatest amount of

40

How Utilitarianism Can Inform Decent Managers in Plural and. . .

745

utility, or pleasure, for the most possible. Utilitarianism can be of great use to business managers (Gustafson 2013). Business is the most powerful force in society, bringing about more epochal transformations than anything else. So management of business has the power to indirectly impact all aspects of our lives – and we know this. What we eat, wear, enjoy, how we spend our time, communicate, relate to one another – in short, nearly everything we do is impacted by business, and so in some way by its management. Of course our daily work lives are directly impacted by management in the business world. Our workplace, our work relationships, and all of our business relationships with customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders greatly shape and form us, and management impacts all of those relationships, the spaces in which we maintain them, and the goals we seek as we conduct them. But we know that along with these amazing impacts of business, new questions about their benefits to society have arisen – such as consumer privacy in light of the power of marketing data analytics, the responsibilities and limits of companies in sifting truth from fake news, and the positive and negative impacts of social media, just to name a few. At some point, these social concerns to which business must answer are the concerns managers have to face. Whether we call them corporate social responsibilities, or the ethical responsibilities of business, or simply public relations risks – as the impacts of business on society have risen exponentially, so has the complexity and weight of these questions of public concern. Although businesses do have many impacts and outcomes in society and culture, there is no doubt that the first marker of good management is profitability. As Peter Drucker described successful management: Management must always, in every decision and action, put economic performance first. It can only justify its existence and its authority by the economic results it produces. There may be great non-economic results: the happiness of the members of the enterprise, the contribution to the welfare or culture of the community, etc. Yet management has failed if it fails to produce economic results. It has failed if it does not supply goods and services desired by the consumer at a price the consumer is willing to pay. It has failed if it does not improve or at least maintain the wealth producing capacity of the economic resources entrusted to it. (Drucker 1954, pp. 7–8)

At the same time, this success must be accomplished within the rules of the market, including both societal law and societal customs and expectations. Milton Friedman agreed with Drucker that the most important goal of a business manager is to make a profit for the company – he actually claims that making a profit is the manager’s social responsibility – and still, making a profit must be done within the rules of law and ethics: In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom. (o.e.; Friedman 1970)

746

A. Gustafson

We all know that a company can do acts which, although perfectly legal, bring on a firestorm of public outcry creating a public relations disaster. No good can come of that. So, according to Friedman, the managers’ job is to be financially successful within the bounds of society’s laws, rules, and goodwill. Their primary goal is to make a profit, but they must pursue that in light of the various obligations and expectations that society puts on business and the market. To do so is to act ethically. To not do so is to act unethically.

Utilitarian Ethical Theory To understand the utilitarian theory of ethics – that one should do what brings about the greatest happiness for the most – we should briefly consider a few important objections to utilitarianism which are often brought up. This will help clarify how the utilitarian approach works.

Long-Term Benefit and the Utility of Keeping Promises First, some may say that utilitarianism will advise a manager to make decisions which seem to be unethical, because the end (happiness) justifies the means (whatever they may be). For example, if we have a contract to do something, and we have promised to do it, but we find that to follow through would now cause a great deal of financial hardship to our company, and so impact our investors, employees, and other customers with a great deal of suffering, then we should break the promise. In fact, the right thing to do, since it will bring about greater amount of happiness, is to break the contract and promise. But then, it seems we have an ethical theory which promotes breaking promises when it is convenient and beneficial! However, this is a somewhat simplistic critique of utilitarianism. First, in the real world, contracts are often written in a way which spell out the consequences of failing to follow through – and in such a case, the contract has provision for such unexpected situations. More importantly, though, one must remember that utilitarianism is looking to the long term, not just the short-term benefits. Of course, one frequently has a business transaction setup which, as it nears, one wishes one could change the terms of the contract. But in most cases, one goes ahead and completes the terms of the contract. A company could renege on a deal but, if that occurs too often, soon the company will not be trusted. For the sake of maintaining trust in the market, trust in contracts, and reputation in the marketplace, and also to avoid possible penalties from court rulings, or even legal threats, against a practice of breaking contracts, companies will typically do what they agreed to do – because doing so brings about the greatest happiness not only in the short term (due to contract terms, penalties, legal consequences) but much more often in the long term (due to reputational damage, loss of trust).

40

How Utilitarianism Can Inform Decent Managers in Plural and. . .

747

The Utility of Justice, Fairness, and Other General Rules The larger point then is that utilitarianism is not merely concerned with what will make me immediately happier, it is concerned with maintaining the conditions for the greatest possibility of happiness. Most of us understand these sorts of decisions about long-term or short-term happiness all too well. Should I eat all I want and regret it later? Should I go to the gym to work out regularly and lose some weight or sit here relaxed on the couch regularly and get out of shape? Shall I restrain myself today from certain comforts so that I can have a well-established retirement account, or should I just live for the moment? And, in most of these cases, by and large, we realize that long-term happiness capacity is of greater value to us than momentary pleasure. Even if we regularly make the wrong choice, we know what the right one is, and admire those who have strength of resolve to do it. We know the greater good is to preserve happiness producing capacities for the long term. We also see this in business: in many places in the world there is little rule of law, and there are many violations of trust and goodwill. There is widespread bribery and graft, deceitful practices are endemic, and you can hardly trust anyone. In such places, business does not thrive, because business requires trust. A society or marketplace that does not have an environment of trust, concern for fair dealings, and a respect for and belief in the law will, ultimately, be much less able to provide happiness. Without justice, fairness, and good will, there will be less happiness. And, conversely, in a society where one finds justice, fair dealings, and goodwill, there will be more capacity for happiness. Many utilitarians have advocated rule utilitarianism. This is the view that we decide what rules we should generally follow according to those utilitarian criteria which, generally and usually, will bring the greatest happiness. So, for example, we might likely come up with rules like “don’t steal,” “don’t lie” (we all know of the boy who cried wolf!), and “be kind to others.” While there may be extenuating circumstances where we make an exception to such rules, by and large we will follow these rules, because we know that doing so generally will work to bring about the greater happiness in the longer term.

Utilitarian Calculus Another objection often brought against utilitarianism is that it is quite difficult to do the calculus, because there seem to be widespread disagreements about what happiness is. Particularly, if we consider a cross-cultural situation, what someone from the suburbs of Chicago considers most important for happiness may have quite different views than someone from Malaysia. How then would utilitarianism really be of value in such cross-cultural situations, or whenever people have differing views of what will bring about happiness? While this objection seems strong at first glance, it is not so strong once we consider various factors. First of all, differences of values between cultures are often overstated. Human beings generally have a wide number of shared values and

748

A. Gustafson

expectations of what will bring happiness: security and safety, some degree of freedom, financial well-being, social connections, respect, dignity, and fairness. We can find widespread cross-cultural agreement on many of these values. And when it comes to disagreements of what is a more important value, utilitarians like Mill have said that when you want to know between two pleasures which is higher and which is lower (which is more valuable, and which is less), you have little choice but to ask those who are acquainted with both. A manager, of course, is not focused on helping the entire world. He is, if he is good at his job, focused on his company and those with whom his firm has direct dealings. But this is fully compatible with utilitarianism. Both Mill and Sidgwick, two of the greatest utilitarian philosophers, agreed that one contributes to the greater good by helping those you have direct contact with. Sidgwick says, “practically each man, even with a view to universal Good, ought chiefly to concern himself with promoting the good of a limited number of human beings and that generally in proportion to the closeness of their connexion with him” (Sidgwick 1901, p. 382).

A Utilitarian Approach to Management The impact of the utilitarian approach in business and public administration is undeniable. Of “all the philosophies that have had the most influence on public administrators in terms of intellectual rigor and social appropriateness, utilitarianism holds first place in theory, if not in actual practice” (Henry 1992, p. 394). In economics, for example, utilitarianism is ubiquitous: “Public choice theory, rational choice theory, game theory, cost-benefit analysis, and the decision sciences in general all have their roots in utilitarianism” (Martin 1997, p. 6). Utilitarianism, with its concern for the greater interests of the many, speaks to the manager’s task as we described it above – seeking to achieve the best results for the business (profit) while paying attention to the societal concerns placed on it. Utilitarianism can be implemented on both the micro and macro level. At the micro level, a manager will be concerned with how to bring about the greatest good within the corporation itself – the workplace, as well as the immediate activities, policies, and processes of the company. At the macro level, a manager will be concerned about how the company is contributing to society’s well-being and impacting the industry at large. Some may think that management and ethics, particularly utilitarian concern for the greater happiness, are incompatible. They might say, “management is concerned about making a profit, not about what is ethical,” and others might say “management is not to be concerned with the greatest good for the greatest number of people but towards delivering return on investments (ROI).” First, most of us would agree with Friedman and Drucker that the manager does have to be concerned with whether or not actions or rules are legal and ethical – if for no other reason than because of criminal fines or imprisonment they may face, not to mention bad public relations. Second, while some managers attempt to deliver ROI by ignoring the greater good, many companies have demonstrated that

40

How Utilitarianism Can Inform Decent Managers in Plural and. . .

749

a concern for the greater good can lead to profitable and even superior ROI performance which has been explored recently by Hirschberg in his book, Stirring It Up (2008), as well as by Stangis and Smith in The Executive’s Guide to twenty-first Century Citizenship (2017). Stockholders or owners are indeed considered to be of primary concern to corporate managers – a healthy profit is desired and expected. But there are always additional stakeholder concerns that must be addressed by any manager. Even Jack Welch, the famous CEO of GE, eventually came to say: “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.” And further: “Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy. . . Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.” And: “The idea that shareholder value is a strategy is insane. [Profit] is the product of your combined efforts – from the management to the employees” (Financial Times, 12 March, 2009). The employees must receive fair wages, the suppliers must be paid on time, the customers must receive satisfaction, the government must receive its taxes and have its laws obeyed, the investors or financial lenders must be paid as agreed upon, and good will in the community in which the company exists is important as well. One cannot escape stakeholder concerns, and to ignore these is to ask for trouble. In this sense, the stakeholder managerial approach which seeks to be concerned with all involved in the company’s well-being will be concerned, in this broad sense, with the common concern of all, or the general well-being of the many. Some critics think that utilitarianism, in focusing on the total happiness of all, leads us to neglect our special obligations, such as to one’s family or friends, or even one’s own company. But that is not the case. Me taking care of my family, being a good friend to my friends, and successfully managing my own company are exactly the ways I contribute to the greater happiness overall. A society prospers when it has successful marriages, solid friendships, and well-run profitable businesses – and so I must keep my eye on those responsibilities I uniquely have. And specifically in the workplace, as a manager, I may have to turn my attention at times especially to a particular group of employees to help them understand or solve a problem, and as I do I obviously am not as engaged with other employees for that time, but I do that for the sake of the whole: the employees I am helping in this instance need extra support so that they can contribute to the whole as they should. Management is the art of making decisions about where support and resources should go. Some clients need more attention than others and should get it for the sake of the well-being of the company. Management is the art of deciding who should get what and when, and it is always done with an eye not merely on the well-being of the stockholders, but on the overall good of the company.

Utilitarianism Applied To consider how a utilitarian approach would impact management, it is useful to consider the advice of John Stuart Mill, one of the great utilitarian philosophers, who also was known for his economic theories and his writings on liberty and women’s

750

A. Gustafson

suffrage. Mill had unique insight as a manager, because he worked for the East India Trading Company for 35 years. Mill rarely applied his utilitarianism to the workplace directly in his writings (although he had much to say about economics), but it is not difficult to consider various practical reasons why utilitarianism functions well in the workplace, and how it would support particular policies and fundamental practices. (a) Basis for ethics for all. Utilitarianism was meant to provide a basis for ethics in society which did not require religion, although it is compatible with it. In the workplace, we need an ethical basis for our decisions which makes sense to everyone, and since everyone can at least agree that pleasure is good and pain is bad, we have a decent starting point for agreement. Of course, there will be different ideas of what will bring about the greatest happiness for most, but what utilitarianism brings is a common starting point and a criterion for having such discussions. (b) Good basis for teamwork attitude. Mill believes that people can and will, as they cooperate with others, tend to see the interests of others as their own interests: So long as they are co-operating, their ends are identified with those of others; there is at least a temporary feeling that the interests of others are their own interests. Not only does all strengthening of social ties, and all healthy growth of society, give to each individual a stronger personal interest in practically consulting the welfare of others, it also leads him to identify his feelings more and more with their good,. . .He comes, as though instinctively, to be conscious of himself as a being who of course pays regard to others. (Mill 1998, p. 78)

This is a very useful way to conceive of the workplace, and it provides a good foundation for developing a teamwork attitude in the workplace. (c) Justice and fairness. Mill believes most of us know and understand that a culture which respects justice and fairness will be a source of greater happiness for all of us than a culture where we cannot depend on fair processes and just decisions. So this utilitarian concern for the greater happiness is a foundation for pursuing justice and fairness through workplace policies and decisions. (d) Liberty and respect for the individual. Mill wrote an entire book on liberty. In this book, he wrote against the “tyranny of the majority” and encouraged open mindedness towards people who do things in unconventional ways (Mill 2007, p. 10). He argued that cultures which allow and respect unique individual ways of doing things tend to be more innovative and progressive, and so, more capable of happiness. For Mill, respecting individual liberty leads to a more enhanced and happier culture. So, in the utilitarian-minded workplace, autonomy, experimental projects, and creative ways of doing things would be encouraged. (e) Concern for minority rights and equal rights. Mill constantly argued for the rights of women and also spoke out against slavery and for the rights of minorities (Mill 1850). Again, his arguments were that a society which oppresses minority groups or women simply cannot be capable of the same

40

How Utilitarianism Can Inform Decent Managers in Plural and. . .

751

sorts of overall happiness as a society which maintains respect and the dignity of all people, regardless of race or gender. Utilitarian ethics strongly support diversity and minority rights. (f) Meaningful work. Workers who see their work as contributing to the greater good are often more motivated. If workers see the company as being a positive force in society, they are more likely to buy in, stay loyal, and feel that work itself is a source of personal meaning for their lives. (g) Capitalism, cooperation, and commerce. For Mill, the greatest happiness, or “general interest,” as he sometimes called it, was central to his thinking (Mill 2007, p. 107). But he was not for socialism: “Individual management, by the one person principally interested, has great advantages over every description of collective management. Co-operation has but one thing to oppose to those advantages—the common interest of all the workers in the work” (Mill 1965, p. 792). For him, the ideal situation would be “[w]hen individual capitalist, as they will certainly do, add this [common interest] to their other points of advantage; when, even if only to increase their gains, they . . .connect the pecuniary interest of every person in their employment with the most efficient and most economical management of the concern; they are likely to gain an easy victory over [socialist] societies which retain the defects, while they cannot possess the full advantages, of the old [individual capitalist] system” (Mill 1965, p.792). Even the grandfather of scientific management theory himself, Frederick Winslow Taylor, emphasized that managers should pursue “[c]ooperation, not individualism” and the “[d]evelopment of each man to his greatest efficiency and prosperity.” Under such conditions, he claims, “[t]he larger profit would come to the whole world in general” (Taylor [1911] 1998, p. 74), and that is exactly the utilitarian claim – that management which pursues the development of each person’s betterment, and the cooperation of all together, will ultimately lead to greater good for all. (h) Competition brings about greater happiness. Cooperation, however, does not mean equality. It is not assumed that all will receive the same benefits. Again, Mill criticizes the socialists who do not understand the benefits of competition: “They forget that wherever competition is not, monopoly is; and that monopoly, in all its forms, is the taxation of the industrious for the support of indolence, if not of ‘plunder’” (Mill 1965, p. 794). Competition, he argues, benefits the worker with lower prices for goods, and in many cases with higher wages. “Competition may not be the best conceivable stimulus, but it is at present a necessary one, and no one can foresee the time when it will not be indispensable to progress” (Mill 1965, p. 795). This Praise of Competition Is Reminiscent of Adam Smith’s Famous Dictum that “[i]t is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages” (Smith [1776] 1904, p. 16).

752

A. Gustafson

So Mill certainly sees utilitarianism to be well suited to business practice. It provides a basis for ethics which can apply to all, while providing a basis for meaningful work and teamwork rooted in justice and fairness, respect for individuals and freedom, and the rights of minority groups. Mill’s utilitarianism also sees clear benefits to society “indispensable to progress” derived from industrious commerce and fair competition in a well administered free market economy.

Utilitarian Management, Pluralism, and Diverse Contexts Today we live in a culturally diverse world. A manager who wishes to manage according to the utilitarian ethic will have to deal with that pluralism and the diverse contexts that come with it. When ethicists talk about pluralism, it is used in a couple different ways. First, by ethical pluralism we may simply mean that there are many different views on ethical rules or morals and they may not line up with our own but we are willing to respect them and have an open mind to learn from them. As we have seen, the utilitarian tends to think that allowing for diversity and individual liberty is important for maintaining a culture that is more capable of happiness. That is not to say that everyone is right, only that everyone is entitled to their own opinion. And, of course, there may be limits to that respect. Obviously, everyone is entitled to their own opinion about who will win the Super Bowl – I may think it will be the New England Patriots, and my friend may claim it will be the Chicago Bears, and another may be sure that it will be the Miami Dolphins. In some sense, everyone is entitled to their opinion on which team will win. But it would be absurd for someone to claim that it will be the Los Angeles Dodgers (a baseball team) who will win the Super Bowl. Such a view is outside of the bounds of possibility and, while we will not coerce someone to give up such a ridiculous view, anyone who understands sports will see that it is a ridiculous position. It is like claiming that your favorite number is “purple” or that the best singer to ever live is “my toothbrush” – you can believe what you want but we do not respect your opinion as being possibly valid. Similarly, ethical pluralism may respect many viewpoints, but certainly does not have to respect all viewpoints. Notice also that ethical pluralism is not ethical relativism – which says that morality is relative to each individual or perhaps relative to culture. Of course, some acts are moral relative to the individual – it is appropriate for me to passionately kiss my wife on the lips, but you certainly should not! And while it is appropriate for you to use your toothbrush to brush your teeth, it would be wrong for me to use your toothbrush to brush my teeth. However, the fact that some specific actions are relatively moral or immoral does not mean that all acts are relatively moral. In fact, we probably all agree here in the general (nonrelative) principle that “everyone should use their own toothbrush.” Ethical relativism will say, “whatever is right and wrong for you is uniquely right and wrong for you, but that has nothing to do with what is right and wrong for me,” while ethical pluralism would say “You have a different set of moral principles than I do, and I can respect that, although I may not agree with all of your conclusions, and in fact I think you are wrong on

40

How Utilitarianism Can Inform Decent Managers in Plural and. . .

753

several counts.” To conclude, ethical pluralism is the view that I respect a variety of (although not all conceivable) ethical frameworks and perspectives, and try to learn from them with an open mind. Another, more interesting, kind of pluralism for a manager to consider is value pluralism: the view that there are a variety of values which we should pursue, that at times these values come into conflict, that this conflict may be irresolvable and the values are incommensurate. Often, in such situations, we have to resolve ourselves to either choose one value over the other, or come to a compromise where we are unable to fulfill either value completely. It seems that this is exactly the predicament of a manager – you have the concerns of the employees, the stockholders, the financial investors, of the suppliers, the customers, and the general public to consider. And you also have a concern to provide quality, efficiency, fair price, a healthy profit, maintain a reputation, and a number of other concerns – none of which can simply be disregarded. One might say that, while the manager does have to be concerned about all of these stakeholders, his or her real concern is actually just the stockholder. The manager tries to keep the customers, employees, suppliers, and banks satisfied so that he or she can maximize profit for the shareholders. According to this view, there is still just one value guiding the manager: the shareholder value. This shareholder theory which became popular in the early 1980s has had a powerful hold on management theory for over three decades. But more recently, this single-minded focus has been criticized on several fronts, and disavowed by more and more executives (including the aforementioned Jack Welch). In the very first sentence of the first chapter of his Principles of Scientific Management (1911), Taylor stated that the manager must be concerned with the well-being of employees as well as the owners’ prosperity: “The principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee” (Taylor 1911, p. 1). Intelligent managers of successful companies have long seen their success to be tied to the success of society around them, and have included efforts to improve their community as part of their plan for success. As Amartya Sen, a contemporary economist, has noted, “[i]f economic sense includes the achievement of a good society in which one lives, then the distributional improvements can be counted in as parts of sensible outcomes even for business. Visionary industrialists and businesspersons have tended to encourage this line of reasoning” (Sen 1993, p. 52). This suggests that shareholder theory, for all its charming simplicity, is far too simple to help a manager really understand the complexities of managing. It certainly seems that the manager has multiple values or concerns that he or she is attempting to maximize simultaneously. Therefore, the manager’s job is one of trying to balance these concerns, so that resources are allocated in such a way that one can achieve satisfaction for the many stakeholders who have a stake in the decisions of the company. Those values and concerns are often not in sync, and decisions must be made as to how much of a raise to give employees, whether prices should be raised for customers, whether dividends should be given to shareholders, and so on. The manager is responsible to each of these parties, and must weigh and judge their various concerns and values against each other. This is a situation of

754

A. Gustafson

value pluralism. If a manager does not take into account the good of the various aggregate parts of this whole, he or she will most likely fail. It is not that each of the stakeholders has an equal status necessarily, but each one’s satisfaction must be taken into account. How does utilitarianism, the view that one should do what brings about the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people, help in such a situation? It provides a unified framework for having the discussions, for explaining the decisions made, and for helping people see the logic of why the decision is for the greater happiness of the whole. If managers expect buy in for their decisions, it seems that the utilitarian goal is and must be the goal of a successful manager. So what utilitarianism brings is a framework for thinking about what must be done. Furthermore, it gives a vision for what a business should be, and for how to attain success.

Conclusion In the workplace, a utilitarian approach will focus, at the micro (corporate) level, on the workplace culture, rights of individuals, and responsibilities we have to support the well-being of the company community; and, at macro level, on responsibilities of the corporation to the broader community and to society at large. While an instrumentalist mindset would view business merely as a means to an end, today many employees and employers seek to create a work environment that is meaningful, i.e., that calls upon people’s ambitions, beliefs, and passions and upon work done collectively and in collaboration, to achieve the good of the community. Utilitarianism has many advantages for management, including: strong grounding for cooperation and teamwork; meaningful work for employees; a basis for respect, diversity, and individual autonomy; an awareness of the importance of competition; and an improved and progressing society.

Cross-References ▶ Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy and Its Relevance for Modern Management ▶ How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business ▶ Organizations, Virtue Ethics, and Narrative Identity

References Drucker P [1954] (2006) The practice of management. HarperCollins, New York Financial Times (2009, March 12) Welch condemns share price focus Friedman M (1970, September 30) The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. New York Times Gustafson A (2013) In defense of a utilitarian business ethic. Bus Soc Rev 118(3):325–360

40

How Utilitarianism Can Inform Decent Managers in Plural and. . .

755

Gustafson A (2018) Consequentialism and non-nonsequentialism. In: Heath E, Kaldis B, Marcoux A (eds) The Routledge companion to business ethics. Routledge, Abingdon/New York, pp 79–95 Henry N (1992) Public administration and public affairs. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs Hirschberg G (2008) Stirring it up. Hyperion, New York Martin L (1997) Jeremy Bentham: utilitarianism, public policy and the administrative state. J Manag Hist 3(3):272–282 Mill JS (1850, January) On the Negro question. Fraser’s Magazine, XLI, pp 25–31 Mill JS (1965) Principles of political economy [1848]. In: Collected works of John Stuart Mill, vol 3. University of Toronto Press, Toronto Mill JS (1998) In: Crisp R (ed) Utilitarianism. Oxford University Press, Oxford Mill JS (2007) In: Ryan A (ed) On liberty [1859] and the subjection of women [1869]. Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth Sen A (1993) Does business ethics make economic sense? Bus Ethics Q 3(1):45–54 Sidgwick H (1901) The methods of ethics. Macmillan & Co., New York Smith A (1904) In: Cannan E (ed) An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations [1776]. Methuen, London Stangis D, Smith KV (2017) The executives’ guide to 21st century corporate citizenship: how your company can win the battle for reputation and impact. Emerald Publishing, Bingley Taylor FW [1911] (1998) The principles of scientific management. Dover Publications, Mineola

A Good Manager Serves Two Masters: A Kantian Perspective

41

Wim Dubbink and Luc Van Liedekerke

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Manager Serves Two Masters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Good Manager Compels the Organization to Operate in Accordance with Morality of Right . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Three Forms of Organizational Misconduct . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Need for Active Moral Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Morally Active Employee vs Morally Passive Employee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conditions for Moral Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

758 758 761 762 766 769 770 774 774

Abstract

From a Kantian perspective, the good manager must serve two masters: the organization and morality. Serving morality is an encompassing and challenging task in our day and age; it involves a lot more than making employees comply with rules. We demonstrate this by making the abstract task of “serving two masters” concrete, and work out the specifics thereof. At a minimum, serving two masters means ensuring that the organization “upholds legality” or prevents organizational misconduct. This goal implies moral care tasks for the manager. These depend on historical factors. In today’s society, it includes the onerous task of stimulating employees to become “morally active employees.” An morally active employee has a specific moral character that Kant defines in terms of Denkungsart. Stimulating the development of moral character is a challenge. Moral character can only W. Dubbink (*) Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] L. Van Liedekerke Faculty of Applied Economics, University of Antwerp, Antwerpen, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_33

757

758

W. Dubbink and L. Van Liedekerke

grow in and through freedom. One cannot command an employee to have a robust moral character. It also implies that each employee is given a space in which they are both able and expected to take decisions independently. Keywords

Kant · Good manager · Organizational misconduct · Moral character · Denkungsart

Introduction What constitutes a good manager in Kant’s view? Kant lived at a time when managers as we know them today did not exist. Even organizations as we know them had yet to emerge (Bovens 1998). In view of this, there is no way that Kant could ever have directly expressed an opinion on the idea of a good manager. We construct an answer with reference to Kant’s practical philosophy as a whole. In section “A Manager Serves Two Masters” we briefly address the fundamental question of whether a manager should take into account, or even give primacy to, moral considerations in cases where such considerations come into direct conflict with the objectives that a manager is required to achieve in line with the organization’s goals. We treat this as a fundamental question that must be resolved in view of an account of the meaning of morality. We conclude that the good manager has to live according to the principle that they serve two masters and that morality should be given priority. In the rest of the chapter, we aim to show that serving two masters is an onerous task in today’s society. It involves a lot more of the manager than offering employees an occasional business ethics course. It intervenes with daily business operation and organizational structure. In section “The Good Manager Compels the Organization to Operate in Accordance with Morality of Right,” we translate the abstract principle of “serving two masters” into the more practical principle that the good manager makes sure that their organization operates within the boundaries of “morality of right.” In section “Three Forms of Organizational Misconduct,” we reformulate this principle in terms of combatting misconduct. In section “The Need for Active Moral Agency,” we argue that combatting misconduct has become a difficult task in today’s society. The state cannot do this alone. In sections “Morally Active Employee vs Morally Passive Employee” and “Conditions for Moral Development,” we work out the consequences of this idea by asking what kind of moral character employees need to develop and how the manager can assist in the development of that moral character.

A Manager Serves Two Masters A general and noncontroversial definition of the “manager” concept might read as follows: a professional within an organization who fulfils a supervisory position to ensure that a process is carried out effectively. The manager’s role is to make sure

41

A Good Manager Serves Two Masters: A Kantian Perspective

759

that the organization’s goals are achieved. What this definition does not clarify are the boundaries within which the manager should try to achieve the organization’s goals. Are the organization’s goals the only relevant consideration? Do they eclipse all other considerations? What interests us here is the question of whether or not a good manager has to take morality into account. From a Kantian perspective, there is only one answer to this question: yes, they do. This requirement should be stated in even stronger terms: a manager serves both morality and the organization they work for, but when it comes to a conflict between these two masters, the former has primacy. In this section, we will provide a Kantian argument for this position. We start by looking at the question of how morality can make the bold claim that we ought to be take her seriously (i.e., how we can ground morality). It will be shown that, according to Kant, a proper grounding of morality implies her primacy over any other value, concern, or interest. “Good ethics is good business” is a slogan that business ethicists are swift to embrace (see, e.g., Edward Lowe Foundation n.d.). This slogan grounds morality in self-interest or prudence and is often used in the business context. It can also be used as an argument as to why the manager ought to take morality seriously. A good manager optimizes the organization’s interest and part of that interest is to take into account all of the relevant forces in the wider environment. One of these forces is morality. From a Kantian perspective, this common approach to grounding morality must be rejected. It does not ground morality as an independent and intrinsic consideration. Quite the contrary, morality is only grounded as a derivative interest. After all, it states that one has to take morality into account because it serves the organization’s interest. For Kant, such a grounding is not merely insufficient: it is an immoral way to ground morality, exactly because the interest in morality is made dependent upon something else and thus does not (really) take morality seriously. For Kant a serious grounding of morality demonstrates how and why morality has to be taken seriously for her own sake, i.e., on the basis of intrinsic arguments. So how does Kant ground both morality and its primacy? We pursue a line of reasoning that does not merely point at the importance of the famous Categorical Imperative (CI); arguments that rely heavily on the CI beg the question as to why this CI is supposed to be so important. We start by distinguishing between given morality and morality as a mere idea. Given morality is morality taken as set of substantive norms and values that apply at a certain point in time. Morality as a mere idea is stripped of all historical contingency brought in by all concrete norms, values, and principles. The concept (merely) refers to the formal idea of that which is absolutely good and right (whatever that might turn out to be). It should be noted that while morality “as a mere idea” sounds highly abstract, everyone is actually familiar with the idea. If Sarah says, “It’s morally wrong to discriminate against women,” Diane might answer, “We think it’s wrong nowadays, but is it really wrong?”. Everyone can understand Diane’s argument, even if they disagree. Understanding this argument is only possible if one is able to distinguish between a moral judgment as it applies in a given place at a given time (in accordance with a historical moral system) and morality as a mere idea.

760

W. Dubbink and L. Van Liedekerke

In order to ground both morality and its primacy, the argument that morality (formally) refers to “that which is absolutely good” is key. Formally speaking, it can be argued that the absolute good must be a categorical concern. A categorical concern holds unconditionally. It cannot be set aside by whatever reason. As nothing goes above the absolute, the absolute must be categorical. For the same reason, it must also be given primacy. We will explicate this argument by first elaborating on the distinction between a categorical and a hypothetical way of thinking or discourse. Subsequently we return to the issue how and why a proper grounding of morality acknowledges its intrinsic value and why morality must have primacy. A hypothetical discourse shows why doing a particular thing is good or right, given a certain purpose (or assumption). Economic discourse is one example of a hypothetical discourse. It tells us that Act A is a good act, given that making money or generating economic prosperity is our goal. Legal discourse is also hypothetical in nature. It tells us that Act B is a good or right act, given that we want to stay within the boundaries of the law (and avoid the penalties that come with breaking the law). Categorical discourse is a different proposition altogether. It asserts that we have to take a certain course of action regardless of any goal that might be of personal interest. No condition is attached to making the imperative a requirement that has to be taken into account. As human beings and members of society, we are all very familiar with hypothetical discourse. All day long, we hear advice and prescriptions along the lines of “if you want to achieve x, then you have to do y.” But we are also aware of categorical discourse. It follows from being able to understand the idea or structure of hypothetical discourse; we can also think the idea of categorical discourse. In other words, since we are constantly being bombarded with propositions such as “work hard and then you’ll become rich” or “do this Zen course and then you’ll be stress-free,” our minds automatically grasp the idea that it must be possible to will or want something without a condition. Even more to the point, we realize that we need this idea of the “unconditional imperative” if we are to choose between all those hypothetical discourses and determine whether these goals are actually worthwhile: people are beings who necessarily find themselves asking the question: “what should I ultimately do or want?”. Only by positioning ourselves in relation to what we ultimately want can we escape the inevitable arbitrariness that is a given in any hypothetical discourse. When we see ourselves in relation to the ultimate act or will, we find ourselves in the domain of categorical discourse. We can now see how Kant grounds morality and its primacy. As to its formal idea, morality refers to the absolute good and right. Hence, the commandments of morality must (formally speaking) be categorical commandments. It belongs to the idea of the categorical that it must be given primacy: categorical things are things that must be done unconditionally. This brief introduction to the way in which Kant grounds the primacy of morality leaves many questions unanswered, questions that fall outside the scope of this chapter. However, it is clear that, according to the Kantian perspective, the manager should serve two masters and that in the event of a direct conflict, morality prevails. This has to be the case because the concept of morality refers to categorical

41

A Good Manager Serves Two Masters: A Kantian Perspective

761

prescriptions, whereas promoting the organization’s goals is a hypothetical prescription. Morality’s categorical thinking inevitably overrules all hypothetical thinking.

The Good Manager Compels the Organization to Operate in Accordance with Morality of Right What are the moral duties of the good manager, who is aware that they must serve two masters? In this section we translate the abstract formula “serving two masters” in a more concrete principle. We go about in three steps. First, we discuss what morality requires of human beings, Kantian speaking. Next, we infer what this implies for the organization, and then we look at the manager, the person working in and for the organization. When speaking of the moral duties of human beings, Kant (1797/1914) sums up two general assignments. Firstly, people have to abide by the prevailing moral principles and rules in order to enable the greatest possible freedom for every human being. This aspect of morality is oriented toward the other (i.e., fellow human beings). In this regard, Kant (1797/1914) speaks of the requirement to adhere to morality of right. We take “morality of right” to be observance of the set of moral rules that an agent is required to obey to protect other people, their freedom, and everything else (human or nonhuman) that is worthy of protection. People must also strive toward moral perfection. This means that people have to become virtuous and develop their moral character (idem). This aspect of morality thus has to do with the person’s being and the constitution of agency. This implies overcoming natural deficiencies such as jealousy, anger, greed, or excessive self-love (ibid). It also implies developing a “mode of thought” (Denkungsart) that constantly inculcates the will to act morally (Kant 1798/1917, p. 286). Of course, ultimate perfection is always just a distant glimmer on the horizon: an aspiration at best. What can we infer about the duties of the organization, generally speaking, based on this? In this chapter, we stick to a restricted conception of the organization. We include entities such as Shell, a school, or a government department as organizations but exclude brass plate companies, although legally speaking they do qualify as organizations. Restricting the organization in that way, Selznick (1994), p. 233; see also Scott 1998) refers to the organization as an agent that is also a “special purpose tool.” As agent, the organization ought to have the same duties as human beings, insofar as the protection of human beings (and other morally relevant things) is involved. After all, as agent the organization may affect or harm human beings. Hence, the organization must adhere to morality of right. Yet, as special purpose tool, Selznick also places the organization in the order of things. Because of that, it does not make sense to state that the organization ought to pursue self-perfection for its own sake. As a thing, the organization does not have intrinsic value. The manager is a representative of the organization. They must therefore make sure that the organization fulfills its moral duties. This means that the good manager makes sure the organization complies with the requirements of “morality of right.”

762

W. Dubbink and L. Van Liedekerke

We note that this formulation of the general duty of the organization is still highly abstract and formal. Kant always starts out abstract and formal. In moving from abstract to concrete, we must make historical circumstances relevant. These include the degree of imperfection of positive law, i.e., the degree to which positive law reflects morality of right. For example, if positive law is only slightly imperfect, then adhering to morality of right inclines more toward compliance with legality; if the degree of imperfection is more substantial, then morality of right will oblige you to do more. As circumstances change all the time, there is not much sense in producing an exhaustive list of all concrete duties implied by the general duty to adhere to morality of right. Instead, we aim to demonstrate that in a society in which the organization is the dominant agent, the moral tasks of the Kantian good manager will be quite challenging. Their task is not easily fulfilled as it involves resetting some aspects of normal management practice. We do this by taking a relatively uncontroversial aspect of the manager’s task and demonstrating that even this uncontroversial task has serious implications in today’s historical circumstances. The uncontroversial task is that the manager must ensure that the organization remains within the bounds of legality and thus upholds all positive laws as well as respects the process of lawmaking. We make this task even more uncontroversial by taking as our starting point a society that is relatively “well-organized,” by which we mean a society in which the present legal order reflects morality of right to a considerable degree. It should be noted that while this task is uncontroversial, it is still important and urgent. The media provide us with daily evidence that upholding legality still presents a major challenge to organizations. Sooner or later, many companies engage in misconduct of one kind or another, and the consequences in terms of harm inflicted on people and areas of life in need of protection are great. The roll call of catastrophic events in this regard includes Union Carbide’s Bhopal disaster, Enron’s financial scandal, Exxon’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Volkswagen’s software fraud, Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller scandal, and the Purdue Pharma opioid scandal. Unfortunately, these headline stories are far from exceptional. The list of companies engaged in legal misconduct is endless.

Three Forms of Organizational Misconduct We take the statement that “the good manager serves two masters” to mean that managers have a duty to ensure the organization complies with morality of right. At the very least, this implies that the manager must ensure that the organization “upholds legality.” In this section we aim to get a better understanding of what this implies. We reformulate upholding legality in terms of preventing misconduct. We distinguish between three forms. The task of upholding legality can be formulated negatively, namely, via the idea that the good manager must prevent organizational misconduct. We distinguish between three forms of organizational misconduct. Each explanation is preceded

41

A Good Manager Serves Two Masters: A Kantian Perspective

763

by a brief introduction. In the first, we discuss a conceptualization of “the organization.” In relation to the first form of organizational misconduct: an organization is a special entity, characterized by the fact that, in order to act, it always depends on a person performing an act (Wolgast 1992). In this sense, an organization is an entity in which human action is interwoven with a structure that is nonhuman. We put this aspect at the core of our concept: the organization is an entity that exists by means of the distinction between representative and author. As soon as a society allows the organization as agent to exist (alongside human beings as agents), it necessarily makes the distinction between the author and representative. The representative is the human individual who actually (i.e., in terms of empirical causality) performs an act. The author is the entity to which an act is attributed by law (i.e., in terms of societal causality). Giving reality to the idea of an organization thus means that a range of legal and societal acts that are actually carried out by people (e.g., individual employees) are from that point on attributed to the organization as author. To the extent that an act is attributed to the organization, the person involved is no longer the author of their act. They have acted as a representative of the organization. This concept of the organization is purely formal. It only tells us that a distinction must be made. It does not tell us which acts should be attributed to the organization and which should not. (A discussion of the relevant criteria is beyond the scope of this chapter.) What can be said about them is that, since the nineteenth century, the organization has become the author of more and more acts. For instance, an organization was first accused of murder in the 1970s: in the Ford Pinto case of 1973 (Wikipedia, Ford Pinto). Prior to that case, an individual had always been regarded as the author if a person’s actions (in the context of an organization) resulted in fatalities. We are now in a position to define the first type of misconduct by organizations. This concerns strictly illegal acts that should be attributed to the organization (as author). The “Dieselgate” scandal is an example of this. Individual Volkswagen employees were of course involved in this scandal, but even so, Volkswagen as an organization is seen as its author. The company acted wrongfully and had to pay – a conclusion that did not exonerate individuals from legal responsibility as well. Misconduct of the first type also covers acts that inhabit a twilight zone between legal and nonlegal, i.e., acts that are not – strictly speaking – against the law but that completely disregard the spirit of the law. The definition of the second form of misconduct also requires a brief introduction. In a society that permits the organization as an entity to exist, some actions performed by people in the context of an organization will nevertheless be attributed to the employee as author. In the Netherlands in 2016, for example, there was a case in which several pool attendants were personally put on trial for the death of a child who had drowned while they were on duty and therefore acting in their role as employee (Tieleman 2017). Nowadays, reasons for identifying an employee as the author of an action include the fact that the employee in question was clearly working against the organization’s interests or was operating completely outside their own role (see Vardi and Weitz 2004).

764

W. Dubbink and L. Van Liedekerke

People in an organizational society are often harmed or disadvantaged by acts committed in an organizational context but which have an individual as the author. One very clear example is when an employee embezzles company funds for personal goals. Another is the case of an angry soldier who besieged his ex-lover’s home with an army tank. Although both are examples of acts carried out by someone who was formally occupying their role at the time, it is difficult to see how the organization could be the author of these acts. Some of these acts are not permissible by law and are therefore illegal (see Vardi and Weitz 2004). Other cases focus on acts whereby employees have behaved negligently and/or have shown complete indifference to the consequences of their behavior. One example where the employee should be regarded as an author is the case of Vestia, a Dutch housing association. Vestia ran into very serious financial problems when its financial managers began to speculate with derivatives. This was done under the guise of the organization’s interests, but it was clear to all that personal profit lay behind the trading activities of certain employees, since the managers in question stood to make considerable personal financial gains. In none of the cases where the individual remains an author can the organization be held directly responsible for these illegal acts. After all, it is not the author. At the same time, many of these cases reveal that the organization played a facilitating or encouraging role, or created a situation that elicited this illegal individual conduct. This situation can be categorized as organizational misconduct of the second type: an individual is the author of an illegal act, but the organizational context in which it took place was a relevant force in the act being carried out. The organizational misconduct therefore lies in its facilitating or encouraging role. We understand this role in both positive and negative terms. When it is seen as taking a positive role, the organization becomes a factor that indirectly leads to the act taking place. When its role is viewed negatively, the organization can be said to have done too little to counter the act. A clear example where the organization played such an encouraging or facilitating role was the Sears pricing scandal. Mechanics duped the company’s customers by carrying out unnecessary repairs, but this behavior was provoked by an abrupt change in company policy that adversely affected the mechanics’ earnings. The mechanics were pressured into generating ever-increasing turnover in order to maintain their existing level of pay (Paine-Sharp 1997). Another example is the case of WorldCom, in which accountants were pressured into acting fraudulently (Associated Press 2005). With regard to the negative facilitating role, we call particular attention to the bystander status. Many situations in which the individual is the author of an illegal act involve bystanders. These are employees who do not actively participate in the misconduct but who are aware of the illegal behavior and do their best to look the other way. One such example is the Harvey Weinstein case. As multiple articles and documentaries have made clear, many people in his organization had some degree of knowledge about his predatory behavior toward women. But they looked the other way and were either fully or partly conscious of doing so, for example, by pretending to themselves that the women involved had somehow encouraged Weinstein’s advances: “An actress will go to any lengths to make it in the movies!” We choose

41

A Good Manager Serves Two Masters: A Kantian Perspective

765

to regard the situation where an organization does not actively counteract indifference or passivity on the part of the bystander as misconduct of the second type. There are two reasons for being so stringent about an organization’s responsibility for making its employees active bystanders. Frequently, the immoral behavior of people within organizations can only go from strength to strength if it is facilitated by the passivity of bystanders. Furthermore, while it is impossible to rid an organization of every single rotten apple, even a small group of active bystanders can make organizational misconduct and individual immoral behavior much more difficult to get away with. The third form of misconduct also requires an introduction. The state and politics fulfil crucial tasks when it comes to making legality reflect morality of right. On the one hand, it is up to the state and its legislators to adequately formulate, implement, and enforce positive law. On the other hand, modern societies require vast amounts of administrative law and policy in order to operate effectively. Environmental regulations, spatial planning, and healthcare are just three areas that require intensive regulation. From a Kantian perspective, it may be stated that all administrative law and policy must be drawn up, implemented, and enforced within the bounds of reason. In a well-organized society, reason reigns over administrative law and policy. Once again, it is up to the state and its politicians to draw up and implement such rationally inspired administrative law and policy. The state and the political system are therefore crucial to the functioning of legality in a way that reflects morality of right. In the 1960s and 1970s, some political theorists still thought that people in the political arena could be permitted to pursue their own interests fully and unreservedly: the miraculous functioning of democratic institutions would steer all self-interest in the direction of a legality that reflected morality of right (see Held 1987). Today, we know that this notion can be consigned to the wasteland of lost illusions. The state and politics are fragile institutions. Even in a democracy, they need support from their citizens. When citizens refuse to comply with the rules en masse, the state becomes incapable of enforcing them. If citizens refuse, for instance, to provide policymakers with adequate information, the state cannot go on to develop effective policies. In light of these considerations, we can define misconduct of the third type as follows: an organization engages in misconduct when it deliberately sets out to undermine the proper functioning of the state and politics. It is the task of a good manager to make an active contribution toward combatting this institutional undermining of societies. It is striking that, although he was writing so long ago, Kant’s work addresses the issue of the moral task of a person with role responsibility. He argues that even someone with role responsibility remains a citizen at all times and must utilize “the public use of reason” (Kant 1784/1923, p. 37) to improve the institutional workings of society. This means that long before the Nuremberg trials, Kant constructed an argument which showed that the need for obedience or “passive action” cannot justify the argument “befehl ist befehl.” Kant thus also demonstrated centuries ago that a manager cannot claim to be exempted from assuming personal responsibility because their sole responsibility is to serve the interests of the shareholders. After all, this argument is formally identical to the “befehl ist befehl”

766

W. Dubbink and L. Van Liedekerke

argument. The least any person is required to do is publicly expose matters that need addressing, even if in some cases this may call for a degree of generalization to avoid the sensitivities associated with exposing the details of a specific case. Examples of behavior that undermines society are bribery, abuse of economic power, failure to adequately inform the state or its citizens, lobbying purely in defense of one’s own interests, and supporting specific political parties to obtain favors. It is very important to mention this third type of misconduct, as it is the type frequently committed by organizations. For example, car manufacturers in the USA have for years blocked legislation to make seatbelts compulsory; oil companies continue to support questionable scientific research into the climate crisis; and companies in the USA donate millions to political parties (McCamy 2018). Many do not even regard unscrupulous lobbying as a harmful activity. As a counterargument, it can be stated that a plurality of opinions can and should exist in a democratic system. Hence, not all lobbying is bad lobbying. We respond by stipulating when lobbying constitutes misconduct. First, lobbying is misconduct when it no longer dares to expose itself to public scrutiny. It can also be classified as misconduct when it is solely designed to serve the self-interest of the organization. In this respect, law-giving pushing back lobbying through a “public interest test” is very important (see, e.g., Ombudsman 2019). Further, lobbying is misconduct when the information provided by the organization is incomplete, untrue, or misleading. By reformulating the task of the good manager in terms of preventing misconduct, we have sought to elucidate what the task of “upholding legality” would mean, at the very least. We distinguished between three forms of misconduct that the good manager should work to counteract. These forms of misconduct are as follows: (1) acts committed by the organization (as author) that break the law (legality); (2) ways in which the organization facilitates or encourages immoral behavior by individuals (as author) within an organizational context; and (3) undermining the adequate functioning of the state and politics through activities against the public interest.

The Need for Active Moral Agency A good manager serves two masters. Serving two masters implies upholding the law – at the very least. Upholding the law means working to prevent misconduct. What must the good manager actually take care of in order to prevent misconduct from happening? When focusing on moral care tasks, the scale and the seriousness of the implications of the good manager’s task become clear. Our argument is built on the distinction between the moral goals the manager has to achieve and the care tasks that the manager should have in relation to achieving these goals. While a goal focuses on the world outside the organization and is defined in terms of what to achieve, a care task focuses on what is internal to the organization and how the goal should be achieved. We have defined “preventing misconduct” as the good manager’s goal. Which care tasks are implied by this goal?

41

A Good Manager Serves Two Masters: A Kantian Perspective

767

In examining the care tasks of the good manager, we first discuss an important evolution in Western European and North American societal governance thinking over the last 50 years; one that, not by chance, has coincided with a revival in business ethics. Previous understandings of the governance of society used to assume that responsibility for the social order was largely a concern of the state, who was considered very powerful in discharging this responsibility. The most important instrument at the service of the state was the law, a quasi-omnipotent instrument that could be applied to almost any purpose. The state used the law to, on the one hand, directly bind the organization (as author) to a set of rules and, on the other hand, bind the people within the organization (as both representative and author) to a set of rules. This way of thinking about the position, function, and strength of the state had major consequences for the manager, especially concerning managerial care aimed at preventing misconduct by the organization. The manager did not have to take on many tasks to prevent the organization from engaging in misconduct: the state took a significant part of this role out of the manager’s hands. It was up to the state to draw up the relevant legal rules and also take care of their enforcement. Consequently, the manager did not have it as a role-task to safeguard their own (and their employees’) moral attitude and competence. In other words, the manager and their employees could remain “morally passive.” But this was not because the state had taken over the safeguarding of employees’ moral attitudes and competences. In this way of thinking, it was simply considered unnecessary to appeal to the moral attitude and competence of people within the organization in order to manage problems. Legality could replace morality. This was seen as an advantage: after all, what self-respecting institutional order wants to depend on individual moral reflexes that are purely voluntary? Even ethicists went along with this way of thinking (Van Luijk 1993). In this way of thinking on societal governance, a self-respecting institutional order would bring about morality of right “over people’s heads,” so to speak, in ways that do not rely on the good intentions of individuals. If the manager had any care tasks in terms of countering the misconduct of the organization, it was to prevent situations in which they and their employees might become criminals. And criminal status was only afforded to those who actively sought to outsmart the state: managers who were not pursuing an active career in crime did not have to do much to ensure that they and their employees continued to operate within the limits set by morality. By the end of the 1970s, these assumptions about the state’s position in society had begun to change, particularly with regard to the state’s reach and effectiveness. Since then, an increasing number of books with unsettling titles have been published: Where the Law Ends (Stone 1975), “No Soul to Damn, No Body to Kick”: An Unscandalized Inquiry into the Problem of Corporate Punishment (Coffee 1981), Implementation Problems of Environmental Policy (Vollzugsprobleme der Umweltpolitik; Mayntz et al. 1978), and The Limits of State Action (Yeager 1991). Society slowly awoke from the dream that the state could govern society while individual agents remained morally passive, and a new position prevailed: the government cannot regulate everything and may in fact only be capable of regulating very little, unless its citizens actively support it in that task.

768

W. Dubbink and L. Van Liedekerke

Upholders of this new view emphasize many ways in which legal instruments fail to organize society (see also Dubbink 2003). They argue that legislation tends to lag years behind important changes in society (Mayntz et al. 1978); that good legislation can suffer serious damage at the hands of interest groups opposing sensible legislation simply out of self-interest (Mayntz et al. 1978); and that misconduct is very hard to counteract by a society that mainly relies on the working of its legal system (Bovens 1998). Obsolete laws, bad laws, foul play, fraud, grave but preventable accidents, environmental problems, and injustice of all kinds are the result. Discussions of the limits of state action, on the one hand, and the consequences thereof in terms of injustice and harm done to people, on the other, are relevant for our explanation of the care tasks of the good manager. We mention three reasons. Firstly, the organization is often identified as one of the main culprits giving rise to the new ungovernability and the ensuing injustice. In the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, society has gradually changed to the point where the organization has become a dominant social actor. It is argued that exactly this shift has led to a serious weakening of the state’s scope for action. The organization in particular is immune to legislation (legality) as an instrument of government. Authors such as Coffee (1981), Bovens (1998), and Waters (1978; see also Beck 1988) show that legislative instruments quickly lose their effectiveness in the organizational context, partly because of the difficulty in assigning responsibility for processes. Secondly, we should have little hope that, by themselves, employees will counteract the bad and unjust behavior of the organizations they work for, even if they are morally raised well by their parents, school teachers, and so forth. Many authors emphasize and warn that the organization is a morally risky environment. It is a strong institutional field that poses a great risk of having a detrimental effect on the moral attitude and competence of people. It is precisely within the context of the organization that people cheat, lie, and steal, both as representatives of the organization and as author (i.e., for their own gain) (Bandura et al. 2000; Donaldson 1982; Goodpaster 2007; MacLagan 1998; Vardi and Weitz 2004; Waters 1978). Thirdly, the rise of the organization has led to a situation in which harm and injustice easily scale up to unacceptable levels. In the past, a fraudulent salesperson could harm only a couple of people. Today, as representatives of the organization, bad employee actions have consequences of a magnitude that, in the past, would have been unthinkable. Naturally, harm and injustice are always bad. But whereas in the past, taking a certain level of risk that injustice might occur was acceptable (given the costs), that level of risk taking is no longer acceptable (Perrow 1984). Society can take in a lesser level of risk. So the situation is quite paradoxical: the rise of the organization has led to a situation in which society experiences more difficulties maintaining order and justice; at the same time, more societal discipline is needed to maintain order and justice. The upshot of this discussion is the following: in today’s society, upholding legality (i.e., the prevention of misconduct) is becoming an increasingly greater challenge. This is due to various factors, including the rise of the organization. According to many authors, the situation is such that we must let go of the old idea that the state can do this alone. Its principal instrument, the law, works imperfectly.

41

A Good Manager Serves Two Masters: A Kantian Perspective

769

Morally Active Employee vs Morally Passive Employee In this chapter, we emphasize that being a good manager is a challenging and onerous task. We have unfolded our argument by sketching the context within which misconduct has to be prevented in today’s society. The next step is to point at the solution many authors suggest, who address the limits of state action. Many argue that society needs to rely more on the moral competence of employees (Bovens 1998; Goodpaster 2007; Sharp Paine 1994; see: Dubbink 2003). They ought to be an active force in preventing misconduct of the organization. While endorsing this way out, we also aim to point out the difficulty of the assignment, insofar as Kant’s views on morality and psychology are correct, at least. In this section we reflect on the concept of a morally competent employee. In the next we elaborate on the manager’s tasks in view of stimulating moral agency of employees. If employees are to become a force in preventing misconduct of the organization, they ought to become morally competent employees. But what is a morally competent employee? It is important to realize that the meaning of this concept is dependent on historical factors, as moral competence is partly determined by what we expect the moral employee to do. Moral competence in the past was something different than it entails today. Following the idea that moral competence has an historical dimension, we elaborate on the concept of a morally competent employee by opposing the morally active employee (MAE) needed today, with the morally passive employee (MPE) that could be relied on the past. We consider both kinds as ideal types and not as reflections of the moral quality of actual people, past or present (see Table 1). We will start by describing the MPE, sufficient in the past, as based on four characteristics: 1. An MPE has no direct orientation toward morality in daily life: moral rules as such do not interest the MPE. This does not mean that the MPE fails to abide by these rules. They will obey all applicable legal and social rules, and so, assuming that they live in a well-organized society, they will comply with all moral rules, inadvertently. 2. An MPE has no commitment to morality as an idea. In so far as an MPE focuses on morality, they are concerned with the practical rules and standards that apply at a certain moment in time. These de facto rules form the only benchmark of morality for the MPE. Table 1 Characteristics of MPE vs MAE

Orientation on moral rules Benchmark for moral conduct Moral character Responsibility (including role as bystander)

Morally passive employee (MPE) Indirect Prevailing rules Optional Restricted

Morally active employee (MAE) Direct Morality as an idea Necessary; in particular as Denkungsart Wider

770

W. Dubbink and L. Van Liedekerke

3. An MPE’s morally conforming behavior is not necessarily rooted in an inner source that makes them truly will to will what is morally right. Kant defines this inner source as “a moral character” (Kant 1798/1917, p. 293), and so, in Kantian terms, an MPE does not necessarily act on the basis of moral character. This does not mean that the MPE is entirely lacking in moral character. It would be more accurate to describe the MPE’s moral character as largely being a black box: we do not know and need not know about it. 4. An MPE’s willingness to assume moral responsibility is limited, especially when the latter is called to extend beyond legal responsibility. For this reason, an MPE is also a passive bystander. When things fall outside their legal responsibility, the MPE lets them run their course. In all these aspects, the MAE is the opposite of the MPE: 1. An MAE does have a direct orientation on morality’s rules. Morality is important and has intrinsic meaning for the MAE. 2. An MAE is focused on morality as an idea. This implies that the MAE not only complies with all applicable moral rules but is also aware that the obligations of morality sometimes go beyond the requirements of the prevailing historical morality and that morality as an absolute obligation sometimes stands in opposition to morality as a historical given. 3. An MAE has a moral character. For Kant, character in the strict sense primarily means that action is determined by something called Denkungsart in German, which is translated as conduct of thought (Munzel 1999, p. xv) or mode of thought (Frierson 2017, p. 654): Having character in the strict sense indicates a property of the will evidencing that the subject binds himself to the practical principles that reason has irrevocably prescribed. (Kant 1798/1917, p. 293; authors’ translation) By emphasizing Denkungsart, Kant shows how moral character is always bound up with free will, while it can never be assumed that this will is in harmony with nature, or self-interest, or emotions. Thus, to have character means to be able to resist anything in order to uphold morality. 4. An MAE is far more willing than an MPE to take moral responsibility. This willingness goes beyond the boundaries of what is permissible by law and expected of the employee. The MAE also adopts a more active role as bystander. They will not hesitate to address moral problems within the organization, especially in situations where being an active bystander is facilitated by the organization and the price paid for whistleblowing is limited as a result.

Conditions for Moral Development In today’s context, to be a morally competent employee needed to prevent misconduct implies being a MAE. As the good manager has a duty to prevent misconduct, they must stimulate that their employees become MAE. Otherwise they cannot claim

41

A Good Manager Serves Two Masters: A Kantian Perspective

771

to do what needs to be done to uphold legality. Naturally, by saying this, we are not claiming that employees as human beings are not themselves also responsible for their moral development. From a Kantian point of view, an employee’s own responsibility is a given. Yet, morality is often not a matter of either – or. Thus, admitting that the employee has their own responsibility is not say that the manager may not also have a duty in this regard (and vice versa). Why is the task to stimulate MAE a challenging and onerous task for the manager, as we have claimed? Why not simply distribute a document with the 20 basic values, principles, and rules that each employee must uphold? Why does it not suffice to instruct the employee to take a course in business ethics? The answer can be found in Kant’s razor-sharp analysis of human psychology, i.e., his thinking on the way people learn morality and can develop their character. We will touch upon three aspects of Kant’s moral psychology. Each shows that being a good manager who aims to develop the MAE of their employees faces big challenges. A first aspect of Kant’s moral psychology is the insight that morality can only be developed in freedom (Kant 1803/1923). To understand this proposition, we need to return to the distinction between morality of right and moral perfection. Morality of right is the enforceable part of morality. It contains the rules by which everyone must abide in order to make a society – and, more specifically, a free society – possible. Where this dimension of morality is concerned, Kant states above all that people are required to obey it. It should not matter to fellow citizens what the motives are for disciplining oneself in the face of these demands (Kant 1797/1914). What counts is obedience. For Kant, one can use all kinds of instruments to enforce this obedience, including economic incentives and, if necessary, coercion. But Kant (1797/1914, p. 379 ff.) takes a very different view of moral perfection, which he considers to be part of the morality of virtue. The possibility to strife for moral perfection does not merely presuppose that an agent wants (i.e., wills) things. Their will has to be of a particular kind. The agent must be able to will to will. It makes perfect sense to say that a dog wills things (e.g., the dog wants food). But a dog cannot strife for moral perfection as it cannot “will to will”: it does not have the willing capacity to mold what it happens to will. Human beings can will to will and thus improve their moral character. Yet, a fundamental characteristic of human beings is that they cannot be coerced in the process of perfecting moral character. Changing one’s will to will works by recognizing things as valuable. A human being can therefore only work to improve their moral aptitude as a free being: voluntariness is a sine qua non. Therefore, in his reflections on moral education, Kant strongly opposes any form of punishment and imposition when it comes to developing the moral personality (Kant 1803/1923). Morality is learned in freedom, or not learned at all. This does not mean that Kant is opposed to any form of punishment and instruction, but he does oppose punishment and instruction when the aim is the moral development of the person concerned. A key principle that can be derived from this insight is that the good manager only indirectly encourages the moral development of their employees. Helping another person develop as a moral being means offering them an opportunity in freedom; opening a window for them, in other words. Whether someone seizes that

772

W. Dubbink and L. Van Liedekerke

opportunity must be left up to them. In this sense, developing a moral character is a radically different proposition from helping someone develop their mathematical skills or their command of French. With the latter, you can directly offer knowledge that needs to be learned, and this knowledge can also be tested. While it is true that morality has a cognitive dimension and is partly about learning skills, its essence is a transformation from a morally neutral or even evil will to a will that recognizes morality as its master. That process of recognition can only take place in freedom. Kant’s second psychological insight into morality is that humans are beings who can only understand the meaning of morality – and therefore morality as an idea – if they respect themselves. From a Kantian perspective, we can give two reasons for this. The first is that the recognition of the relevance of morality as an idea is nothing else than the recognition that morality deserves respect. Or, rather, it deserves to be met with awe, where awe is considered as the highest form of respect a person can have for something else (Kant 1788/1913, pp. 73–75). However, respect is a dialectic property. It is something that can only be given by a person who respects themselves. Only a person who thinks that they have and are entitled to a certain status can confer status on something else. So, in order for a person to respect morality, they must also be able to respect themselves. According to Kant, learning morality thus means that a human being learns to feel their own strength (Kant 1788/ 1913, pp. 152–153). The strength that Kant hints at here is the human capacity not just to will but to will to will. This capacity works as a double-edged sword. It creates the capacity to respect (others and morality) but at the same time creates the entitlement to respect. Psychologically, these cannot be separated. A crucial consequence of this situation is that people will only respect the law, if they can respect themselves and are given the respect that they themselves are entitled to. The insight that people can only develop morally if they are respected (by themselves and others) has important consequences for the good manager. A good manager always puts an employee in a position in which they have reason to be proud of themselves. Or, in less demanding terms: a good manager never gives an employee work from which they cannot derive any self-respect and cannot acknowledge that they themselves are respected. In the present context, we will elaborate on one important consequence of this principle: a good manager gives each employee a space in which they are able to, and expected to, take decisions independently. This applies to every employee, from the CEO to the lowest-ranked person in the organizational hierarchy. The good manager is therefore opposed to micromanagement and the comprehensive structuring of work via protocols. They assume that every employee (however humble) is an expert in a certain area (however limited) and therefore should be addressed as an expert, as a person who exerts some discretion. In his text against servility, Kant states that anyone who behaves like a worm should not complain when they are addressed as if they were a worm (Kant 1797/1914, p. 437). Rephrasing this idea from the manager’s perspective: a manager who always treats their employees like worms should not be surprised if they start behaving like worms. Worms do not have moral character. An additional advantage of addressing each employee as an expert is that moral competences, such as judgment, can only be developed by practicing them. An employee who is called

41

A Good Manager Serves Two Masters: A Kantian Perspective

773

on to be an expert has to make decisions independently and must therefore exercise their powers of judgment. Kant’s third psychological insight into morality is that people are not only moral beings or beings who are naturally well-disposed toward morality. We must think of humans as beings who belong to two worlds (Kant 1788/1913, pp. 114–119): as rational beings, they are in principle well-disposed toward morality; but as natural rational beings, they are focused on their own self-interest and happiness and not necessarily on morality. For this reason, humans as natural rational beings have the urge to ignore the authority of morality. However, according to Kant, humans as natural beings can never completely ignore the authority of morality, however, much they would like to. They are still also rational beings per se. People who, in acting as natural beings only, disregard the authority of morality and decide to act immorally will never be completely satisfied, even as natural beings. They cannot rid themselves of the rationality, even if they wanted to. As reason continues to reaffirm the authority of morality, its clear and persistent voice makes humans as natural beings evil. Consequently, they do not simply reject morality: they start to hate it, and change from ordinary immoral beings into evil beings (Kant 1793). This evil manifests itself psychologically, among other things, in a person’s tendency to seize upon every excuse in order to refuse to take on moral responsibility. Human hatred of morality is a highly relevant factor in Kant’s moral psychology. Because of their hatred of morality, people will have a tendency to immediately break off their moral development project as soon as they are given an excuse to do so; and the excuse they have seized upon makes them feel entitled to do so. Hatred of morality, therefore, has major consequences for how the good manager has to perform their tasks. Humans, as natural beings, think of themselves as equal to all others. Hence, they see no difference between themselves and others when it comes to having a right to be happy or a right to the opportunities to be happy. In itself, this is not strange. In fact, morality confirms this basic human equality. After all, the value and dignity of humanity is determined by its reason, which is a quality of being human and therefore of every human being. People’s natural pursuit of equality makes it very difficult for them to tolerate inequality. In this context, the experience of inequality immediately gives people the excuse they are looking for to break off any moral development. Consequently, the good manager has the task of creating an atmosphere of equality within the organization. There should be no unjust or unjustifiable inequality. On this point, Kant draws attention to two aspects of inequality: unequal distribution of revenue and/or goods and unequal distribution of power (Kant 1803/1923). When people are forced to function in circumstances of unjust distribution of goods or illegitimate distribution of power, they will refuse to develop morally. It is therefore up to the good manager to ensure that these injustices do not exist in the organization. Only then will the condition under which employees can develop their moral character and competences be met. Hence, the Kantian good manager, for example, makes sure that the revenues of all employees (including all managers!) are balanced. They also never use power arbitrarily.

774

W. Dubbink and L. Van Liedekerke

In conclusion: a good manager serves two masters. Serving morality means upholding legality. At a bare minimum, upholding legality means preventing misconduct by and within the organization. In today’s context, this implies that the good manager must stimulate the development of their employees as morally active employees. This is an onerous and challenging task, given Kant’s moral psychology. Three crucial insights have to be taken into account: morality can only be learned in freedom; only a person who respects themselves can develop morally; and human beings are not naturally disposed to only embrace morality. At least three crucial management principles follow from these insights: development of character should be encouraged indirectly, people should be addressed as experts, and, in an organization’s work environment, equality must prevail. While there is no scope to compare here these Kantian principles with other insights from the literature of organizational management, we note, in conclusion, that Kant’s perspective is radically different from conventional thinking about compliance. To put it bluntly, from a Kantian perspective, as a strategy to enhance morality, compliance strategy does everything wrong. Kant’s approach is much closer to contemporary thinking on integrity as espoused by Sharp Paine (1994), for example, who also emphasizes the impossibility of imposing morality. We content, however, that the Kantian principles we have set out in this chapter as a guide for the good manager go beyond Paine’s perspective, by advocating the requirements that (1) everyone should be in a position to be an expert and (2) equality should prevail in the organization.

Cross-References ▶ Is Moral Growth Possible for Managers? ▶ Moral Agency and Decent Management ▶ The Role of Virtue in Good Management

References Associated Press (2005) Ex-WorldCom accountant gets prison term. The New York Times. Available via DIALOG. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/06/business/exworldcom-accoun tant-gets-prison-term.html. Accessed 17 Jan 2020 Bandura A, Caprara GV, Zsolnai L (2000) Corporate transgressions through moral disengagement. J Hum Values 6(1):57–64 Beck U (1988) Gegengifte - Die organisierte Unverantwortlichkeit. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main Bovens M (1998) The quest for responsibility: accountability and citizenship in complex organizations. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA Coffee JC (1981) “No soul to damn, no body to kick”: an unscandalized inquiry into the problem of corporate punishment. Mich Law Rev 79:386–459 Donaldson T (1982) Corporations and morality. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs Dubbink W (2003) Assisting the invisible hand. Contested relations between market, state and civil society. Issues in business ethics series. Springer, Dordrecht

41

A Good Manager Serves Two Masters: A Kantian Perspective

775

Edward Lowe Foundation (n.d.) Why you need good business ethics. Available via DIALOG. https://edwardlowe.org/why-you-need-good-business-ethics/. Accessed 10 Jan 2020 Frierson PR (2017) Denkungsart in Kant’s anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. In: Altman MC (ed) The Palgrave Kant handbook. Palgrave handbooks in German idealism. Palgrave, London, pp 643–664 Goodpaster K (2007) Conscience and corporate culture. Blackwell Publishers, Malden Held D (1987) Models of democracy. Polity Press, Cambridge, MA Kant I (1784/1923) Beantwortung der Frage: waß ist Aufklärung? Kant’s gesammelte Schriften Band 8. W. De Gruyter, Berlin, pp 33–42 Kant I (1788/1913) Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. Kant’s gesammelte Schriften Band 5. W. De Gruyter, Berlin, pp 1–164 Kant I (1793/1910) Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft. Kant’s gesammelte Schriften Band 6. W. De Gruyter, Berlin, pp 1–202 Kant I (1797/1914) Die Metaphysik der Sitten. Kant’s gesammelte Schriften Band 6. W. De Gruyter, Berlin, pp 203–493 Kant I (1798/1917) Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht. Kant’s gesammelte Schriften Band 7. W. De Gruyter, Berlin, pp 117–334 Kant I (1803/1923) Über Pädagogik. Kant’s gesammelte Schriften Band 9. W. De Gruyter, Berlin, pp 439–499 MacLagan P (1998) Management and morality. A developmental perspective. Sage, London Mayntz R et al (1978) Vollzugsprobleme der Umweltpolitik. Empirische Untersuchung der Implementation von Gesetzen im Bereich der Luftinhaltung und des Gewässerschutzes. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart McCamy L (2018) Companies donate millions to political causes to have a say in the government – here are the ten that gave most in 2018. Business Insider. Available through DIALOG. https:// www.businessinsider.nl/companies-are-influencing-politics-by-donating-millions-to-politi cians-2018-9?international¼true&r¼US. Accessed 12 Jan 2020 Munzel GF (1999) Kant’s conception of moral character. The “critical” link of morality, anthropology, and reflective judgment. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Ombudsman (2019) Public interest. Available through DIALOG. https://www.ombudsman.parlia ment.nz/sites/default/files/2019-08/Public%20interest%20August%202019.pdf. Accessed 7 July 2020 Perrow C (1984) Normal accidents at Three Mile Island. In: Perrow C (ed) Normal accidents. Living with high-risk technologies. Basic Books, New York, pp 15–31 Scott WR (1981/1998) Organizations: rational, natural and open systems, 4th edn. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River Selznick P (1994) The moral commonwealth. Social theory and the promise of community. University of California Press, Berkeley Sharp Paine L (1994) Managing for organizational integrity. Harv Bus Rev 72(2):106–117 Sharp Paine L (1997) Cases in leadership, ethics and organizational integrity. Irwin, Chicago Stone CD (1975) Where the law ends: the social control of corporate behaviour. Harper and Row, New York Tieleman Y (2017) OM: Badmeesters en leraren hebben schuld aan dood Salam. In: De Gelderlander. Available through DIALOG. https://www.gelderlander.nl/rhenen/ombadmeesters-en-leraren-hebben-schuld-aan-dood-salam~a68240a8/. Accessed 7 July 2020 van Luijk H (1993) Om redelijk gewin. Oefeningen in bedrijfsethiek. Boom, Amsterdam Vardi Y, Weitz E (2004) Misbehavior in organizations. Theory, research, and management. Laurence Erlbaum Associates, London Waters JA (1978) Catch 20.5: corporate morality as an organizational phenomenon. Organ Dyn VII (/1):3–14 Wolgast E (1992) Ethics of an artificial person. Lost responsibility in professions and organizations. Stanford University Press, Stanford Yeager PC (1991) The limits of law. The public regulation of private pollution. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA

Moral Agency and Decent Management

42

Eva Tsahuridu

Contents Introduction: Moral Agency and Decent Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Decency and Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Decency at Work: Applying Kantian Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moral Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

778 779 783 787 790 790 790

Abstract

The recent emphasis on decent work in management and organization research has not been matched with a similar attention to decent management. This chapter explores decency and whether decent organizations and decent management are required for decency at work. It also discusses what decent management means for moral agents, whether they are being managed or are managing. Decent acts and decent behaviors require a moral motivation that overcomes tempting circumstances and a higher-than-ordinary level of difficulty. Decency at work requires that the dignity of, and respect for, people remains intact, in line with the widely accepted Kantian injunction to treat people as an end. Management theory and practice is not really concerned with the duties created by the moral agency of all people at work for moral agents who are managed and are managing. This lack of concern creates conditions that impede decent management and decency at work.

E. Tsahuridu (*) Formerly RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_16

777

778

E. Tsahuridu

Keywords

Decency · Decent management · Moral agency · Dignity · Respect · Kantian ethics · Margalit

Introduction: Moral Agency and Decent Management Over the last 20 years, we have experienced an increased research and policy focus on decent work, particularly as evidenced by a number of soft laws that have been developed in the area of labor. In 1999, the report of the Director General of the International Labour Organization (ILO 1999), presented during the 87th session of the International Labour Conference, was titled Decent Work. Back then, facing the new challenges that the new century was about to bring, the ILO defined its mission as: to improve the situation of human beings in the world of work. Today, that mission finds resonance in the widespread preoccupation of people at times of great change: to find sustainable opportunities for decent work. (ILO 1999)

The ILO further defines its primary goal as “to promote opportunities for women and men to obtain decent and productive work, in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity. . .” (ILO 1999) and sees decent work as a qualitative characteristic of jobs that relates to work conditions, as well as to its impact on the workers and on their feelings of value and satisfaction. Decent work is also seen as necessary for decent livelihoods and decent standards of living, because “without productive employment, the goals of decent living standards, social and economic development and personal fulfilment remain illusory” (ILO 1999). Poor jobs are described by the ILO as jobs which are “low in productivity, dangerous or lacking in basic social protection” (ILO 1999). Therefore, decent jobs have specific qualitative characteristics in relation to form, conditions and feelings of value and satisfaction. With regard to decent work, the primary concern is not on the impact of work on the individuals, or on their treatment, or on the role of organizations and their management in creating it. Decent work is more concerned with skill agility and responsiveness to change: Decent jobs will be created when firms and workers are able to adapt and acquire new capabilities so as to take advantage of new opportunities. Employment policies must anticipate technological and institutional change, so that workers are equipped to move into new jobs and enterprises have the skills and incentives to create them. (ILO 1999)

Decent work is the converging focus of the ILO’s four strategic objectives, which are the promotion of rights at work, employment, social protection, and social dialogue:

42

Moral Agency and Decent Management

779

Social dialogue requires participation and freedom of association, and is therefore an end in itself in democratic societies. It is also a means of ensuring conflict resolution, social equity and effective policy implementation. It is the means by which rights are defended, employment promoted and work secured. It is a source of stability at all levels, from the enterprise to society at large. (ILO 1999)

Another example of the focus of supranational organizations on decent work is the UN Global Compact, whose labor-specific principles stipulate that “businesses should uphold the freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining” (Principle 3); “all forms of forced and compulsory labour” should be eliminated (Principle 4); child labor should be effectively abolished (Principle 5); and “discrimination in respect of employment and occupation” should be eliminated (Principle 6). These principles are described as, at a minimum, meeting fundamental responsibilities in the areas of human rights, labor, environment, and anti-corruption (UN Global Compact 2015). Further, the Sustainable Development Goals adopted in 2015 (United Nations 2015) include Sustainable Development Goal 8, which refers to promoting “sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all” (p. 14), with the resolution to build a better future for all people, including the millions who have been denied the chance to lead decent, dignified and rewarding lives and to achieve their full human potential. (United Nations 2015, p. 12)

While we see a focus on decent work, decent jobs and decent standards of living in international labor policy, a corresponding emphasis on creating decent organizations populated by decent management is lacking. This chapter is not evaluating the characteristics of decent work and their adequacy. It assumes that the fundamental conditions and characteristics of decent work mentioned are desirable, even if inadequate. The focus of this chapter is on what decency means for organizations and management. Using Hobbes (1668/1994), Markus (2001), and Nuyen (2002), it explores decency and its relationship to dignity and respect for persons. Further, using Kant’s (1785/1959) and MacIntyre’s (2013) conceptions of moral autonomy and moral agency, it explores what decent management means for moral agents who manage, or are managed by, other moral agents.

Decency and Management To explore decent management and what it means for moral agency, it is important to clarify what decency is and where it sits on the ethics continuum. Is decent management of moral agents barely adequate, just right, or does it exceed requirements? And is it possible? Relatedly, is decent management a right of moral agents that creates obligation for organizations and management?

780

E. Tsahuridu

Etymology can provide a useful starting point to understand decency. Nuyen (2002) explains that, generally, “decency” is a term of measurement, which contains the notion of proportionality: The etymological root of “decency” is the Latin decēre, meaning something like fittingness, or appropriateness. A decent something, such as a decent remuneration or a decent effort, is something that is fitting or appropriate in the circumstances. What is fitting or appropriate, in turn, is typically what is proportionate. . . As such, the term ‘decent’ and its cognates can be used in non-moral as well as moral contexts. (p. 499)

In everyday language, decency has a number of other meanings. In the 1946 film Gilda, the phrase Gilda, are you decent? has been immortalized. Here, “decent” means: is your body adequately covered? Within the same semantic family, we have “indecent” proposals and “indecent” exposures, which are related to appropriateness of sexual relationships and attire. Commonly, decency also has to do with our actions and behavior, and its meaning has been intertwined with that of civility or manners. Markus (2001) distinguishes between civility and decency, arguing that, while both concepts have to do with recognition and respect, they are fundamentally different. Decency implies a respect for the ‘dignity’ of each person and some interest in, and commitment to, promoting the ability of all members of society to lead a dignified, humanly meaningful life. It involves not only the toleration of other views and convictions, but also an interest in and openness toward what they say along with an attempt to understand the reason why it can be meaningful to hold such a view. (Markus 2001, pp. 1021–1022)

On the other hand, civility focuses on recognizing the other person as a bearer of certain rights that must be respected. This distinction seems to imply a difference in distance and influence between civility and decency. We can only be decent towards people with whom we interact to a significant degree, and where we may be able to influence their ability to lead a dignified and meaningful life (Markus 2001). In this sense, I cannot be decent towards the elderly person standing on the bus by providing my seat but I can be civil, polite, or even considerate. Benziman (2014) uses the term “common decency” more as civility rather than as the decency owed to people we interact with to a significant degree (as described by Markus 2001). Benziman sees common decency as the way we would expect everyone to behave: this is not moral excellence but a standard of behavior that is appropriate among human beings, regardless of their relationship. Common decency, according to Benziman, gives rise to imperfect duties (Kant 1785/1959), which “admit exception in favor of inclination” (Benziman 2014, p. 92). Such acts are obligatory but their performance is chosen by the actor, as is the case with charity. While we have to practice such obligatory acts, we can choose when and towards whom to practice them, as they do not give rise to a right on any specific recipient: We are dealing here with minor acts of civility, considerateness, or decency. My action is directed toward her, but it is her qua another human being – not her qua any special

42

Moral Agency and Decent Management

781

relationship I might have with her. I would act the same way towards any other person. Thus it is not exactly her that I’m thinking of as I’m acting. In fact, I might not be thinking of anybody or anything in particular. I’m acting in this way because I’m well educated. This is simply what decent people do (Benziman 2014, p. 93).

Thomas Hobbes in the Leviathan (Hobbes 1668/1994) uses the term “manners” in the same sense as Markus’ (2001) decency. Hobbes explains that decency of behavior is about “how one man should salute another, or how a man should wash his mouth, or pick his teeth before company, and such other points of the small morals,” while manners are “those qualities of mankind that concern their living together in peace and unity” (Hobbes 1668/1994, p. 57). It seems that, with time, the concept of decency has increased its moral loading, while civility and manners have decreased it. In analyzing Hobbes’ description, Risse (2000) distinguishes between etiquette and morality. He seeks to elucidate what is meant to be a decent person in a moral sense. Risse does not see a decent person as one who possesses a specific virtue, as decency is not a specific virtue. Instead, he argues that a decent person’s character merits a positive overall evaluation. There is, however, a difference between being a decent person and behaving decently. Someone can behave in a decent manner, for a number of reasons, in a specific situation but not so in others. We would not characterize such a person as decent because consistency is lacking – even if we appreciate the actions themselves to be decent. Decency reflects minimal praise for something that is acceptable or regular, and may be used to describe a specific act, as well as the character of a person who consistently performs decent acts. Let us now turn to the concept of management. To continue with etymological insights, we find that the word “manage” comes from two sources: the “Italian word ‘maneggiare’ which (roughly translated) meant handling things (Latin, manus, a hand) and especially horses,” and the “French menager which meant careful use (especially in a household)” (Wensley 1996, p. 39). Wensley explains that management was initially a neutral (or sometimes even a pejorative) term, with managers originally the agents of owners or in charge of workhouses and not found in the civil service, which was run by “administrators.” Combining these etymological insights, if decency is about fittingness and appropriateness and, in a moral sense, about respecting human dignity, can it be accomplished through external handling and careful use? Is decent management possible? Or, what kind of management, if any, could be decent, and how can it be accomplished? An important issue with decent management is that we are not sure if it is asking too much or too little from those who manage others. Would we evaluate decent management as morally appropriate, as morally deficient, or as a supererogatory act (i.e., an act which leads to praise but whose omission does not lead to blame)? To start with, Heller’s (1988) work provides the foundation by addressing the fundamental question: “Good persons exist – how are they possible?” A good person, according to Heller, is one who “prefers to suffer wrong rather than do

782

E. Tsahuridu

wrong to others” (p. 174). Such a person makes the existential choice to be decent, a choice that is available to every human being, regardless of circumstance. On the other hand, Risse (2000) explains that calling somebody a decent person is to pass a bottom-line judgment that this person has a basic concern for other people, their reasons and feelings, but this judgment is consistent with his not having many morally desirable properties and with his having morally significant flaws. (p. 269)

Hence, a decent person, according to Risse, is not necessarily someone we would applaud as a person of integrity and good moral character. Nuyen (2002) agrees that a person’s decent character may deserve only minimal praise but argues that some decent acts or behaviors may in fact go well beyond minimal praise. This is because a decent act is not typically something that can be performed without effort or even pain, given that what makes an act decent is the fact that its proportionality, or appropriateness, has to be maintained despite the effects it has on an agent. This is another way in which proportionality, decēre, may be used to distinguish decency from kindliness, generosity, or benevolence. A person can be painlessly kind, or joyously generous, or naturally benevolent. In assessing the value of decency, however, we have to take into account the effects on an agent. (Nuyen 2002, p. 501)

To illustrate this point, Nuyen discusses the following example: [S]uppose that Smith is a wealthy employer with a thriving and very profitable business. Smith takes care to ensure that her employees are paid salaries and wages proportionate to the work performed and to the prevailing pay rates. Suppose that Jones is not a wealthy employer and has a business that is on the verge of bankruptcy. Nevertheless, Jones is also concerned with ensuring that appropriate wages and salaries are paid. (Nuyen 2002, p. 502)

While both Smith and Jones behave in a similar manner, we are inclined to describe as decent the actions and behaviors of Jones but not of Smith. Basic concern and proportionality are not sufficient to characterize an action as decent. Such characterization requires some level of cost to the actor, which the actor assumes in order to allow the action to take place. Nuyen (2002) sets out three conditions that must be met to appreciate a person’s action as decent in a specific situation: (1) the agent must have a basic concern for the other person and care for that person’s reasons and feelings; (2) because of that basic concern, the agent “believes that he should act in proportion to his perceived responsibility toward the other person” (p. 504); and (3) the agent faces significant tempting circumstances not to act in proportion to his perceived responsibilities but manages to overcome them, and succeeds in acting proportionately toward the other person, despite the effect of the decent action on the agent. Hence, a decent action is praiseworthy because the agent has acted proportionately out of concern and care, despite the effect that the proportionate behavior had

42

Moral Agency and Decent Management

783

on himself. Concern and care form the basis for the praiseworthiness of the action, because, as Nuyen explains, neither Smith nor Jones, as employers, would be regarded as acting decently if they pay their employees appropriately only because, say, they do not want to be in violation of labor laws. (p. 504)

So, the action becomes praiseworthy, even if the level of praise is moderate, because it is motivated by concern and care. This motivation compels the agent to act proportionately in relation to his responsibility to the other person. Proportionality is what distinguishes a decent action from a benevolent, kind, or generous one. Nuyen (2002) explains that disproportionate actions, even if motivated by concern, are not characterized as decent even if they are generous and kind, such as “paying workers enough to ensure that they could send their children to private schools” (p. 505). This is the case because the third condition requires a certain level of difficulty, if not sacrifice. If the appropriate action that is done out of concern can be done with such ease that the agent does not encounter a conflict or a temptation, then such an action is not a decent one. Nuyen qualifies that, for a decent act, “a non-trivial tempting circumstance” (p. 505) is required. In relation to decent management, we can argue that it can be evaluated as a characteristic of managers – but perhaps more fruitfully as a characteristic of managers’ actions. Using the criteria proposed by Nuyen (2002), managers’ acts towards those who are managed would be decent if they were motivated by concern and care and, as a result, managers accepted their responsibility to act proportionately, even in circumstances where their self-interest may suffer, and proceeded to successfully fulfill that responsibility. For example, a manager spends a large amount of funds to create needed training opportunities to employees that will provide the necessary skills for the imminent technological changes, and such spending results in a significant reduction in the bonus the manager receives. Such an act appears to fulfill the criteria of a decent action provided the act is motivated by concern for the employees and their learning and career aspirations, and not merely by the potential cost of employee replacement. However, we would not consider decent the act of a multinational organization’s CEO who, while making more than 1000 times the salary of the organization’s median employee, decides and declares: “we listened to our critics and are increasing minimum wage by 11%” if the pay increase is not expected to have any material consequence on the net profit of the organization or the CEO’s own remuneration.

Decency at Work: Applying Kantian Ethics Self-determination, justice, and fair treatment contribute to what is considered to be decent work. As Grandey et al. (2015) explain, the term “decent work”

784

E. Tsahuridu

not only codifies that employees have the right to employment that lives up to their expectations regarding both fair interpersonal treatment and fair wages, but dovetails with the justice and self-determination literatures (p. 773),

while “emotional labor violates basic human rights for decent work” (pp. 780–781). Injuring one’s self-respect undermines decency at work and results in the injured feeling humiliated. Margalit (1996) explains that humiliation is any behavior or condition that “constitutes a sound reason for a person to consider his or her selfrespect injured” (p. 9), a behavior or condition that can only be produced by other people and not by any other causes. It can also occur regardless of the intention or motivation of the person who causes it. Margalit, whose focus is the decent society, describes it as one where institutions avoid acting in ways that cause the people under their authority to consider themselves humiliated. Beside self-respect, another condition that facilitates decency is dignity. Markus (2001) describes a decent society as one whose institutional arrangements are oriented by principles, norms, and rules directed at creating and maintaining conditions of dignified, humanly meaningful life for all its members and that is able to extend its civility and decency to non-members as well. (p. 1022)

Markus focuses on the public arena but accepts that it is up to individual predispositions to create these conditions. Similarly, Crouch (2010) considers respect in encounters between individuals and institutions, and sees individual action as the bottom line of both collective and private life: In the case of ‘decency’. . .it follows that actual flesh and blood persons have to ‘do respect’ and be seen to do so, either as individuals or in collectivities, as agents within, and of, social institutions. (p. 90)

Applying these insights to the organization as a social system with a certain degree of authority over its employees and with management as its intermediaries, we would expect, as a condition for decency, that management be required to ensure that the self-respect and dignity of people are protected. It is impossible to talk of dignity and respect and not refer to Kant’s insights about how to treat other people and about what decent management of moral agents may entail. Kant’s concepts of perfect and imperfect duties, as developed in Foundations of The Metaphysics of Morals (Kant 1785/1959), provide a lens though which decent management can be explored. Several questions arise. Is decent management a duty that permits no exception, or is it an imperfect duty, i.e., one that may contribute to the agent’s happiness but that may also be omitted? If respecting the dignity of persons is required by every moral agent, what does that mean for moral agents who are managers, as compared to what it may mean for moral agents who are managed? And, is decent management possible? One ongoing issue with people at work is whether work arrangements can ever be ethical and, if that is possible, what are the required conditions. Let us reflect on how Kantian ethics may help us address these questions. Kant’s (1785/1959) prescription

42

Moral Agency and Decent Management

785

for ethics can be summarized under three conditions: (a) be subject to reason; (b) do unto others as you would have others do unto you; and (c) treat others as an end and never as a means only. The ability to discover the moral law through reason is what confers humans the condition of moral agency. Moral agency gives people dignity, which in turn requires that they be treated as ends in themselves. Kant’s autonomous persons are moral because they are rational: The equation of personhood with autonomy, and of autonomy with a moral entitlement to respect for one’s agency, originated with Kant. (Fallon 1994, p. 878)

In discussing the distinction between treating people as end and means, for Kant and earlier philosophers, MacIntyre (2013) explains that a human relationship informed by morality is one where each person treats the other as an end. This means to offer them what I take to be good reasons for acting in one way rather than another, but to leave it to them to evaluate those reasons. It is to be unwilling to influence another except by reasons which that other he or she judges to be good. It is to appeal to impersonal criteria of the validity of which each rational agent must be his or her own judge. (p. 35)

On the other hand, to treat someone as a means is to seek to make him or her an instrument of my purposes by adducing whatever influences or considerations will in fact be effective on this or that occasion. The generalizations of the sociology and psychology of persuasion are what I shall need to guide me, not the standards of a normative rationality. (p. 35)

Treating people as ends in themselves and not merely as means is allowing them to use their evaluative judgments and requires mutual respect, as well as self-respect. Respect for all others and one’s self denotes moral motivation, the necessary ingredient together with moral judgment for moral action. Dignity in the Kantian sense is intrinsic and does not depend on the choices we make, as everyone is an end in themselves (Vischer 2011). Defenders of the Kantian view, states Vischer, may accept the idea that dignity may be cultivated but also consider dangerous the notion that people have variable levels of dignity. What would follow then, according to Vischer, is that if everyone has equal moral standing, and everyone is an end in themselves, rather than a means to someone else’s ends, then the facilitation of a person’s ends can be an obvious way of honoring her dignity. (p. 227)

Human dignity is the foundation and goal of human rights, argues Sandkühler (2010), who sees its protection through the guarantee of the freedom and equality of every human being. The idea that all people should be treated with dignity and respect is widely accepted: “[f]ew formulas in philosophy have been so widely

786

E. Tsahuridu

accepted and variously interpreted as Kant’s injunction to treat humanity as an end in itself” (Hill 1980, p. 84). Applied to the organizational context, these insights denote that people at work are entitled to be treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their place in the hierarchy. This entitlement would impose certain duties on organizations and their managers, as well as those who are managed. However, there are different views as to what treating people as ends, means or mere means entails in the work context. Ewing (1978) states . . . only in America do we make a big production of guaranteeing such civil liberties as free speech, privacy, conscience and due process to all people except from the hours of 9-5, Monday through Friday. (p. 168)

While some developments – such as those by the ILO (1998, 1999) and the UN Global Compact (2015) – have been made since 1978, when Ewing was lamenting the absence of human rights at work, the widely accepted idea that people should be treated with dignity and respect at work remains elusive, as the workplace seems to remain separate from contexts where decent actions towards moral agents are expected. Werhane (1999), in discussing the individual in the organization, explains that not all employees in the private sector enjoy rights to due process, freedom of speech, privacy, rights to employment information, and job security. While that may be a consequence of the applicability of the U.S. constitution to interactions between persons or institutions and the state, and not to the private sector (Radin and Werhane 2003), similar issues are identified in other jurisdictions. Werhane (1999) further emphasizes the contrast of voting rights and participation between political decisions (which are guaranteed constitutionally) and management (which are at best ignored). This is in part a consequence of people at work, as the organization’s human resources, being considered wealth producing instruments, comparable perhaps to machines, and not valuable in their own right as human beings with their own values and aspirations, as ends and not just means. (Pruzan 1998, p. 1392)

Naming workers “resources” implies that they are treated like commodities, even when highly valued. According to Alzola (2018), even the views that are more sensitive to the workers conceptualize them as ‘our most important asset’, as ‘human capital,’ or as ‘intellectual capital’. . .Being a valuable ‘thing’ is still better than being useless or replaceable, but it still fails to acknowledge people’s humanity. The problem is worsened by prevalent accounting techniques, which do not even record the employees as assets but merely as costs. (pp. 836–837)

The absence of the humanity of human beings in the language and frames developed in the work context interferes with the widely accepted injunction to treat persons as ends in themselves with dignity and respect. According to McPhail (2001), this makes it easier for some people to treat other individuals cruelly. Interestingly, organizational discourse has more recently developed a

42

Moral Agency and Decent Management

787

rhetoric around integrity, using concepts such as mindfulness and resilience. However, decency does not seem to have entered the mainstream management and organizational lexicon in relation to the treatment of people at work. The implications are clear: mindfulness and resilience are concepts that seem to push the responsibility for organizational behavior onto employees, without identifying and acknowledging the responsibilities of the organization and its management towards them. Employees are also made to feel personally responsible for not “thriving” while they are made to endure inhumane and even cruel treatment in some workplaces. Unfortunately, treating people with respect and dignity at work continue to be excluded from the key responsibilities attributable to management by the organization and its stakeholders. Alzola (2018) sees the UN Global Compact as an important yet insufficient step for decent work. He contends that the UN Global Compact Labor Principles fail to include some fundamental aspects of decent work such as selection, termination, and compensation – and therefore upholding the principles of freedom of association, collective bargaining, nondiscrimination, and elimination of forced and child labor will not necessarily deliver decent work. However, even if we include the aspects that Alzola finds missing, we are still unlikely to end up with decent work in relation to respect and dignity, particularly the toleration of people’s views and convictions (when they diverge from ours) and the attempt to understand the reasons for holding them (Markus 2001). Alzola (2018) holds a moderate view on this, stating that the management of human resources is not ethical only if it treats employees more than a means to an end, as has been suggested by Legge (1998) and Greenwood (2002). Workers are means, argues Alzola, but treating someone as mere means to an end “is to involve him or her in a scheme of action to which he or she does not or could not reasonably consent” (p. 848). This implies that, in order to avoid treating others as a mere means to an end, it would be necessary to understand their views towards the objectives of the organization and their role, as well as the reasons for these views (Markus 2001), both commonly unexplored for many people at work.

Moral Agency Kantian ethics requires a moral motivation that is independent from outcomes, rewards, or punishments. Management cannot be ethical if it treats people as ends due to instrumental (and not moral) reasons. Gaining competitive advantage, improving organizational effectiveness or one’s legitimacy may be the consequences of treating people as an end in themselves. If the motivation for treating them as ends is to gain these benefits, then management is not ethical. What is important, therefore, is not only the action but also its motivation. So, do we need managers to act decently only out of a moral motivation – namely, a final motivation rather than an instrumental one? And is that ever possible? Herman (1981) explains that, while other reasons may motivate our actions,

788

E. Tsahuridu

to say that an action had moral worth we need to know that it was no accident that the agent acted as duty required. (p. 368)

Discussing whether the corporation is a fully fledged moral person, and what that means for the moral agency of its managers and employees, is beyond the scope of this chapter. What is important here is to clarify the duties of managers in relation to employees and the organization. If we accept that individual moral responsibility cannot be reassigned, and also that not all organizational actions can be distributed to individuals, it is appropriate to assign responsibility to the policies and practices of organizations, as well as (rather than instead of) to the individuals who acted (Werhane 1989). In this sense, indecent management is responsible for its indecent actions – but it is also responsible for the organization’s indecent policies and practices, because these are the source of individual actions on behalf of a corporation, because the nature of collective action precludes that these policies and practices can always be traceable to those individuals who developed them even if they are still with the corporation, and because unless one holds liable corporate policies and practices as well as individuals, these practices and policies will continue despite punishment of individuals. (Werhane 1989, p. 822)

Management responsibility extends to its own actions but also to the schemes, policies, and practices it develops or allows to take root, making management responsible for the work environment it creates for others. While responsibility for ethical decisions remains with the human moral agent, organizations should hold their managers-agents both legally and morally responsible for actions taken on their behalf (Dunn 1991). Although moral agency and thus responsibility for our actions cannot be turned off or reassigned, we do not always act as moral agents in the organizational context. Nesteruk (1991), for example, argues that an individual can make choices (i) as a person or a moral agent; (ii) as the occupant of a role; or (3) as the subject of rules. In organizations, he suggests, individuals make choices more as occupants of roles and subjects of rules than as moral agents. Similarly, MacIntyre (1999) maintains that organizations are social structures that may preclude the people who inhabit them from understanding themselves as moral agents. This has consequences for both the individual and the organization because if individuals do not understand themselves as moral agents they would not use their powers to act as moral agents and would not feel accountable for what they do. In such circumstances, responsibility should be attributed to the individual but also to the organization. Our moral agency may fade when we enter certain organizations. This effect is in part enabled by management’s actions, as well as by the policies and practices developed by management on behalf of the organization. As employees, we have to understand the influence of the organization we enter and work for. However, as moral agents, we are responsible for situations we enter and for the impact of those situations on our ability to be virtuous (Weaver 2006) or to act in line with our moral values more broadly. As the appreciation of this impact and influence is not

42

Moral Agency and Decent Management

789

automatically apparent and is sometimes willfully overlooked, MacIntyre (1999) considers the maxim “Always ask about your social and cultural order what it needs you and others not to know” (p. 319) to be indispensable to our contemporary organizational conditions. Moral philosophy has a long tradition of recognizing that to be a moral agent is to be autonomous or self-directed (Rachels 1997). To act as moral agents, persons must think of themselves as moral agents (MacIntyre 1999). Treating people with dignity would require respecting their moral autonomy, their goals and reasons, as well as their views. Furthermore, all people at work also need to consider what it means for themselves to be a moral agent in the context of work. Rachels (1997) claims that to follow someone else’s directions, no matter what they are and no matter what one’s conscience directs one to do, is to abdicate from the responsibility for moral thinking and to abandon one’s role as a moral agent. So, my status as a moral agent creates duties on others who encounter me or have duties towards me but it also gives rise to responsibilities for myself. The explanation “they made me do it” or “I’m just doing my job,” in the context of work as in most other contexts, does not absolve people from organizational decisions and actions. Therefore, moral agency cannot be abandoned in the organizational context and, to be moral agents in organizations, both people and organizations must develop a community that respects that very moral agency (Tsahuridu 2003). Decency provides criteria for moral agents who manage or are managed. These criteria are neither supererogatory (depending on the situation) nor heroic (depending on the actor’s capacities) (Risse 2000), as a decent person is neither a hero nor someone who does supererogatory acts. A decent person may not even act in accordance with what is morally required, as morality may in some circumstances require heroism. The decent person does what is proportionate. We can therefore conclude that a decent person is not a virtuous person but rather one who may have significant moral flaws. A decent person has concern for others in pursuing their plans and acts proportionately when “basic human needs and wants are involved” (Risse 2000, p. 274), that is, “needs and concerns relating to one’s quality of life in a serious sense” (p. 274). Moral agency provides a valuable criterion for management to assess its own moral status but also the moral status of people who are managed. Management literature and practice is not generally concerned with how people at work are able to behave like moral agents and what is involved in treating people with dignity and respect. Organizations, managers, and the management discipline need to address not only what decent work entails but, more importantly, what decent behavior towards people at work requires. This could lead to the development of an approach to management that is informed by decency and focuses on treating people not only as means but as ends, respecting their dignity. We also need to consider whether the term “decent work” (as currently understood and employed in workplace discourse) may in fact impede the development of organizational and management practices that focus on the responsibilities of humans towards humans rather than on the development of roles and tasks with certain characteristics.

790

E. Tsahuridu

Conclusion Decent work, as described by the ILO and the UN Global Compact, has specific qualitative characteristics, with some reference to human dignity. Overall, however, decent work is primarily focused on the availability of employment and the adaptability of workers to ensure they can achieve a decent living through their work. By contrast, there has been little emphasis on decent management. Decency, explored particularly in relation to morality, can be understood as the characteristic of an act or an actor, and is distinguished from civility or manners. Decency requires a certain level of interaction and influence, and this is what gives it particular importance at work, where we spend half of our conscious life. Decency has been explored in terms of its position in the continuum of morality. Dignity and respect are central to decent acts, not surprisingly coinciding with the treatment of moral agents as ends and not only as means, as commonly agreed in moral philosophy. Therefore, managers as moral agents have a responsibility to treat those who are managed with dignity and respect, as ends and not only as means. This requires a fundamental shift in how people at work are treated, and also in the language and rhetoric around work and people. But people who are managed also have responsibilities as moral agents, the most fundamental being the protection of their moral agency in all contexts and roles of their life. This is not in the least because they remain responsible for their ethical decisions, even if they fulfill set roles or are subject to rules (Nesteruk 1991). If we are to achieve decent management, where people are able to act as moral agents, where they are treated as ends (and not only as means), and where their dignity is respected, then it is important to develop approaches to management and organizations that are centered on the duties we owe, in the workplace, to people as our fellow human beings.

Cross-References ▶ Creating an Effective Business Ethics ▶ The Role of Virtue in Good Management

References Alzola M (2018) Decent work: the moral status of labor in human resource management. J Bus Ethics 147(4):835–853 Benziman Y (2014) The ethics of common decency. J Value Inq 48(1):87–94 Crouch M (2010) Respect: where and how? Thesis Eleven 101(1):89–96 Dunn CP (1991) Are corporations inherently wicked? Bus Horizons 34(4):3–8 Ewing D (1978) Employee freedom within the organization. Paper presented at the power and responsibility in the American business system: proceedings of the second national conference on business ethics, Bentley College

42

Moral Agency and Decent Management

791

Fallon RH (1994) Two senses of autonomy. Stanford L Rev 46(4):875–905 Grandey AA, Rupp D, Brice WN (2015) Emotional labor threatens decent work: a proposal to eradicate emotional display rules. J Org Behav 36(6):770–785 Greenwood MR (2002) Ethics and HRM: a review and conceptual analysis. J Bus Ethics 36(3):261–278 Heller A (1988) General ethics. Basil Blackwell, Oxford Herman B (1981) On the value of acting from the motive of duty. Phil Rev 90(3):359–382 Hill TE Jr (1980) Humanity as an end in itself. Ethics 91(1):84–99 Hobbes T (1668/1994) Leviathan. Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis ILO (1998) ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and its Follow-up. Retrieved from www.ilo.org/declaration/thedeclaration/textdeclaration/lang%2D%2Den/ index.htm ILO (1999) Report of the director-general: decent work. Paper presented at the international labour conference, Geneva Kant I (1785/1959) Foundations of the metaphysics of morals (trans: Beck LW). Library of Liberal Arts, Indianapolis Legge K (1998) Is HRM ethical? Can HRM be ethical? In: Parker M (ed) Ethics and organisations. Sage, London, pp 150–172 MacIntyre A (1999) Social structures and their threat to moral agency. Philosophy 74(289):311–329 MacIntyre AC (2013) After virtue: a study in moral theory. Bloomsbury, London Margalit A (1996) The decent society. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Markus MR (2001) Decent society and/or civil society? Soc Res 68(4):1011–1030 McPhail K (2001) The other objective of ethics education: re-humanising the accounting profession – a study of ethics education in law, engineering, medicine and accountancy. J Bus Ethics 34(3):279–298 Nesteruk J (1991) Legal persons and moral worlds: ethical choices within the corporate environment. Am Bus Law J 29(1):75–97 Nuyen A (2002) Decency. J Value Inq 36(4):499–510 Pruzan P (1998) From control to values-based management and accountability. J Bus Ethics 17(13):1379–1394 Rachels J (1997) Can ethics provide answers? And other essays in moral philosophy. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc, Lanham Radin TJ, Werhane PH (2003) Employment-at-will, employee rights, and future directions for employment. Bus Ethics Q 13(2):113–130 Risse M (2000) The morally decent person. South J Philos 38(2):263–279 Sandkühler HJ (2010) Human dignity, and the transformation of moral rights into legal rights. Iris Eur J Philos Public Debate 2(4):349–362 Tsahuridu EE (2003) Moral autonomy in organisational decisions. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Edith Cowan University, Churchlands UN Global Compact (2015) The Ten Principles. Retrieved from https://www.unglobalcompact.org/ what-is-gc/mission/principles United Nations (2015) Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Retrieved from http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/generalassembly/ docs/globalcompact/A_RES_70_1_E.pdf Vischer RK (2011) How do lawyers serve human dignity. U St. Thomas Law J 9(2):222–249 Weaver GR (2006) Virtue in organizations: moral identity as a foundation for moral agency. Organ Stud 27(3):341–368 Wensley R (1996) Isabella Beeton: management as “everything in its place”. Bus Strateg Rev 7(1):37–46 Werhane PH (1989) Corporate and individual moral responsibility: a reply to Jan Garrett. J Bus Ethics 8(10):821–822 Werhane PH (1999) Justice and trust. J Bus Ethics 21(2–3):237–249

Creating an Effective Business Ethics Is Virtue Ethics up to the Challenge?

43

Arran Gare and Cristina Neesham

Contents Introduction: The Virtue Ethics Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Business World Since Solomon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Place of Business Ethics in the Culture of Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Understanding Action: From MacIntyre to Bourdieu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Revisiting the Place of Ethics in Modernity: A Brief History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion: Is the Failure of Solomon’s Project Inevitable? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

794 795 797 798 801 805 806 806

Abstract

While business ethics as an academic field of inquiry is flourishing, indicating an appreciation of the importance of ethics to the functioning of business and the economy, the philosophical discipline of ethics that underpins work in this field is in crisis. As Alasdair MacIntyre argued, the dominant moral philosophies that have emerged with modernity have rendered normative ethics fundamentally ineffective in improving human behaviors in society. In response to this failure, building on MacIntyre’s attempt to revive a pre-modern, Renaissance-inspired conception of ethics that focuses on the cultivation of virtues, Robert Solomon sought to found business ethics on the cultivation of virtue and character. This chapter examines the failures and potential of Solomon’s virtue ethics project, in three steps. Firstly, it evaluates the place of business ethics in the culture of modernity. Secondly, it outlines a philosophical understanding of human action A. Gare Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] C. Neesham (*) Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_22

793

794

A. Gare and C. Neesham

that combines elements of symbolic interactionism with Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. Thirdly, it reinterprets the history of ethics and its modern avatars based on this understanding. Finally, to overcome the modern crisis in business ethics, we propose a revival of Solomon’s virtue ethics project that should challenge the fundamental assumptions of the culture of modernity about human nature and human action, and should actively promote Solomon’s conception of business professionalism as a framing model for the dominant business habitus of our time. Keywords

Business ethics · Virtue ethics · Modernity · Theory of action · Symbolic interactionism · Habitus · Homo economicus · Business professionalism

Introduction: The Virtue Ethics Project There are very good reasons why those observing the way businesses have been operating in the contemporary world have promoted the development of business ethics. Ethical concerns have been raised not only by major business scandals (Gray et al. 2005) but also by the predatory behavior of corporate elites on a massive scale, leading to such concentrations of wealth and power around the world that economies are being destabilized and democracies undermined (Offer 2017). More broadly, such behavior is associated with a failure of societies to respond effectively to the global ecological destruction now threatening the future of civilization (Wright and Nyberg 2015). However, there are equally good reasons for being skeptical about achieving much by invoking ethics, at least as it is presently understood. Given the effects of business behaviors on society, looking to ethics to constrain business practices suggests a failure to face up to reality. As the German sociologist Ulrich Beck suggested, ethics in this context is “like a bicycle brake on an international jet” (Beck 1992, p. 106). However, while Alasdair MacIntyre (1997) suggested that it would be impertinent for a professor of philosophy to lecture businesspeople on business ethics, Robert Solomon, who had already established himself as a significant philosopher, did forge ahead and succeeded in establishing business ethics as a philosophy subject within universities (Kellner 2011). Is skepticism about business ethics justified? Or have Solomon and his successors proven Beck and MacIntyre wrong? Solomon published his main works in the 1980s and early 1990s, partly in response to a vigorous assertion by neoliberal economists and politicians that business is amoral (Carr 1968). Highlighting the problems of amoralism, he identified the most important virtues required for the proper functioning of business: honesty, fairness, trust and toughness, friendliness, honor, loyalty and shame, caring and compassion, and the ultimate virtue, justice, closely associated with the virtue of integrity. To list only some of his major contributions, he showed us how to evaluate specific situations on the basis of these virtues, offered a critique of the economics of Milton Friedman and some of the assumptions on which it was

43

Creating an Effective Business Ethics

795

based, and defended the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and of the institutionalist economist John Kenneth Galbraith (Solomon 1994, pp. 273ff., 343ff., 376ff.), by endorsing an emphasis on institutional arrangements rather than atomic individuals, and arguing that corporations are neither juggernauts nor legal fictions but communities (Solomon 1993, pp. 77, 109). The idea of firms as communities of persons has been kept alive in the virtue ethics work of humanistic management theorists (see Melé 2012). Solomon criticized the focus on the profit motive in business, stating that it “causes more damage to the virtues – and more emphasis on the wrong virtues – than any amount of sleaziness or dishonest dealings on the part of the business community” (Solomon 1993, p. 46). He also praised the long-term planning of Japanese business organizations compared to US organizations, and the economic security they provided to employees (Solomon 1994, p. 457ff.). All these issues were integrated in his characterization of business management as a profession, which implies a commitment to ends other than those of self-interest (Solomon 1993, 1994). Just as medical doctors have a primary commitment to the health of their patients, while still demanding proper payment for their work, managers of corporations should have a primary commitment to advancing the economy for the common good of stakeholders, while also having to maintain the profitability of their enterprise and being entitled to expect proper remuneration for their work. Despite the important achievements outlined here, and the extent of followership created in business ethics education in business schools (see Ferrero and Sison 2014), it seems that Solomon’s project to “rofessionalize” business ethics based on virtue ethics has had little influence on how businesses operate, on the cultures they produce, and on how the economic and political life of contemporary society has developed.

The Business World Since Solomon Evidence from the way businesses have evolved since then suggests that Beck and MacIntyre may have been right. The managerialism associated with neoliberal ideology applies none of the professionalism premises outlined by Solomon (Khurana 2010). On the contrary, managers are expected to prove their worth by restructuring their businesses and by providing the dominant (if not the only) discourse about the direction of the organization (Heery 2016). Control is achieved by eroding employees’ job security, simplifying work wherever possible to reduce labor costs, thus making employees easily replaceable and expendable, and designing new ways of keeping employees under constant surveillance while measuring their outputs (Clegg et al. 2006). Not only has making profits become an end in itself but, despite bitter lessons such as Enron, the success of a company continues to be measured by its share price. Consequently, managers are rewarded with huge incomes tied to their capacity to increase shareholder value, and this motivates the design of unethical tactics to extract value from employees and customers. This has gradually led to the domination of the business world by the financial sectors of economies, which in turn has

796

A. Gare and C. Neesham

resulted in a series of economic crises, culminating in the global financial crisis of 2008 (Varoufakis 2011). The crises were dealt with by using public money to bail out financial institutions, both in Europe and the USA, causing a further massive transfer of wealth to the managers of the financial sector (Varoufakis 2011, pp. 178 f., 203ff.). Under the pressures of neoliberal ideology, public institutions such as utilities, banks, schools, universities, even prisons, have been either sold off or transformed into quasibusiness organizations (see Plehwe et al. 2006). This trend has been associated with a profound transformation of state and civil institutions, including political parties, towards protecting the interests of the few – by abolishing those regulations designed to control economic activity and make it accountable for the public good, by facilitating the privatization of public assets and by expanding state power to protect private property. These efforts have resulted in radically lowering taxes on companies, increasing their freedom to move operations around the globe to where wages are lowest and regulations most lax, weakening public institutions committed to the common good, and concentrating power, wealth, and income with the corporate management while disempowering the rank-and-file employees and rendering their lives more precarious. The capacity of financial institutions to avoid regulation by moving their operations off-shore largely accounts for the massive expansion of the financial sectors relative to other sectors of economies, with this sector controlling where investments are made, to the detriment of the long-term future of societies (Pettifor 2017). As the free movement of capital by transnational corporations has been aided by the financial sector, formerly well-off workers in the core zones of the world economy have had to compete with workers in the developing countries living in dormitories and working 12 h a day, 7 days a week. This race-to-the-bottom kind of competition has made operations difficult for companies that are committed to serving the public good, to improving the conditions of their workers, or to being ecologically sustainable (Streeck 2014). Consequently, the current world order is characterized by massive increase in both government and personal indebtedness, and by recurring financial crises (Streeck 2014). At a global level, with powerful international organizations such as the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization acting in the interests of transnational corporations, the goal of the United Nations to create a world order in which nations would be able to control their own destinies has been largely subverted (Fotopoulos 2016). Furthermore, corporate control of the media and public institutions, including educational institutions, has profoundly undermined society’s resources for resistance, producing a population that is largely passive, amoral and indifferent to threats to democracy and to the future of their civilization (Plehwe et al. 2006). These profound social changes have led to relative economic stagnation, and major companies, such as General Motors, have gone broke as a result (Chang 2011, p. 195). Nations have effectively been enslaved to transnational corporations and financial institutions (Gare 2016) by being forced to compete with each other to lower taxes and other costs for these corporations in order to attract capital investment (Fotopoulos 2016). It seems that business has been given a free hand to pursue profits by transferring (and even destroying) wealth rather than creating it. The transformations we are witnessing have curtailed the era of general prosperity aspirations and rapid economic development of the decades following World War II.

43

Creating an Effective Business Ethics

797

Although business ethics appears powerless in the face of these alarming trends, it is often invoked as a reference point for norms of virtuous behavior, and as a source of resistance and change, especially during public crises of confidence and trust in business (see Gray et al. 2005). But can business ethics, as a discipline, generate effective projects that could change business behaviors? To be able to ascertain this, we examine some of the challenges business ethics (and in particular virtue ethics) is confronted with in the culture of modernity.

The Place of Business Ethics in the Culture of Modernity To foster resistance and behavioral change more effectively, we need to found our ethics theories and applications on a better understanding of why people behave as they do. The importance of this understanding was appreciated by the historian of medieval technology, Lynn White Jr., who observed that “[t]he artefacts of a society, including its political, social and economic patterns, are shaped primarily by what the mass of individuals in that society believe, at the sub-verbal level, about who they are, about their relation to other people and to the natural environment, and about their destiny” (White 1973, p. 57). It is these sub-verbal beliefs that have to be confronted in order to alter the way people behave. Hence, the apparent failure of Solomon’s project suggests that, to effect meaningful change in business behaviors, we need to go deeper and challenge the sub-verbal beliefs of our culture. In this context, the position of business ethics is rather precarious. Traditionally, business ethics is a sub-discipline of ethics, which in turn is a sub-discipline of philosophy. Unfortunately, over the last 100 years, this tradition has been subverted, with philosophy surrendering its cognitive status to the sciences and also losing status as an arbiter in questions of value (see, for instance, A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, [1936] 1971). While efforts to establish business ethics as a subject within universities have been successful, at present this appears to be of limited relevance to how business is actually being practised, except by providing a language that can be selectively appropriated to whitewash what is really going on (Banerjee 2012). This suggests that the discourse of business ethics is not taken seriously enough in business practice to produce socially desirable behavioral change. To those who have studied the history of philosophy and the culture of modernity, this should come as no surprise. A comprehensive historical overview reveals the deeper problems that reside in the way ethics is currently conceived. By the end of the eighteenth Century it became clear that the scientific revolution had undermined the basis for Christian ethics in cosmology, and by the second half of the nineteenth Century, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche had recognized the failure of Immanuel Kant and those he had influenced to find an alternative foundation for ethics, either in universalizable principles or in a logic of historical progress. As MacIntyre points out in After Virtue ([1981] 2007), logical positivists such as Ayer ([1936] 1971), who claimed that ethical statements were nothing more than expressions of emotion designed to influence others, were merely echoing in dull prose what had been more profoundly explained by the earlier philosophers. As Nietzsche had argued, “nihilism, this weirdest of guests, stands before the door”

798

A. Gare and C. Neesham

(Nietzsche [1910] 1968, p. 9). MacIntyre concludes that, in the modern world, “we have – very largely, if not entirely – lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality” ([1981] 2007, p. 2). Accordingly, continuing to teach moral philosophy and ethics while ignoring this could be regarded as unethical. Drawing on the work of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, MacIntyre responds critically to modern nihilism and seeks to recover pre-modern ethical doctrines centered on cultivating virtues. A virtue “is an acquired human quality the possession or exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods” (MacIntyre 1993, p. 109). Solomon argues that business also should be based on the cultivation of virtues, and accords a central place to the quest for excellence of character. This is promising but, as MacIntyre himself acknowledges, pre-modern ethical doctrines like those centered on virtues were developed as components of complete philosophical systems (MacIntyre 1993). It was as such that they helped form the culture of, and were embraced by, entire populations. Furthermore, the pre-modern societies that produced these systems were societies where the market was subordinated to what were considered to be higher ends than the pursuit of money. MacIntyre is sceptical about extending virtue ethics to business because engagement in commercial enterprises appears to be inimical to upholding the classical virtues. Without the support of philosophical systems and people committed to ways of life based on an overriding commitment to the good of communities, such ethical doctrines become arbitrary choices. Moreover, if people make these choices, they are likely to find life in the modern business world far more difficult and their careers far more precarious than otherwise. It appears that something more is required, including a better understanding of why people (not as individuals but embedded in whole communities and cultures) act as they do at present, and what would lead them to act differently. For this, we need to understand what is involved in acting, and the role of culturally embedded reasons in actions. To provide the required perspective on reason and action and to show what role ethical judgment could play in influencing how people act, it is necessary to look further at theory of action. In doing so, we acknowledge the extant contribution of moral and social psychology in the study of moral judgment, moral action, and their relationship (see Lapsley 2018). However, beyond analyses of how reasoning, judgment, and action occur in individual moral behaviors, the philosophical perspective needed here is one that embeds individual psychology in the historical and cultural context of the society in which it operates.

Understanding Action: From MacIntyre to Bourdieu MacIntyre himself offers a theory of action. He defends the Aristotelian notion of practical syllogisms whereby actions follow from characterizing situations, and argues that action involves situating oneself in one of the many stories being lived out in society. As he put it:

43

Creating an Effective Business Ethics

799

I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters – roles into which we have been drafted – and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be construed. It is through hearing stories . . . that children learn or mislearn what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions and in their words. (MacIntyre [1981] 2007, p. 216)

However, these theories of action, while important, are not adequate by themselves to account for the diverse ways in which people do act, for the power relations involved in action and, more importantly, for how people are able to question and rethink the assumptions of their cultures. For ethics to modify current practices, it has to be developed as part of a coherent conception of the world that redefines not only particular situations but the nature of institutions, societies, humanity and the relationship between humans and the rest of nature. To overcome our present malaise, ethical behavior will require of people that they question their cultural heritage, strive to develop a different conception of their place in the world, and embody this conception in their practices as a habituated way of perceiving phenomena, defining situations, and acting. But first of all let us try to understand why this foundational questioning is not happening. To clarify the place of ethics in society, we refer to the school of social psychology and sociology known as symbolic interactionism. According to this school, people act on the basis of their own definitions of the situations they are in. The coherence of these definitions derives from their perspectives. Such perspectives are shared, so that people define themselves from the perspectives of others. To begin, these are significant others but, as children develop, they are able to adopt the perspectives of reference groups and then strive for the broader perspective of the “generalized other” (Shibutani 1972). In the work of later symbolic interactionists, perspectives have been characterized as “frames” (see Goffman 1986). It is by virtue of this capacity to define situations from the perspective of others and to internalize these perspectives that individuals are able to define themselves as selves, and to recognize role relationships, judging their own actions and lives from these perspectives (Meltzer 1972). Through the “self,” people not only define themselves in their relations to others but also engage emotionally with these others. Organized role relations are institutions. Adopting frames is not a fully conscious process, hence initially these frames are embraced unreflectively. Subsequently, a dialectic emerges between the “self” viewed objectively from the perspective of others, and the “I,” the spontaneous aspect of human being whereby individuals appreciate the meaning of situations and respond with the potential for creativity to each situation, especially when some situations prove to be very different from those experienced in the past. Concepts are central to defining situations, whether well or inadequately. Moreover, concepts are particularly important in the formation and maintenance of institutions and the relationships between them. For there to be an institution, there must be a shared concept of it. As Julius Kovesi argues, most concepts are evaluative

800

A. Gare and C. Neesham

and imply how we should act (Kovesi 1967, p. 92ff.). If one is a ship’s captain, for instance, it is implied that one should take responsibility for the ship and put the safety of one’s passengers ahead of one’s own. From the perspective of the generalized other, particular situations are defined in relation to broader contexts, which are in turn defined through more general concepts that should support the more specific concepts. For instance, the concept of ship’s captain is encompassed by the concept of crew and by that of the ship’s function in the economy and society. Concepts incorporated into definitions of situations are stabilized as institutions and structure social life, organizations and communities. They range from families and friendships to global civilization. They structure the relationships between people, between individuals and society, and between humanity and the rest of nature. In acting on the basis of received concepts, people reproduce their social and natural worlds, by continually re-incorporating these concepts into practices and institutions, and at the same time defining their own goals and aspirations. Institutions defined through role relations co-emerge with individuals, where the latter are subjects able to engage emotionally and act with some degree of spontaneity and creativity. Diverse perspectives defining different roles and institutions can cohere with each other, but they can also come into conflict, leading to tensions in each individual’s self-definition and in their emotions. Such incoherence can be tolerated or dealt with in different ways: for instance, by prioritizing particular perspectives and taking the claims of some roles less seriously than others, or by challenging these perspectives and attempting to modify them and the roles defined in their terms. Most societies are riven by clashing perspectives of different reference groups upholding different concepts or conceptualizations of the world we live in. It is through such clashes that different perspectives are likely to be more critically examined and explicitly elaborated, developed, defended and possibly reconciled. It is in this way that ideologies, philosophies and worldviews are developed as coherent conceptual frameworks. Understood in this manner, ethics is built into the way we define successive situations, by relating these situations to our understanding of the world generally, into the way we formulate goals and ambitions, and into the process by which we might question the perspectives that define individual roles, expectations, responses, ambitions and goals. It is in this way that ethics requires stories and is incorporated in the stories we are living out. The characterization of action and the place of ethics outlined above can be further developed through the genetic structuralism of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s social theory has much in common with the ideas of the symbolic interactionists but he also introduces several concepts that extend their work. In studying how people actually do act, Bourdieu develops the concept of habitus. In The Logic of Practice (1990), he defines habitus as: . . . systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures, predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain

43

Creating an Effective Business Ethics

801

them. Objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor. (p. 52)

In other words, concepts and associated evaluations through which people define situations while engaged in action operate most of the time at a pre-conscious level, and often cannot be brought to full consciousness. The second concept relevant here is capital, which refers to any form of socially recognized power enabling actors to participate in society and augment their position in it. For instance, social contacts amount to social capital, competence in deciphering cultural relations or cultural artifacts represent cultural capital and, most importantly, power to define reality, power gained from prestige, authority, and comprehension of how it operates constitutes symbolic capital and includes the significance of people, their acts, and products. And the third important concept developed by Bourdieu is that of field: it refers to the partially autonomous domains characterized by objective positions (i.e., roles) that people strive to occupy in society. The autonomy of fields is manifest in the specific forms of capital that are being sought, the most important being symbolic capital or recognition. The three concepts outlined here provide Bourdieu with the means to analyze the relations and exercise of power associated with action, including the power relations between the different fields. Since fields can be global fields, integrating Bourdieu’s work with symbolic interactionism empowers the latter to investigate the macrodynamics of whole societies and civilizations. This integration enables us to revisit the history of business as a cultural idea and to re-evaluate the role that ethics should play in business today.

Revisiting the Place of Ethics in Modernity: A Brief History The integration of Bourdieu’s ideas with symbolic interactionism adds another dimension to understanding action. Bourdieu shows that very often there is a disjunction between what people say they believe and what they are shown to really believe by virtue of how they act. This insight has been confirmed by moral psychology research, and theorized as the judgment-action gap in moral behavior (Blasi 1983). But, after observing such judgment-action gaps, or – in his terminology – disjunctions, Bourdieu went further to explain the need to identify people’s beliefs as manifested in how they act, and the society-constitutive stories that they take seriously when making their choices; in other words, their habitus. Understanding habitus is of crucial importance when considering commercial activity and the development of business ethics in the context of modernity. Habitus with regard to business practices, in various cultures, has a fascinating history. Up until the seventeenth Century, in many traditional, agrarian communities in Europe, merchants had been looked upon with suspicion (Nelson 1969). From Ancient Greece up until the Renaissance, trade played a significant role in society but the mindset engendered by it was seen as problematic. Pleonexia, that is, avarice,

802

A. Gare and C. Neesham

greed and the pursuit of wealth for its own sake, was explicitly identified and condemned. The social end that was really valued was the autonomy or liberty of the community, that is, freedom from arbitrary power or slavery, and the virtues required to maintain it (Nelson 1969). In sum, the ultimate ends to be valued and pursued were those which served the common good, and behaviors threatening the common good were regarded as vices. Hence, pleonexia was seen as the foremost vice leading to corruption, where corruption was understood as placing one’s own particular interests above the common good, thereby deflecting the goals of, and undermining, the proper functioning of social institutions. A great deal of work in philosophy and religious thought was devoted to protecting society from pleonexia, leading to the elaboration of the medieval teleological worldview through which the value and significance of all roles and institutions in society, and of all actions, could be evaluated, and virtues and vices could be identified. In the medieval world, this ethical stance was conveyed to every individual through the court of conscience. Usury was proscribed among Christians right up until the Renaissance. The abandonment of this proscription of usury and the avarice it fostered led to a massive cultural shift (Nelson 1969). This shift in attitudes to usury and pleonexia was accompanied by the abandonment of medieval and Renaissance cosmologies and the triumph of scientific materialism, where nature was conceived of as nothing but matter in motion, moving endlessly and meaninglessly. What was lost in this process? The Renaissance civic humanism centered in Florence had revived Roman republican and Greek thought, and supported sixteenth Century radical philosophers such as Giordano Bruno and other Nature Enthusiasts who had celebrated the creativity and value of nature. The civic humanists set out to foster the virtues required of people to protect their liberty and govern themselves, while Bruno provided the cosmology to defend such republicanism. Bruno was a prime target of the proponents of the new mechanistic philosophy leading to scientific materialism (Gare 2016). Instead, in accordance with scientific materialism, Thomas Hobbes redefined humanity, society, individuals and their relation to each other and to nature in a way that eliminated the possibility of humans acting on any other basis than egoism (Skinner 2002). Looking to Venice rather than Florence, Hobbes was privileging the market as the core institution of society and was identifying pleonexia as its driving force. He was thus promoting what MacPherson (1962) calls “possessive individualism” (p. 3), in a wider project to justify absolute monarchy and oppose the Renaissance quest for republicanism, its civic humanism and the influence of Aristotle. As reasoning was confined to adding and subtracting in the service of controlling the world to satisfy appetites and avoid aversions (Hobbes [1651] 1985), the role of more complex emotions was trivialized, and scientific knowledge was identified with achieving instrumental control. This allowed no place for reason to question the conception of humans as entirely selfish or the basic assumptions of scientific materialism, and no place for the cultivation of virtues. Few thinkers, however, have fully embraced Hobbes’ rigorously worked out and exceedingly intransigent, philosophy. Instead they have embraced the less austere, and also less coherent, version of it developed by John Locke, whose ideas had a major influence on the moderate Enlightenment. Rather than referring to appetites

43

Creating an Effective Business Ethics

803

and aversions, Locke identified what is good with what produces pleasure and what is evil with what produces pain, and postulated these notions of good and evil as the primary drivers for human action (Locke [1690] 1979). He then argued for the right to property and life on the assumption that society is based on a contract between egoists. Both contractarian notions of rights (i.e., rights that can be “rationally” defended by accepting the social contract underlying the existing social order) and utilitarianism (i.e., the injunction to maximize pleasure and minimize pain for the greatest number of people) have their roots in Locke’s philosophy (Halévy [1928] 1972). As MacIntyre ([1981] 2007) demonstrates, both Hobbes and Locke, while each assuming individuals to be fundamentally egoistic, have failed to provide an effective approach for constraining their egoism. This conception of humans has dominated the culture of modernity – a fact with profound implications for the business ethics project evaluated here. Social legitimation of an egoistic human nature has formed the basis of neo-classical economic thought (Weisskopf 1955, p. 23ff.), which has displaced the economic thought of the Renaissance. While the Renaissance civic humanism had been centrally concerned with fostering human abilities to augment the common good of society (Reinert 2007), modern neo-classical economic thought (including neoliberal economic thought) have been supported by social Darwinism. Originally developed by Herbert Spencer to legitimize commerce ([1876] 1972), social Darwinism took a mechanistic form in the twentieth Century. Based on this logic, if we are nothing but machines for reproducing DNA, as Richard Dawkins (1976) argues, then there is no basis for ethics apart from being efficient in the struggle to dominate and consume. It would be, however, a mistake to think of this modern worldview as lacking ethics. On the contrary, it has been producing an effective ethic of its own. This new and coherent form of ethics dominated first Britain, in the nineteenth Century and early twentieth Century, and then other countries. After falling into disrepute with the Great Depression and the Second World War, when it underpinned the social Darwinism of the Nazis, it has been revived by the proponents of neoliberalism, a doctrine heavily indebted to the thought of John Locke and vigorously opposed not only to the traditional humanism of social democracy but also to the social liberalism of twentieth Century economists such as John Maynard Keynes. Claiming to be a positive, value free science, neoclassical and neoliberal economics implicitly promote homo economicus as a major virtue, and consider this virtue to drive economic progress, arguing that any effort to subordinate it in the quest for the common good must lead to tyranny (Hayek [1944] 2001). But the ethical outcome of practising this virtue is precisely pleonexia, in its modern forms. As Gordon Gekko put it in the film Wall Street of 1987, “greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” While homo economicus is claimed to be a neutral scientific concept, it actually promulgates the efficient, calculating egoist as the moral ideal to which all humans should strive to conform. In their actions and ways of life, people have incorporated this definition of what humans are into social reality, so that it has been reproduced as part of their habitus; and this, in turn, through a self-reinforcing cycle, has transformed and continually reproduced the political, economic, social and

804

A. Gare and C. Neesham

cultural fields engendering the same habitus across generations. Projecting an egoistic conception of humanity onto the whole of nature, social Darwinists from Herbert Spencer onwards have portrayed the pleonexia of every organism, organization, society and race as the driving force for the evolution of life. By analogy, people engaged in commerce, or at least the winners in the struggle for wealth, have been celebrated as the driving force of society, the cutting edge of economic advance, and the pinnacle of social and political evolution. With neoliberalism, under the influence of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, this way of thinking is being imposed on most institutions throughout the world, including political, educational and cultural institutions (Osborne and Gaebler 1993). This does not mean that the Hobbes-Locke conception of humans has totally dominated modern thought. Pre-modern, Renaissance thought survived as the radical wing of the Enlightenment. Even Adam Smith, who has been attributed a major role in the history of the homo economicus concept, rejected it as a general characterization of humans. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments ([1759] 1976), he articulated a profound and largely neglected ethical philosophy that constrains egoism, according a central place to sympathy and the development of character. Arguing that sympathy is basic to human nature, he extolled the virtues of propriety, prudence and, above all, benevolence and self-command. Radical economists, including John Maynard Keynes, have assumed these more nuanced notions of humanity. Not surprisingly, there was a strong revival of these notions in the decades after World War II. More recently, neoliberalism has emerged through critiques of these very notions: as an example, consider Hayek’s attack against the concept of social justice and its humanist foundations, in The Mirage of Social Justice (1976). There are good reasons to reject the homo economicus theory of human nature as inadequate, for both economic and social reasons. In 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (2011), Ha-Joon Chang compellingly argues that those countries fully embracing the conception of humans as homo economicus have actually failed to develop economically. Furthermore, at a broad societal level, many people still stubbornly continue to define their human condition outside the market, in ways that are antithetical to scientific materialism, both in everyday life and in a range of different institutions and cultural fields. Although non-philosophers have found it increasingly difficult to protect their definitions of reality against challenges from neoliberal economics, behaviourist psychology and reductionist biology, these alternative definitions of reality have still carried force. One reason for this is that society could not work if everyone in all walks of life adopted and applied Hobbes’ ethic of egoism. Women in the family and soldiers defending their country, for instance, would be self-defeating, in the most practical ways, if they were calculating egoists. When civil servants and politicians embrace calculating egoism, their institutions are gradually corrupted and eventually paralyzed, leading to concentrations of wealth, the disempowerment of the broader population and then economic crises, followed by socio-political crises. In sum, if we were all Hobbesians, society would cease to function. Let us now summarize the historical conditions in which virtue ethics has survived so far, as an account of human nature and human action, in business ethics theory and practice. While utilitarianism, theories of rights and duties based on social contract and Kantian theories identifying morality with universalizable principles of action could

43

Creating an Effective Business Ethics

805

sometimes co-exist with the homo economicus assumptions, the implications have often become more palatable when complemented by appeals to timeless virtues and to character building (Sison et al. 2018). These ongoing returns to classical humanism have continued to be accepted by many because, for the individual, the alternative – being a calculating egoist (even within a greater good or social justice frame) – is still being felt as rendering human life abhorrent and meaningless. Consequently, imperatives and virtues that were fostered in pre-modern eras have not been totally abandoned, despite having lost their cosmological support. But applications of virtue ethics in business continue to be impaired by two major difficulties. Firstly, in the realm of theory, both moral philosophers and business ethicists, although aware of the need to insulate individuals and communities from such a meaningless conception of human existence, still stumble around for explanations of why and how essential occupations and institutions that could not function properly if everyone were driven by pleonexia, have continued to survive in the modern world. Secondly, while business cultures themselves instinctively acknowledge the practical benefits of empathizing with pro-social human sentiments and behaviors that go beyond (and in fact contradict) pleonexia, the latter triumphs by dissimulation. Those who embrace Hobbes’ ethics tend to find it expedient to foster pro-social values in others and to present themselves as espousing and sharing those values while continuing to anchor their actual business decisions in pleonexia. On the bright side, these difficulties (including the need to dissimulate) are evidence of the profound and enduring humanism of virtue ethics, at least in our fundamental social expectations. The role of business ethics in this context appears paradoxical in the extreme. In sum, as the ideology of globalization, combined with neoliberalism, leaves little room for free human agency (Heron 2008), business practices are channeled to embrace the ethics of greed as a habitus, and this move is still supported by an implicit social Darwinist cosmology. Despite clear evidence that this cosmology has permeated mainstream economics and psychology, there is seldom any acknowledgment of the conceptual genealogy and affinities at work here. The implicit naturalization of social Darwinism in business has nefarious consequences. Accordingly, apparently adverse consequences can be regarded as inevitable aspects of evolution, whereby the losers in the struggle for survival are made to serve the winners or are weeded out. In this hyper-competitive climate, the expectation that ethics, and in particular virtue ethics, be taken seriously over and above working within the law appears so demanding and unsettling that the most common compromise solution adopted by corporate cultures is to co-opt the ethics and social responsibility discourse and neutralize its meaning so that business as usual can remain unaffected (Banerjee 2012, Wright and Nyberg 2015).

Conclusion: Is the Failure of Solomon’s Project Inevitable? It is hardly surprising that neoliberal managerialism has gained new territory since Solomon wrote, reviving the Hobbesian tradition, neoclassical economics and social Darwinism in the 1970s, and entrenching their cosmology even further. The core

806

A. Gare and C. Neesham

dogma of neoliberalism, along with its consequences, is neatly summed up by Ha-Joon Chang: Free-market ideology is built on the belief that people won’t do anything ‘good’ unless they are paid for it or punished for not doing it. This belief is then applied asymmetrically and reconceived as the view that rich people need to be motivated to work by further riches, while poor people must fear poverty for their motivation. (Chang 2011, p. 255)

Taken as common sense by many managers, economists and their political allies, this perspective characterizes the habitus of business, in particular global business, at the dawn of the twenty-first Century. Could things be otherwise? The theory of action outlined above, with support from MacIntyre, symbolic interactionism and Bourdieu, suggests so. However, taking a different path would require not just a revival of virtue ethics but a deep questioning of our current culture in order to achieve self-understanding. It would also require the generalization and establishment of a worldview that provides humans with a proper place for their continuing quest for self-understanding, as well as with proper conditions for advancing this self-understanding. This would be necessary not only to justify and support virtue ethics but also to provide the concepts through which people could redefine their relations with each other, with social institutions and with nature. To find a worldview that suits the purpose, we do not need to journey too far. Solomon’s virtue ethics is underpinned by such a worldview. Hence, reviving his project would involve establishing his conception of business professionalism as a habitus in contemporary business cultures. The inherited world is still rich with examples and role models. There are still parts of society where people live according to a habitus that prioritizes quests for truth, justice, and liberty. The space for habitus change is embodied by the quest for wisdom, where the deep assumptions dominating modernity, or indeed any status quo, could be challenged, transformed, and replaced. This is indeed the ultimate quest, the core virtue of democracy and the core of philosophy.

Cross-References ▶ Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics ▶ The Role of Virtue in Good Management

References Ayer AJ (1936/1971) Language, truth and logic. Penguin, Harmondsworth Banerjee SB (2012) The ethics of corporate social responsibility. In: Management ethics. Routledge, London, pp 69–90 Beck U (1992) From industrial society to the risk society: questions of survival, social structure and ecological enlightenment. Theory Cult Soc 9(1):97–123

43

Creating an Effective Business Ethics

807

Blasi A (1983) Moral cognition and moral action: a theoretical perspective. Dev Rev 3(2):178–210 Bourdieu P (1990) The logic of practice (trans: Nice R). Polity Press, Cambridge Carr A (1968) Is business bluffing ethical? Harv Bus Rev 46(1):143–153 Chang H-J (2011) 23 things they don’t tell you about capitalism. Penguin, Harmondsworth Clegg SR, Courpasson D, Phillips N (2006) Power and organizations. Pine Forge Press, Newbury Park Dawkins R (1976) The selfish gene. Oxford University Press, New York Ferrero I, Sison AJG (2014) A quantitative analysis of authors, schools and themes in virtue ethics articles in business ethics and management journals (1980–2011). Bus Ethics 23(4):375–400 Fotopoulos T (2016) The new world order in action, 2nd edn. Progressive Press, San Diego Gare A (2016) The philosophical foundations of ecological civilization: a manifesto for the future. Routledge, London Goffman E (1986) Frame analysis: an essay on the organization of experience. Northeastern University Press, Lebanon Gray KR, Clark GW, Frieder LA (2005) Corporate scandals: the many faces of greed. Paragon House, St. Paul Halévy E (1928/1972) The growth of philosophical radicalism (trans: Morris). Faber & Faber, London Heery E (2016) Framing work: unitary, pluralist, and critical perspectives in the twenty-first century. Oxford University Press, Oxford Heron T (2008) Globalization, neoliberalism and the exercise of human agency. Int J Polit Cult Soc 20(1–4):85–101 Hobbes T (1651/1985) Leviathan. Penguin, Harmondsworth Kellner D (2011) Bob Solomon and continental philosophy: some personal reflections. Sophia 50(2):247–251 Khurana R (2010) From higher aims to hired hands: the social transformation of American business schools and the unfulfilled promise of management as a profession. Princeton University Press, Princeton Kovesi J (1967) Moral notions. Routledge, London Lapsley DK (2018) Moral psychology. Routledge, London Locke J (1690/1979) An essay concerning human understanding. Oxford University Press, Oxford MacIntyre A (1981/2007) After virtue, 3rd edn. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame MacIntyre A (1993) Are philosophical problems insoluble? The relevance of system and history. In: Cook P (ed) Philosophical imagination and cultural memory. Duke University Press, Durham/London, pp 65–82 MacIntyre A (1997) Why are problems of business ethics insoluble? In: Proceedings of the first national conference on business ethics. Bentley College, Waltham MacPherson CB (1962) The political theory of possessive individualism. Clarendon Press, Oxford Melé D (2012) The firm as a “community of persons”: a pillar of humanistic business ethos. J Bus Ethics 106(1):89–101 Meltzer BN (1972) Mead’s social psychology. In: Manis JG, Melzer BN (eds) Symbolic interactionism, 2nd edn. Allyn and Bacon Inc, Boston, pp 4–22 Nelson B (1969) The idea of usury, 2nd edn. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Nietzsche F (1910/1968) The will to power (trans: Kaufmann W), Kaufmann W, Hollingdale RJ (eds). Vintage, New York Offer A (2017) The market turn: from social democracy to market liberalism. Econ Hist Rev 70(4):1051–1071 Osborne D, Gaebler T (1993) Reinventing government: how the entrepreneurial spirit is transforming the public sector. Penguin, New York Pettifor A (2017) The production of money: how to break the power of bankers. Verso, London Plehwe D, Walpen B, Neunhöffer G (eds) (2006) Neoliberal hegemony: a global critique. Routledge, Milton Park

808

A. Gare and C. Neesham

Reinert ES (2007) How rich countries got rich . . . and why poor countries stay poor. Carrol & Graf, New York Shibutani T (1972) Reference groups as perspectives. In: Manis JG, Meltzer BN (eds) Symbolic interactionism, 2nd edn. Allyn and Bacon Inc, Boston, pp 160–171 Sison AJG, Ferrero I, Guitián G (eds) (2018) Business ethics: a virtue ethics and common good approach. Routledge, London Skinner Q (2002) Visions of politics, volume III, Hobbes and civil society. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Smith A (1759/1976) The theory of moral sentiments. Clarendon Press, Oxford Solomon RC (1993) Ethics and excellence: cooperation and integrity in business. Oxford University Press, New York Solomon RC (1994) Above the bottom line: an introduction to business ethics. Harcourt Brace, Fort Worth Spencer H (1876/1972) Principles of sociology. In: Peel JDY (ed) On social evolution: selected writings. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Streeck W (2014) Buying time: the delayed crisis of democratic capitalism (trans: Camiller P). Verso, London Varoufakis Y (2011) The global minotaur: America, the true origins of the financial crisis and the future of the world economy. Sed Books, London von Hayek FA (1944/2001) The road to serfdom. Routledge, London von Hayek FA (1976) The mirage of social justice. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Weisskopf WA (1955) Psychology of economics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago White L Jr (1973) Continuing the conversation. In: Barbour IG (ed) Western man and environmental ethics: attitudes towards nature and technology. Addison-Wesley, Reading, pp 55–64 Wright C, Nyberg D (2015) Climate change, capitalism, and corporations. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

The Role of Virtue in Good Management

44

Andrew West

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Manipulation and “Gaming” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Virtue Ethics as a Means of Understanding the Moral Issue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Agent-Centered Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Combination of Reason and Emotion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Absence of Impersonal Formulae or Rules that Can Resolve Moral Dilemmas . . . . . . Both Individual and Common Goods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Objective Conditions of Human Flourishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Virtue Ethics Can Contribute to Good Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Virtues or Excellences that Assist a Manager in Managing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Virtues or Excellences that Contribute to the Manager Living Well . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Virtues or Excellences that Contribute to the Common Good . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

810 811 811 812 812 813 814 814 815 815 817 818 819 819 820

Abstract

Any investigation into “good management” raises questions about what it means to be a “good manager.” This itself suggests that there is more to moral theorizing than impartially analyzing the specific details of discrete decisions, and that some consideration ought to be paid to moral agents themselves and what constitutes their good. Such considerations are integral to the virtue ethics tradition. This chapter illustrates how the key features of Aristotelian virtue ethics are necessary for understanding moral issues, as they are faced by managers, using the issue of

A. West (*) School of Accountancy, QUT Business School, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_13

809

810

A. West

data manipulation as an example. Based on the view that a moral theory will only be useful for management if it can adequately describe such moral issues, it argues that the Aristotelian tradition is thereby well suited for application to managers. Three ways in which the Aristotelian perspective can contribute to good management are then presented, which include consideration of: the virtues or excellences relevant to managerial functions; those relevant to living well qua human; and the importance of both individual and common goods. The chapter closes by drawing attention to how the Aristotelian perspective stands in stark contrast to a common conception of ethics as compliance. Keywords

Aristotle · Character · Flourishing · Management · Moral agents · Moral theory · Virtues

Introduction Any investigation into the concept of “good management” invites reflection on not only the characteristic tasks of management (such as planning, leading, organizing, and controlling) and how they are performed, but on who actually does the managing. It is not uncommon, when thinking of “good management,” to bring to mind those we consider to be examples of “good managers.” Indeed, if we start with the observation that “good managers exist,” we turn naturally to ask about the characteristics of such “good managers,” how they differ from those managers who are not as good, and how they might have acquired or developed these characteristics. To the extent that these characteristics have the nature of semipermanent dispositions, we then find ourselves asking the same sorts of questions that virtue ethicists (whether or not they were labeled as such) have been asking for thousands of years. This chapter provides an overview of how the virtue ethics tradition is particularly suitable for analyzing the practice of management, and how virtue ethics can further develop good management. There has been considerable work on virtue ethics and business, such as Solomon (1992, 2004), Bragues (2006), and Hartman (2006, 2008a, b), that extends the revitalized study of virtue ethics led by Anscombe (1958), MacIntyre (1981), Foot (1978), Hursthouse (1999), and others. However, this chapter draws on certain themes articulated by Aristotle (typically regarded as the founder of Western virtue ethics) in his Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle 2009). For introductions to this work, I recommend Pakaluk (2005), Urmson (1988), and Hughes (2013). The chapter adopts the logic that a suitable moral theory for management (and for “good management”) must be capable of providing an adequate description of the ethical issues that managers face. A theory that cannot do so will not be useful for managers. However, if a moral theory can provide an adequate understanding of moral issues as they occur in practice, then we can look more closely at the theory to ask how it might then contribute to the practice of good management. Along these lines, the chapter proceeds by presenting several examples of a particular moral issue faced by many managers, that of data manipulation or “gaming.” This is followed by an

44

The Role of Virtue in Good Management

811

examination of how key features of the Aristotelian virtue ethics tradition are necessary to adequately understand these examples. The subsequent section then discusses how virtue ethics can inform managers in their pursuit of good management.

Manipulation and “Gaming” Christine is a financial manager currently overseeing preparation of the year-end accounts for a listed company. A significant portion of the manufacturing equipment has, due to rapid technological change, become obsolete and will require complete replacement within the next 3 years. The financial accounts currently reflect a useful life of 12 more years for this equipment, but any adjustment to reflect a shorter useful life will result in a lower profit for the company this year. Christine decides to compromise and adjusts the accounts to reflect a remaining useful life of 8 years. Michelle is a manager in an academic department of a prominent university. A government initiative to rank research outputs at all universities is currently underway and Michelle is managing the process for her department. Before the reporting period closes, Michelle has the opportunity to hire two well-known, highprofile researchers from another country as part-time appointments. Even though these researchers would have no teaching obligations and would remain overseas, their research output over the last 5 years would then be included in the current assessment exercise. Michelle does not proceed with hiring the overseas researchers and the department’s research is ranked as “mediocre.” Rob is a manager at a private health provider that runs a group of hospitals and is required to report on the rate of postoperative complications each year. Recent media reports have highlighted high complication rates at some hospitals that are of public concern. Rob can reduce his group’s rate of complications by 10% by amalgamating the figures from rural and urban areas, while also reducing the specified timeframe in which a “complication” occurs to only 24 h after surgery. Rob proceeds with these amendments and the group avoids any scrutiny of its postoperative complications. Although there is a wide variety of moral issues that managers face on a daily basis, some of which are more specific to particular roles (such as an audit manager’s need to maintain client independence), the manipulation of figures and the “gaming” of performance systems that these three examples reflect is fairly common and applies to managers in a variety of different sectors, organizations, and departments. Accordingly, it provides an opportunity for wide application and analysis.

Virtue Ethics as a Means of Understanding the Moral Issue When we apply a moral theory to a specific moral issue, even if we are doing so only with the intention of providing a means of resolving the issue or coming to a moral judgment, we necessarily assert a particular perspective on what it is that makes that issue a moral issue. According to the classical utilitarian perspective, for example, the issue is described in terms of competing courses of action and their outcomes,

812

A. West

and it is evaluated with regard to which of these outcomes maximizes the “good,” interpreted as overall (hedonistic) happiness. In a similar vein, the virtue ethics tradition provides its own perspective on the key moral features of the issue. In this section, a number of the key themes of Aristotelian virtue ethics are presented and applied to the scenarios described above.

Agent-Centered Approach Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is itself an enquiry into what it means to be a good human being, and his analysis is in terms of both intellectual excellences and various character-based dispositions or virtues (the word “arête” can be translated as either “virtue” or “excellence,” and these terms will be used interchangeably throughout this chapter). Unlike those moral theories which focus on the decision being made, such as how Christine ought to account for the obsolescence of company assets, the focus of the virtue ethics tradition lies not on the action itself, but on the person making the decision (in this case, Christine). This shift of focus encompasses a range of questions that are otherwise not typically raised, such as: “what sort of person is Christine?,” “what sort of person does Christine want to be?,” “what is Christine’s history?,” “what competing roles does she play and which competing obligations has Christine adopted?,” and “what are Christine’s goals?.” With the exception of perhaps the most straightforward and least controversial of issues, unless we have some answers to these questions, we will not have an adequate understanding of the issue itself. We may find, for example, that having spent significant time outside of the workplace, Christine no longer has a good technical understanding of financial accounting requirements, and is very much aware of her technical shortcomings. Motivated to securely establish herself in her current role, her tendency is to avoid any actions that might attract negative attention from senior management. Following the Aristotelian perspective, we might describe Christine as lacking the intellectual excellence of knowledge (with respect to the accounting knowledge expected of a financial manager), as well as displaying traits of self-doubt, timidity, and a willingness to please. Any determination of how Christine might herself go about acting ethically would require some consideration of what would be required of Christine, given her background, goals, roles, and the traits she habitually displays. Such an analysis would also include what is required of Christine for her to exercise or develop the necessary practical wisdom (Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of “phronesis”) that will enable her to deal with the specifics of this situation. Ultimately, it is difficult to see how an adequate understanding of the context of this moral issue can be obtained if such an agent-centered analysis is excluded.

A Combination of Reason and Emotion The character traits that Aristotle identifies, such as courage and generosity, can often be explained in terms of an appropriate emotional response (Aristotle’s

44

The Role of Virtue in Good Management

813

“golden mean”) in relation to a particular area or domain. Courage, for example, is the appropriate emotional response when faced with a fearful situation. Importantly, these virtues of character operate pre-reflectively, such that the courageous person who is well practiced in exercising courage in such situations does so habitually. This is not to suggest that there is no role for reason, and Aristotle clearly identifies an interdependence between the character-based virtues and the intellectual excellence of practical wisdom. It is this interdependence between reason and emotions that is evident in our daily lives and in how we engage with particular moral issues. If Michelle, for example, has spent her entire working career resisting calls to compromise her standards and to take advantage of “loopholes” in official policies in apparent pursuit of the “greater good,” she would have developed traits of constancy, resilience, and integrity. Accordingly, she will then find it much easier to resist this particular pressure than someone who finds himself in such a situation for the first time. While Michelle may therefore instinctively resist the pressure placed on her, it is through further consideration of the circumstances (including some assessment of the outcomes for all of those involved) that she will reflect on her initial reaction, and can come to a judgment on whether this needs to be qualified or revised. Again, however, without recognition of the importance of our emotional responses, and how these develop over time, we cannot have an adequate appreciation of the moral issue.

The Absence of Impersonal Formulae or Rules that Can Resolve Moral Dilemmas The third key feature of an Aristotelian virtue ethics follows from the previous two and highlights the particularities of each situation. The guidance that Aristotle provides for determining how one ought to act in a certain set of circumstances is notably vague. He states, for example, that one ought to display anger or give money “to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way. . .” (NE2.9, 1109a27–29). While this may appear to be of little practical help, it draws attention to how an appropriate moral judgment depends on the context, and how appeals to law-like abstracted rules or principles cannot provide complete guides to moral behavior. Rob, for example, could appeal to a utilitarian calculation of the consequences of his possible actions. He could thereby attempt to identify all those who would be affected by his redefinition of postoperative complications and proceed to estimate the degree to which their pleasure (or some other measure of utility) might be increased or decreased by his action. Alternatively, he could test his proposed redefinition against a supposedly impartial criterion of universalizability, to be rejected if it fails the test. However, if he relied upon the outcome of these deliberations to provide a clearcut decision, he will necessarily be omitting certain aspects of his situation that are typically taken to be important in a moral sense. He will, for example, be ignoring the inherent value of making decisions (such as how to count and define

814

A. West

postoperative complications) with honesty, consistency, and transparency. These are features we value in themselves and not simply instrumentally. However, when focusing on outcomes only, it is precisely these features that could be discarded when the end is achieved or when there are alternative means to satisfy this end. He would also fail to notice the possibility of behaving as a moral exemplar, embodying what it means to live a good life – where, for Aristotle, the good life is not a matter of achieving a particular emotional state, but of actively living in accordance with the virtues.

Both Individual and Common Goods Although Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is primarily concerned with what it means for an individual to live well, it was written as a prelude to his Politics, in which the importance of the “polis” as the political community is emphasized. For Aristotle, it is in relation to the community that individual flourishing finds its place, and it is in the well-functioning (and just) community that individuals can flourish. Some recognition of this interdependence between the goods of individuals and the common goods of the community is necessary for the context of moral issues to be adequately understood. In all three of the examples above, there are relationships of dependence, where some people (or groups of people) depend upon the actions of Christine, Michelle, and Rob for their own flourishing, even if only indirectly. For Christine, for example, there are stakeholders who rely upon the accuracy of the financial reports she prepares, and there is a general reliance upon the trustworthiness of financial information for all of those in the community to make responsible and just decisions concerning economic goods. Furthermore, Christine, Michelle, and Rob all participate as codeterminants of these common goods and how they are to be achieved. It is worth emphasizing that this consideration of common goods is not simply an aggregation of private interests that reflects diverse but morally equivalent individual preferences. Instead, it entails a ranking of goods, and the acknowledgment that some people are in greater need of particular goods for their flourishing, and therefore require decisions that accord these needs greater weight.

The Objective Conditions of Human Flourishing The final feature of an Aristotelian virtue ethics discussed here reflects the objective nature of how we experience moral issues. For Aristotle, human flourishing (“eudaimonia”) is the ultimate human good, and is necessarily related to our nature as human beings. As such, there are some conditions that are conducive to human flourishing, and some conditions that are not. Consequently, our moral judgments are not merely expressions of our preferences or desires but are actually oriented either toward or away from human flourishing.

44

The Role of Virtue in Good Management

815

In the example above, Rob does in fact decide to amend the definition of a postoperative complication and to amalgamate rural and urban hospitals in order to arrive at a more favorable complication rate, and it appears that he does so out of self-interest, to avoid scrutiny. Suppose that Rob later reflects on his decision and regrets his choice, observing how it has frustrated the attainment of responsible decisions regarding public health. We would not be surprised to hear him then claim that he made the wrong choice, both for himself and for the wider community. It would be less likely that we would hear him describe his original moral stance as merely corresponding to his preferences at the time, and his expressed regret as amounting to no more than a change in those preferences. It is this characterization of moral judgments as being right or wrong (or being more or less so), rather than being merely personal preference or desire, that lies at the heart of moral outrage, moral debate, and moral progress. Avoiding such a characterization renders these concepts less intelligible and is removed from our experience of moral discourse. Furthermore, in as far as we can link our judgments to the conditions that are necessary for human flourishing, we can claim some justification for our moral assessments. As Rob’s case suggests, if we avoid doing so, we are less able to adequately understand how we actually experience moral issues.

How Virtue Ethics Can Contribute to Good Management The discussion thus far has focused on presenting a particular moral issue that is commonly faced by managers across various sectors, organizations, and departments, and then illustrating how accepting some of the key features of an Aristotelian virtue ethics is necessary for us to gain an adequate understanding of the issue itself. Conversely, it has also enabled us to ask: can we really trust a moral theory to provide reliable resolutions to our moral dilemmas if it cannot adequately describe our moral issues? Having such a perspective, we can now inquire what this theory might have to offer, in terms of contributing to the practice of good management. This section considers three ways in which this question can be answered.

Virtues or Excellences that Assist a Manager in Managing Consistent with the focus on the moral agent described above, the virtue ethics tradition is concerned not with abstract techniques of moral decision-making or “rules of thumb” that can be applied across various contexts, but with the development of the manager as a good manager. For Aristotle, a good specimen is one that performs its characteristic function well, and the virtues or excellences are those traits or dispositions that enable it to do so. For the practice of management, then, a good manager is one who manages well, and who has developed the relevant virtues or excellences that enable her to do so.

816

A. West

As noted above, a distinction can be drawn between intellectual and character-based virtues or excellences. Considering the technical aspects of management, it is apparent that, depending on the specific area in which the manager operates, certain knowledge and expertise is necessary in order to manage effectively. This could, for example, include the ability to conduct a net present value cost–benefit analysis, or to maintain an adequate understanding of health and safety laws and regulations. The development of excellence in these areas depends to a large extent on one’s education and training, whether formal or informal. While the inclusion of such technical considerations as moral excellences may seem to impose a moral interpretation on nonmoral competencies, it reflects how we ordinarily make evaluative judgments about a lack of such competence: for example, we would not consider a financial manager who cannot perform a net present value analysis to be a good financial manager. While the development of technical ability may be necessary for someone to become a good manager, it is by no means sufficient. Popular accounts of managers of large corporations often include descriptions of how they have related to those around them. For some, there are stories of inspiration and encouragement, where managers have been able to draw on the potential they see in others. For others, there are stories of ruthlessness and a lack of empathy for those whom managers encounter on their paths to wider recognition. However, what is distinctive about our stories of managers is that they are not simply a sequence of individual, isolated actions, but an account of the nature of an individual’s character. In this context, where managers are managing people and frequently dealing with interpersonal conflict, the character-related virtues of empathy, mildness, and tact are clearly relevant. Furthermore, in the context of a competitive business environment and limited resources, managers are expected to provide leadership, and so require virtues of determination, persistence, and resilience. Moreover, given the nature of hierarchical organizations and the reality of power imbalances, a manager functioning well will also need to display honesty, consistency, and integrity in his decisions and communications, and justice in the distribution of rewards and requirements. What is obvious from this discussion of character traits is that they are not easily acquired (or easily lost), and there is no workplace seminar or corporate code of ethics that can impart virtues such as integrity or tact. As Aristotle observed, the development of such character-related virtues begins with one’s early education and upbringing. Although this is important (and is reflected in our curiosity over the background of a Bernie Madoff, for example, and how he came to be the kind of person who could devise a multimillion dollar Ponzi scheme), there are nevertheless ongoing opportunities to develop virtuous traits. Aristotle’s comparison with physical training is informative, where the development of a character-based virtue, like the development of a muscle or athletic ability, requires practice. Furthermore, the types of practice will vary from person to person, so that while someone like Michelle is already used to resisting calls for compromising her ethical standards and so may not require much further practice to handle such pressures in the workplace, someone like Rob may need to learn to develop the necessary traits incrementally, before he is equipped to do so.

44

The Role of Virtue in Good Management

817

A further consideration relates to Aristotle’s concept of “weakness of will” or akrasia (see Urmson 1988). In addition to the distinction between a virtuous person, who acts well, i.e., in accordance with both her desires and deliberation, and a “vicious” person, who acts badly, i.e., without either a desire to act well or any deliberative inclination to do so, there are two intermediate states. These two states are both characterized by a deliberative aim to act well, despite not wanting to do so. However, the person who suffers from a weakness of will is not able to overcome her desire to act contrarily, and so does not act well. On the other hand, the person with strength of will is able to overcome his desire to act contrarily, and consequently does act well. Faced with the opportunity to hide important information from shareholders, for example, while a virtuous manager would have no difficulty acting with transparency, and a “vicious” manager would similarly have no qualms about hiding the information, it is the intermediate states that may be more relevant. That is, a manager may not desire to reveal the information to shareholders but may nevertheless judge that he ought to do so. If he is able to overcome his desire, he demonstrates strength of will; if not, he suffers from a weakness of will. This has two implications for our discussion of good management. Firstly, the good (or virtuous) manager does not experience acting ethically as a struggle against her inclinations, or as a series of constraints within which she is permitted to operate. The good manager’s desires are entirely consistent with what acting well requires of her. Secondly, as this virtuous state may be rare, some consideration is necessary of how managers might develop moral motivation that enables them to act well, even when this is contrary to their own desires. Again, this goes beyond applying abstract decision-making criteria (as their deliberation already leans toward the morally right action), and is likely best addressed by returning to some of the questions raised above, such as “what sort of manager do I want to be?” and “what do I need to do to become that sort of manager?” This may also lead to a wider set of questions, to which we now turn.

Virtues or Excellences that Contribute to the Manager Living Well Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is not concerned primarily with the varying roles that we may play (of which “manager” may be one), but ultimately asks, and attempts to answer, the question “what does it mean to live well as a human?” As noted above, Aristotle proposes flourishing (“eudaimonia”) as this end, described as living in accordance with the various virtues or excellences. This emphasis on living well qua human, rather than just qua manager, doctor, accountant, etc., is important as it directs our attention to one’s entire human life, and how the virtues or excellences that are necessary for living well qua human will necessarily impact on how we conduct ourselves as managers. Ultimately, we would expect some consistency between the virtues or excellences that are closely related to managerial roles and those that are necessary to live well qua human. To the extent that there is an inconsistency between these, this suggests

818

A. West

a context where it is possible to be a good manager in only a limited sense. If, for example, a manager is expected to regularly withhold information from customers and use this information asymmetry to the corporation’s advantage, there is an inconsistency between being a “good manager” in the sense that the corporation’s expectations are achieved, and being a good human, who would engage with customers more justly. MacIntyre (2015), for example, discusses the characteristics needed to be a “good” investment manager along these lines. Consequently, the virtue ethics perspective on good management provides a constraint in that one cannot ultimately be a good manager while displaying traits that are inconsistent with being a good human. This again suggests a reflection, asking not only “what sort of manager do I want to be?,” but “what sort of person do I want to be?” It is also clear that any demarcation between how I am as a manager (or “at work”) and how I am as a person (and in nonwork contexts) is ultimately illusory.

Virtues or Excellences that Contribute to the Common Good Finally, another way in which an Aristotelian virtue ethics can contribute to good management refers to the interdependence between individual and communal goods, and the observation that it is in a flourishing community that individuals can flourish. Just as the Aristotelian perspective raises questions about who we want to be qua human, it also raises questions about what sort of community we want to be, what goods are required for a community to flourish, how we rank those goods, and how they are best achieved. For the good manager, this entails a reflection on how one’s work contributes (or, indeed, how it might not contribute) to such common goods. A manager could, for example, question her involvement in an industrial organization that has a detrimental impact on a developing country’s water supply. Similarly, those working in industries developing armaments, alcoholic beverages, tobacco products, or providing gambling opportunities may have reason to question the common goods that their work contributes to, and to also question how it does so. This is not to suggest that there are simple answers, or categorical prohibitions, but that one’s work as a manager, and one’s flourishing as a human, cannot be divorced from the development of common goods upon which we necessarily depend. Furthermore, as this requires some (shared) reflection, the virtue ethics perspective is fundamentally incompatible with appeals to an “invisible hand” that will ensure that the greatest good is served if we just look after our own interests. It is also incompatible with a quantitative reduction of either individual or communal wellbeing to improvements in gross domestic product or average wages. In contrast, the good manager is engaged in some activity that does contribute to the development of common goods in some way, and so some awareness of the conditions for human flourishing at both an individual and a communal level is necessary.

44

The Role of Virtue in Good Management

819

Conclusion This chapter has provided an overview of how the Aristotelian virtue ethics tradition can provide some insights into the practice of good management. It has been argued that a moral theory will be most useful to management practice if it can accurately characterize moral issues themselves, and, conversely, that a moral theory which cannot do so has a questionable application to management. On this basis, the chapter has shown how five of the key features of the Aristotelian perspective are typically relevant in our common understanding of moral issues. In particular, this includes the focus on the moral agent himself or herself, the relationship between reason and emotions, the absence of impersonal formulae that can resolve moral problems, the importance of both individual and common goods, and the acknowledgment of objective conditions relevant to human flourishing. Omitting any of these features results in an inadequate understanding of moral issues. Given this applicability of the Aristotelian perspective, the chapter has identified three areas in which this perspective can contribute to good management: firstly, by considering the virtues or excellences that can assist managers in their managerial functions; secondly, by extending the analysis to the virtues or excellences that contribute to the manager living well qua human; and thirdly, by drawing attention to the common good and how the manager may (or may not) be contributing to flourishing at both the individual and communal levels. Lastly, it is worth drawing attention to the substantial difference between the perspective described in this chapter and many other approaches to ethics in management. Although the chapter has not discussed alternative perspectives in any detail, it is apparent that, in many situations, ethics in management is treated as an issue of compliance or duty, sometimes associated with the management and reduction of organizational risk. Codes of conduct and standards of corporate governance typically identify actions that are prohibited (such as conflicts of interest, breaches of confidentiality) and controls that are implemented in order to ensure that behavior within the organization is ethical. In this context, management often involves ensuring that these standards and controls are observed and appropriately implemented, so that employees can get on with the “ordinary” business of the organization. Such an approach is, however, decidedly at odds with the Aristotelian perspective, where ethics is associated not with compliance, but with excellence and with living well. Furthermore, we witness recurring ethical failures within businesses, despite an ever-increasing number of standards and controls to prevent such failures. This suggests that, ultimately, we may need a reframing of ethics in terms of individual and communal flourishing and excellence, and away from ethics as compliance, in order to realize both good business and good management.

Cross-References ▶ Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility of Organizations as Artificial Persons

820

A. West

References Anscombe GEM (1958) Modern moral philosophy. Philosophy 33(124):1–19 Aristotle (2009) The Nicomachean ethics. Oxford University Press, New York Bragues G (2006) Seek the good life, not money: the Aristotelian approach to business ethics. J Bus Ethics 67(4):341–357 Foot P (1978) Virtues and vices: and other essays in moral philosophy. University of California Press, Berkely Hartman E (2006) Can we teach character? An Aristotelian answer. Acad Manag Learn Educ 5(1):68–81 Hartman E (2008a) Reconciliation in business ethics: some advice from Aristotle. Bus Ethics Q 18(2):253–265 Hartman E (2008b) Socratic questions and Aristotelian answers: a virtue-based approach to business ethics. J Bus Ethics 78(3):313–328 Hughes GJ (2013) The Routledge guidebook to Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics. Routledge, Abingdon Hursthouse R (1999) On virtue ethics. Oxford University Press, Oxford MacIntyre A (1981) After virtue: a study in moral theory. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame MacIntyre A (2015) The irrelevance of ethics. In: Bielskis A, Knight K (eds) Virtue and economy: essays on morality and markets. Ashgate Publishing, Farnham, pp 7–22 Pakaluk M (2005) Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics: an introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Solomon RC (1992) Corporate roles, personal virtues: an Aristotelean approach to business ethics. Bus Ethics Q 2(3):317–339 Solomon RC (2004) Aristotle, ethics and business organizations. Organ Stud 25(6):1021–1043 Urmson JO (1988) Aristotle’s ethics. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, UK

Organizations, Virtue Ethics, and Narrative Identity

45

Chris Provis

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Narrative Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Meaningful Work and Narrative Identity in Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Work-Life Balance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Narrative Identity and Social Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

822 822 825 827 829 832 833 834

Abstract

A key idea of virtue ethics is the idea that people’s narrative identity is basic to their good. After considering the notion of narrative identity itself, this chapter suggests that the idea helps to clarify the concept of meaningful work and also to understand how important aspects of people’s identities are affected by the organizations they work in, with implications for issues of work-life balance. Work is meaningful when it has narrative-type connections to other parts of an individual’s life, and work-life balance requires such connectedness between work and other parts of life. However, individuals’ narrative identities have to be contrasted with their social group identities, gained just through people categorizing themselves as members of social groups. Social group identities interact with narrative identities, but so far as possible diversity policies should concentrate on individuals’ narrative identities.

C. Provis (*) UniSA Business, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_23

821

822

C. Provis

Keywords

Diversity · Meaningful work · Narrative identity · Social identity · Virtue ethics · Work-life balance

Introduction Over recent years, virtue ethics has come to greater and greater prominence, both generally and in business and management (see, e.g., Sison et al. 2017). A key part of some virtue ethics is the idea of “narrative identity,” the idea that who a person is – the most important aspects of who a person is – can best be seen in the story of a person’s life. This suggestion has been prominent in MacIntyre’s work, linking the idea of a person’s life narrative with what is good for the person. He says, for example, In what does the unity of an individual life consist? The answer is that its unity is the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life. To ask ‘What is the good for me?’ is to ask how best I might live out that unity and bring it to completion. (MacIntyre 1985, p. 218)

What follows aims to say more about the idea of a person’s life embodying a narrative, and about the idea that this is tied to the person’s good, and then note some implications for people’s lives as members of organizations. One implication has to do with meaningful work. It is not new to suggest that people’s job satisfaction is often tied to their perceptions that the work they do is meaningful, but how to define or explain the idea of meaningful work is generally left quite unclear. The idea of narrative identity can shed light on this, and at the same time it links performance of meaningful work not only to people’s subjective job satisfaction at any particular time, but to their long-term wellbeing. Another implication is that of “work-life balance.” While the idea of narrative identity offers no magic bullet for dealing with work-life balance, it can perhaps clarify the issue and its relationships to some other more general issues. One problem that can arise about work-life balance is the pressure that individuals may feel to embrace different identities at work than in other parts of their lives. Addressing this issue raises questions about respect for individuals’ identities. This is a matter that diversity policies often aim to address, but the identities that matter are individuals’ narrative identities, rather than people’s collective social identities. It is therefore necessary to clarify both the distinction between these forms of identity and how they are related. It will be suggested that diversity policies need to take account of individuals’ social identities, but should do so because of the effects that these social identities can have on their narrative identities, not for the sake of the social identities themselves.

Narrative Identity Appiah notes that the stories we tell about ourselves, about events in our own lives, have the same general structure as the fictional stories to be found in novels and short stories and movies (Appiah 2005, p. 22). They utilize the same narrative conventions

45

Organizations, Virtue Ethics, and Narrative Identity

823

and it is therefore no great step to think of a person’s life as a story, and no great further step to think of a person’s identity as being tied to that life story. The idea of persons’ narrative identity can be developed in different ways (Schechtman 2011), but as Schechtman says, “the idea that our lives are in some sense story-like runs deep in our everyday thought” (Schechtman 2011, p. 394). The idea has come to be of interest not only in virtue ethics but in other parts of philosophy. For example, Korsgaard alludes to the idea and suggests that each of us sees our own individual life to matter as “part of the general human story” (Korsgaard 2009, p. 212). The idea of narrative identity also figures in modern psychology. McAdams and McLean characterize narrative identity as “a person’s internalized and evolving life story, integrating the reconstructed past and imagined future to provide life with some degree of unity and purpose” (2013, p. 233). The idea is a fruitful one in various ways. For example, it helps us to make sense of notions like authenticity and integrity (Cullity 2020), and it allows us to account for the fact that a person’s interests cannot be analyzed solely as the sum of separate momentary interests, but needs also to be considered from the point of view of the structured relationships amongst different moments, relations among parts of life that can reasonably be construed as “narrative” relations (Velleman 1991). Certainly, the idea that people’s lives have narrative form has some detractors. For example, Currie (2010) does not see persons’ lives as narratives because he wishes to reserve that phrasing for representational artifacts (p. 24). However, he also notes (p. 219) that the representations of events and processes in a narrative emphasize the temporal and causal relations among them, and the way that agents themselves show such connectedness. In the present context, the key point is that the causal and temporal connectedness of agents gives their lives the internal structure of a life depicted in a narrative. Thus, Velleman (1991) notes that what an agent does or experiences is often made significant in one way or another by what happens before or after: “a particular success can be either a windfall or a well-earned reward, depending on the amount of effort that preceded it; the expenditure of a particular effort can be either a good investment or a waste, depending on the degree of success that ensues” (p. 57). Strawson (2004) takes issue with the idea of narrative identity more forcefully than Currie does, suggesting (p. 428) that we do not need to see people’s lives as stories, and denying that people generally experience their lives as stories. He suggests that while there may be some people who do so, others do not, calling the former “Diachronic” and the latter “Episodic.” He puts this as an empirical claim, contending that such variation is found in all cultures (p. 431) and suggests that for episodic individuals “one does not figure oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future” (p. 430). However, this claim seems contrary to well-established empirical and theoretical work in psychology (see, e.g., Baddeley et al. 2009, Chap. 7), where absence of such a continuing sense of self is typically indicative of brain damage. There may be differences across cultures in the extent to which attention is focused on the past and the future, as opposed to the present, but there are many such differences among cultures (see e.g. Nisbett 2003). Such differences seem to be matters of degree and

824

C. Provis

focus, and the effect of priming in specific cultural milieux (see, e.g., Nisbett 2003, p. 68 and pp. 228–229). Overall, several lines of thought suggest very strongly that it is useful and important to conceive of people’s lives in narrative form. Of course, it is no novelty for philosophers that individuals have a sense of self that recalls the past and anticipates the future. Rudd points to Locke’s conception of personal identity, where Locke takes it as characteristic of a person to be an intelligent being that considers itself the same entity at different times (Rudd 2007, p.61; see Locke 1964 [1690], Bk. II, Chap. 27, Sec 9). What is perhaps more recent is emphasis like MacIntyre’s on the ethical significance of this point. However, such emphasis emerges naturally from recognition that people see themselves as having a past and future and that events in a person’s life are given significance by the past and the future. Around the same time as MacIntyre published After Virtue, Harry Frankfurt made related points in “The Importance of What We Care About” (Frankfurt 1988). He took up the idea that what we care about had become a neglected issue so far as philosophers were concerned, and most importantly here pointed out that, while a person’s desires or beliefs may be a succession of momentary occurrences without places in the person’s continuing history, “caring about” things requires attention to linkages among them and relationships to moments in the person’s own life (Frankfurt 1988, p. 83). Individuals’ lives involve sequences of actions and events that are interconnected in ways that make it natural to construe them as narrative episodes. It is what characters in a novel care about that often gives significance to happenings in the story, and it is what we care about that often gives significance to events in our own lives. To that extent, the recall and anticipation of past events is important to us. More than that, however, it is the future and the past that help us to explain and understand events that figure in our lives and in the lives of those around us. One way of putting this is to say that it is earlier and later events that give something its meaning. Any novel or history book is one long series of examples. We can see how events in people’s lives are interconnected over time. For instance, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth’s response to Darcy is comprehensible only in the light of her own upbringing and Darcy’s own behavior. In the history of Rome, the significance of Caesar’s action at the Rubicon emerges only from his past actions, his present intentions, and the Roman legal and political situation. Similarly, “autobiographical memories comprise the story of our lives, rich in interactions and relationships, and in a very deep sense, provide a sense of self through a narrative identity” (Fivush et al. 2011, p. 322). Through accounts of individuals’ development from infancy onward, it seems that, over time, narrative increasingly provides the basis for them to connect past, present, and future (Nelson 2003). Individuals also develop “self-schemas” that are a central part of their psychological makeup, and which allow them to envisage possible futures, with aspirations and fears (e.g., Fiske and Taylor 1991, Chap. 6). Such self-schemas are developed in a social context, and also involve learning social scripts that assist our understanding of social events (Bernsten and Rubin 2004). Partly, our understanding of human events utilizes such established social scripts and schemas that function to both predict and

45

Organizations, Virtue Ethics, and Narrative Identity

825

prescribe sequences of actions. Partly, it utilizes our ability to imagine the responses the agent might have to the situation as they perceive it. Such an account brings out the importance of narrative identity for virtue ethics. Through those stages of development, individuals have the potential to develop virtues like carefulness and sensitivity as they pay attention to their past and future, seeing the inter-relationship between past and possible future events in their life. They can discern implications for the present and for other people, with increasing practical wisdom. Other ideas like integrity and authenticity, which seem central to virtue ethics, are tied to that sort of connectedness among the parts of a person’s life. Failures of authenticity occur when a person’s self-presentation at one time is not truly reflective of other parts of the person’s life. Failures of integrity occur when a person’s actions at one time are not consistent with professions or commitments made at other times. In business, Badaracco’s study Defining Moments (1997) revolves around the point that often for managers to make good decisions where they face conflicting ethical alternatives, they must in effect consider what courses of action best fit the continuing stories of their lives. “Become Who You Are” is the title Badaracco gives to one chapter, and it encapsulates an important ethical dimension of narrative identity. Importantly, though, it is not only issues of obligation and right action that are tied to narrative identity. Not only questions about “the right” – about how we should act – but also questions about “the good” – what we should aim for or aspire to – seem tied to the idea of individuals’ continuing identities through time. Goods like friendship and achievement are linked with events in a person’s past and future in the sorts of ways that make up narrative connections, where some events are the explanations for others that come before and after. If a person’s life lacks connections among its parts, then many fundamental human goods are lost to it. Since people’s lives generally have their work as a prominent part, it is unsurprising that connectedness of their work with the rest of their lives is an important aspect of their good. This is especially relevant in relation to two issues that have been widely discussed in recent years: the nature of meaningful work, and the idea of work-life balance.

Meaningful Work and Narrative Identity in Organizations Bailey and colleagues say that “meaningful work is something that many individuals crave, and that many organizations aspire to promote,” and suggest that “important and meaningful work is the single most valued feature of employment for the majority of workers” (Bailey et al. 2017, p. 416). The question of what can make work “meaningful” is not straightforward. However, if it is the narrative form in people’s lives that gives meaning and significance to the lives’ events and episodes, it is natural to see narrative identity as tied to issues of meaningful work. Raising questions about the nature of worthwhile work, and about what factors make work worthwhile is not new (see e.g. Fox 1971, Chap. 1) but a particular emphasis on “meaningful” work was prompted by Taylorist routinizations of work during the first half of the twentieth century, which led to “job enrichment” initiatives

826

C. Provis

(Dufty and Fells 1989, pp. 51ff; Legge 1995, pp. 172, 230). The repetitive and boring structure of many work processes prompted moves towards reorganization of work tasks to make them more satisfying and fulfilling. However, these have shown mixed success (Stone 2008, p. 179). One reason may be that there has been continuing emphasis on job characteristics, with less attention given to “personenvironment fit” (Parker and Ohly 2009, p. 275). There has been a tendency to see meaning as an inherent characteristic of some work more than of other work – for example, the work of a doctor as inherently more meaningful than that of a checkout operator. However, this ignores the fact that how meaningful work is for a person – and, derivatively, how satisfying it is –depends very much on how well it matches the person’s inclinations, skills, experience, and so on; in other words, to what extent the work tasks are connected with other parts of the person’s life that together make up the person’s narrative identity. There are many situations where people’s well-being at work seems determined by how well their individual characteristics match the demands and opportunities of their jobs (see, e.g., Parker and Ohly 2009). This point has a number of aspects. What skills one has will affect how successfully one can do a particular job, and that will almost inevitably affect people’s satisfaction with their work and their relationships with people around them, be they colleagues or organizational clients. But not only skills will be relevant here; so will people’s personality and interest in the job, for example. There will be interplay among the various factors: people’s skill and interest in the work affect their relationships with colleagues, but also relationships with colleagues can affect individuals’ interest in the work, interest in the work can foster skill development, and so on. This general point applies to meaningful work: whether work has meaning for an individual depends on how it fits into the individual’s own life story. How meaningful for individuals their work may be often depends on how well their individual characteristics match their jobs. A person’s work can have meaning for that person in the way that events in a narrative can have meaning, in the sense that they have implications for other parts of the narrative, before or after, fulfilling expectations, offering opportunities, creating relationships, and so on. These factors vary a lot across individuals – therefore one can say, literally, that meaningful work is an individual matter. There are reasons to create organizations that offer individuals meaningful work, because meaningful work is part of what is good for a person, but to do so requires attention not only to the nature of the work but also to the characteristics of the individuals. Hence, the idea of narrative identity offers a way to clarify questions about meaningful work, and to relate them to MacIntyre’s suggestion that what is good for a person is to live a life unified by its narrative identity. At the same time, narrative identity offers a way to explore some other related issues that have been especially salient in work and organizations since the late twentieth century neoliberalism. Developments that have involved industry restructuring, erosion of job security, and increased uses of casual or contract labor have deeply affected many people’s individual narrative identities. Thus, we read in a study of the American middle class: “To be a downwardly mobile executive is first to discover that you are

45

Organizations, Virtue Ethics, and Narrative Identity

827

not as good a person as you thought you were and then to end up not sure who or what you are” (Leidner 2006, p. 453, quoting Newman 1988, pp. 93–94). The result is quite simply a problem for individuals to find the unity that MacIntyre pinpoints as the good for a person. When we see that meaningful work is work that fits into the narrative of a person’s life, we also may see how a person’s narrative identity can fit in with the values of an organization, or fails to do so. Leidner (2006) surveys a wide variety of issues that arise for individuals’ identities as the result of such efforts. One is simply that individuals are encouraged to embrace different values at work than those they accept in other parts of their lives. At home, they may accept the importance of gentleness and sympathy, while at work they are expected to be aggressive and detached. With their friends, they may value cooperation and harmony, while their workplace requires competitiveness and conflict. If they pretend to uphold values they do not truly embrace, they fall into inauthenticity as well as disunity. But changing the values they have outside their work will bring conflict with their relationships with other people who are important to them, and with their own memories and hopes. It is true that our lives are never quite fully connected. Sometimes, we forget past events, or take too little heed of them. Sometimes, we fail to see the future effects of an action we take. Sometimes, however, we partition whole sequences of events from other sequences, pushing aside the implications of some things we do from other parts of our lives. When this occurs, our lives may read like stories with disconnected subplots, quite contrary to “the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life.” The possibility of work values being disconnected from those in the remainder of one’s life can highlight the pressure many people face to separate work from family, as though one’s life has two separate stories. That is one way that narrative identity arises in the ethics of organizational life, and a way that organizational life can impair the narrative unity of people’s lives. And this is related to the issue often referred to as “work-life balance.”

Work-Life Balance There is now enormous literature on work-life balance. However, this phrase embodies a misleading metaphor, suggesting two different realms that must be managed separately, “work,” on the one hand, and “life,” on the other. It is assumed, then, that problems of work-life balance arise when they “interfere” with one another (see, e.g., Schieman et al. 2009). It may even be suggested that one should aim to allocate equal weights of oneself to each realm, for “balance.” But a number of scholars have questioned the idea that work and other parts of life should be conceived as separate, referring to “the myth of separate worlds” (Kanter 1977, p. 8) and the associated myth that a person has two separate identities, only one related to work (Ramarajan and Reid 2013). It is misleading to think of two separate worlds, for two reasons.

828

C. Provis

The first reason, which has nothing in particular to do with narrative identity, is this. Part of what is referred to as the problem of work-life balance is simply the familiar issue of not being able to fit everything into the time available. The myth obscures that point. Work may take up too much time for one to do everything that one wants to do or ought to do. But such problems occur not just as conflicts between work and other parts of life; they can occur anywhere. At work, there can be conflict between some responsibilities and others. At home, there can be conflicts between opportunities for leisure time spent with friends and such time spent with family. Sometimes, such conflicts are simply choices among possible goods. On the other hand, they may sometimes be conflicts of obligations, as when promises to children conflict with responsibilities to an elderly neighbor. Further, there can be ethical problems about such conflicts between work-based obligations and other obligations (Provis 2009, p. 481). These situations indicate one sort of problem that may be connoted by the idea of “work-life balance,” where one has obligations in each area without the time or other resources to meet them all. It is an important issue, but it is an example of a more general problem about conflicts of obligations. The second reason is more specifically to do with narrative identity. The phrase “work-life balance” suggests a distinction between work and life, as though there were an inherent separation between them. But this conception obscures the sort of problem that can arise when individuals have difficulty in maintaining narrative unity between the identity they have at work and the identity they have elsewhere, so that their lives have disconnected parts. We can imagine a novel where characters depicted in one chapter seem to live through events which have no connection with the events that befall them in another chapter, where the hopes and aspirations and commitments they display in the former chapter seem quite different from those they show in the later chapter, and where in the later chapter they seem not to be affected by the expectations, hopes, or commitments they had in the former. In relation to this problem, Ramarajan and Reid (2013) survey a wide variety of examples that have been reported in the literature. In some cases, individuals seek to fully integrate their work and non-work lives, and in others, people decide quite freely and deliberately to maintain separation between the two. There does not seem to be anything inherently problematic about such chosen separation. When one area of people’s life is stressful and demanding, they may prefer to put thoughts of it aside when there is opportunity, to relax and perhaps to allow themselves to engage more fully in the other things they do. In each part of their life they know fully well what is involved in the other part, sometimes with wistful yearning, sometimes with excited anticipation; they can discuss it, if need be, and make provision for it. But they prefer not to dwell on it, the better to engage with the stressful part and to relax in the other part, and in each to be most fully themselves with other individuals concerned. In that case, although the different parts of life are separated in some ways, there are multiple narrative connections between them, sufficient to give them narrative unity. However, in many cases, the separation is not so fully voluntary. Sometimes, it results from external pressures on an individual to separate the person they are at work from the person they are at home. Various studies have suggested a wide range of such pressures, from organizational culture and formal structure to physical

45

Organizations, Virtue Ethics, and Narrative Identity

829

features, and including both explicit and implicit pressures (Ramarajan and Reid 2013, p. 626). It is this sort of problem about individuals’ identity that has preoccupied a great deal of the literature about identity at work, and it is here that individuals may find it difficult to maintain connectedness between the different parts of their lives. Then, there is the question: to what extent can an individual achieve the sort of unity that MacIntyre contends is the good for a person? Individuals may face pressures on their identities that they do not consent to, that they find difficult to resist, not for their own benefit but for the benefit of the organization, that may fundamentally change them, that are stressful, and that may impair their relationships with other people who are important to them. They may become involved in deception and inauthenticity, when they see no way forward than to dissimulate and pretend to embrace values and identities they do not really accept.

Narrative Identity and Social Identity Problems about meaningful work and work-life balance can usefully be considered in terms of individuals’ narrative identities. But sometimes narrative identity has to be considered in juxtaposition with another sort of identity: the identity that individuals develop through seeing themselves as members of abstract groups. We noted that people develop self-schemas in a social context. We learn from others about ourselves, and about how we resemble others. Our narrative identity is tied to our experiences with caregivers, with family, and with the community more widely. Our understandings of past events, our expectations, and hopes about the future, our concerns, and enjoyments all are shaped in contact with others. But there is also a sense of “social identity” that goes beyond the self-understanding we have on the basis of our direct contacts and relationships. There is the sense where we adopt identities simply from the fact of our memberships of general social groups and categories. It is easy to see a contrast between narrative identity and this form of social identity. Narrative identity revolves around people’s individual histories, personal relationships, memories, regrets, hopes, plans, and expectations. Social identity revolves around memberships they perceive themselves to have in quite abstract groups, as women, or blacks, or Australians, or Protestants. Abstract categories such as gender or class are familiar as a basis for identity. Often, it is possible to doubt the extent to which such categories name real groups (Appiah 2018). However, they play a very important part in behavior. “Social identity” can also be referred to as “collective identity,” or “group identity,” or perhaps “social group identity,” but whatever terminology is used, the distinction that can be made between the ideas of “narrative identity” and “social identity” is important not only conceptually, but also because of the different psychological effects that these forms of identity have on individuals. The idea that a form of individual identity emerges from group membership is not new, but it has come to be developed more fully after empirical studies referred to as “minimal group experiments” (Brown 1986, p. 543; see also Forsyth 1990,

830

C. Provis

Chap. 13). These experiments constructed groups that were essentially fictional, in the sense that individuals were allocated to one group or another on the basis of some irrelevant factor, and had no contact with other members of the group. In allocating resources to other individuals, the subjects nevertheless tended very strongly to favor members of their own group: they showed marked “in-group bias,” favoring members of their own minimal group, despite the absence of any real shared life among the group members. Such experimental results have underpinned various theoretical accounts (see, e.g., Ellemers et al. 2002; Kang and Bodenhausen 2015). Overall, it seems clear that there is a basic tendency for all of us to categorize ourselves as members of abstract groups, and for these categorizations to have major effects on our behavior. These effects are often prompted by quite subtle factors that make one or other of our social identities salient in a particular context (Tajfel 1981; Hogg and Turner 1987). For example, if just one member of a group is a woman, her identity as a woman becomes more salient than in a group with other women (Tajfel 1982, p. 5). We apprehend the social world through processes of categorization, just as we also use categorization mechanisms as part of our cognitive strategies for apprehending the natural world, dividing it into such mental categories as solid and liquid, hard and soft, animate and inanimate, and so on ad infinitum. Then, we add to the group categorizations the fact that we ourselves as individuals are members of some but not of other groups. Because these group memberships can become important parts of our self-conception, they affect our behavior. Most notably, they give rise to marked tendencies for us to favor members of our own groups over others, to see our own groups as more deserving than others, and to enhance our own self-esteem. Our self-identification as members of some groups rather than others is at the heart of “ingroup-outgroup” effects. The mechanisms of social group identification can be automatic and strong, and can give rise to judgments and decisions that are rationalized in various ways (Baron et al. 1992, pp. 136–142). Thus, for example, the tendency to sort individuals into categories gives rise to “stereotype” effects, where members of outgroups are perceived to be more similar to one another than members of the ingroup, and in some cases to be perceived negatively to enhance the ingroup by comparison. This can lead to derivative effects, where members of the stereotyped group themselves accept the negative image that is part of the stereotyped image (Brown 1986, Chap. 15). The empirical effects bring out the importance of the conceptual distinction between narrative identity and social group identity, and we can see some important implications for ethical analysis. On the one hand, we can see how the good for individuals may be tied to narrative identity, as the individuals learn and strive for the best way to live their lives. Often, a person’s narrative identity will be the focus of their reflection and development through learning and social relationships with other individuals. Striving for improvement, overcoming difficulties, rectifying mistakes, collaborating with others, meaningful work, all these can be regarded both as components of a good life and as parts of narrative identity. We can also see how these aspects may figure as important parts of individuals’ lives in organizations, and how it can be important for organizations to be aware of how organizational

45

Organizations, Virtue Ethics, and Narrative Identity

831

arrangements can enhance or impair the narrative identities of individuals within them. On the other hand, we can also see how group identities may serve to unite and advance the political ends of disadvantaged groups (see, e.g., Phillips 1993; Heyes 2018). Because identification with one group (an in-group) can lead us to denigrate members of another group (an out-group), more powerful groups have often oppressed members of other groups, and identification of individuals as members of lower-status groups has gone along with many forms of disadvantage. Developing awareness by members of disadvantaged groups has offered them a basis for unity and collective action to remedy unfairness, leading to the expansion of “identity politics.” Although the two forms of individual identity, narrative identity and social identity, have different implications, nevertheless as forms of self-identification they often blur and mingle. Individuals’ narrative identities include the experiences they have in interaction with others and the relationships they develop with others, and can revolve around their individual personal characteristics. However, they can also include experiences shaped by their group memberships. Steele (2010) gives a vivid and suggestive account of how members of stereotyped groups can be affected by their experiences without themselves being aware of how the process occurs. Importantly, though, Steele’s account also indicates ways in which this “negative stereotype threat” can be countered. For example, it is ameliorated by the numerical presence of negatively stereotyped minority group members in organizations, or from the presence of organizational policies regarding diversity or affirmative action. By providing appropriate cues, the organization can overcome the stereotype threat felt by the individuals (Steele 2010). Although differing in detail, similar results have been reported elsewhere (e.g. Hall et al. 2018). The effects of diversity policies are variable and complex (Guillaume et al. 2017; Nishii et al. 2018), and part of the reason may be the complex interplay between narrative identities and social group identities. If we focus especially on individuals’ narrative identity, it seems clear that, within organizations and elsewhere, individuals can suffer from being members of negatively stereotyped outgroups and from the threat that the stereotypes create. Individuals have also suffered quite directly from practices that have discriminated against some groups, being hindered in their opportunities for study, work, and advancement. Appropriate diversity policies and practices can ameliorate these adverse effects and, by so doing, allow individuals to develop their capacities and build their lives without those various impairments. However, when diversity policies are given an aim of “inclusion,” this aim may not refer to overcoming barriers to inclusion that are created by the negative stereotype threat experienced by individuals as members of outgroups. It may be that “inclusion” is aimed to go further than this, to offer some positive endorsement or support for a particular social identity. This is the approach taken by some theorists with regard to inclusion as it applies to social policy generally (Heyes 2018, pp. 4–5), and it can also be applied to diversity policies in organizations, where it may be suggested that diversity policies should actively support or promote individuals’ identities as gay, perhaps, or their ethnic identities as Latinos (e.g., Chapman and Gedro 2009, p. 97; Ferdman 2017, pp. 246, 248).

832

C. Provis

As a matter of general social policy such an approach has been criticized on the basis that it neglects matters of fairness and individual welfare in favor of promoting an abstract group identity (e.g., Michaels 2006). Certainly, care is needed in diversity policies and practices, because it is possible to confuse the promotion of an abstract identity for its own sake, on the one hand, with respect and support for individuals and their narrative identities, on the other hand. Social group identities can motivate and attract loyalty regardless of the merits of groups or the well-being of individuals. If we focus on concrete individuals rather than abstract identities, then we shall need to consider what is actually necessary and appropriate to support the advancement of the well-being of those individuals. One of the problems about emphasizing abstract identities is the tendency for our social group identities to take on a life of their own. The psychological mechanisms they summon up hinder reflective judgment and, all too often, create motivations that are separate from careful thought, leading ultimately to such familiar outcomes as racial vilification or religious war. At the same time, in making salient the collective social identities that individuals have, we tend to focus their attention on these rather than on their narrative identities. Rather than reflecting on the challenges that confront me and on the skill and creativity required in the projects that I have developed, my attention is taken up by identities of gender, race, or the like. As Appiah notes, such identities push aside elements of narrative identity and restrict individuals in what they allow, because such collective social identities emerge from the life of groups and develop associated social scripts that can act as constraints (e.g., Appiah 2005, p. 110). There are thus several reasons why diversity policies are not well advised to aim for promotion or support of collective identities per se. Such policies are likely to be divisive, in the way that identity politics tends to be divisive; and they tend to cement versions of social identities that may hinder the free development of individuals – even that of individuals who have those identities. On the other hand, there are very good reasons why diversity policies should be aware of individuals’ narrative identities. For example, such policies need to be aware of the adverse effects of negative stereotype threat on individuals’ well-being and performance. In that case, the main reason to be aware of collective social identities and take account of them is that they are bound up with individuals’ narrative identities. The individual’s experiences of being black, or a woman, or a Moslem, for instance, have affected them and the course of their life story, and continue to do so. Therefore, it is simply unfair to those individuals not to remedy the adverse effects of that undeserved negative identity. Then, the case for diversity policies revolves around those individuals’ narrative identities, the stories of their lives, and the chance each person has to live out a life as a unity and bring it to completion, in MacIntyre’s terms.

Conclusion In summary, the idea of individuals’ narrative identity is a fruitful one in considering some important ethical issues for people’s lives in organizations. By treating the connections within a person’s life as similar to connections in a narrative, we can

45

Organizations, Virtue Ethics, and Narrative Identity

833

understand what it is for a person’s life to be more or less unified. We can see more clearly the force of ideas like authenticity and integrity, and we can better understand how the unity of a life can constitute the good for a person. More specifically, we can also see how activities in a person’s life can be “meaningful” – not so much inherently meaningful but because they are connected to an individual’s life as part of a narrative, as activities that contribute to fulfilling expectations, remedying problems, utilizing skills, extending relationships, and so on. We can also better appreciate the importance of work and organizational life for individuals, and the problems that arise when individuals experience pressures that lead to disconnections between work and other parts of their life. If we are concerned about the good for individuals, then we need to regard individuals’ lives as wholes, and such disconnections as inherently bad. It is also important to distinguish individuals’ narrative identities from their social group identities. The first are gradually formed as humans grow, learn, and develop relationships with others that allow them to see themselves as one individual among others, understanding others as being like themselves. The second are categorizations of self that tend to emphasize differences from many others and likeness only to fellow ingroup members. Such categorizations are important to be aware of in organizations, partly because of the adverse effects they have on individuals. These effects can be ameliorated by effective diversity policies. While such policies need to be grounded in a solid awareness of social group identities, it is also important to bear in mind that the aim of such policies should be to support individuals and their opportunities, by sustaining their individual narrative identities, rather than promoting social group identities for their own sake. While crucially important, the notion of a person’s identity is an ambiguous and complex one. Our identities pick us out, each of us, from others. But they also develop over time, and it is some sort of continuity that makes an individual the same person at one time as another. If we see that continuity as the sort of continuity that a story can have, as a sort of narrative, we can see various sorts of connectedness among parts of an individual’s life, and we can give an account of each individual’s life as a potential unity with its own value, while still being different from the life of every other person. Modern organizations have the potential to enhance or detract from that unity, in various ways. By developing sound organizational policies, we may help individuals develop positive, flourishing narrative identities – and thus contest Macbeth’s vision that life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5, lines 26–28).

Cross-References ▶ Creating an Effective Business Ethics ▶ The Role of Virtue in Good Management

834

C. Provis

References Appiah KA (2005) The ethics of identity. Princeton University Press, Princeton Appiah KA (2018) The lies that bind: rethinking identity. Profile Books, London Austen J (1813) Pride and prejudice. Egerton, London Badaracco JL Jr (1997) Defining moments: when managers must choose between right and right. Harvard Business School Press, Boston Baddeley A, Eysenck MW, Anderson MC (2009) Memory. Psychology Press, Hove Bailey C, Madden A, Alfes K, Shantz A, Soane E (2017) The mismanaged soul: existential labor and the erosion of meaningful work. Hum Resour Manag Rev 27(3):416–430 Baron RS, Kerr NL, Miller N (1992) Group process, group decision, group action. Open University Press, Buckingham Bernsten D, Rubin DC (2004) Cultural life scripts structure recall from autobiographical memory. Mem Cogn 32(3):427–442 Brown R (1986) Social psychology: the second edition. The Free Press, New York Chapman DD, Gedro J (2009) Queering the HRD curriculum: preparing students for success in the diverse workforce. Adv Dev Hum Resour 11(1):95–108 Cullity G (2020) Narrative virtues and second-order reasons. In: Ulatowski J, Van Zyl L (eds) Virtue, narrative, and the self: explorations of character in philosophy of mind and action. Routledge, New York Currie G (2010) Narratives and narrators: a philosophy of stories. Oxford University Press, Oxford Dufty NF, Fells RE (1989) Dynamics of industrial relations in Australia. Prentice-Hall, Sydney Ellemers N, Spears R, Doosje B (2002) Self and social identity. Annu Rev Psych 53:161–186 Ferdman BM (2017) Paradoxes of inclusion: understanding and managing the tensions of diversity and multiculturalism. J Appl Behav Sci 53(2):235–263 Fiske ST, Taylor SE (1991) Social cognition, 2nd edn. McGraw-Hill, New York Fivush R, Habermas T, Waters TEA, Zaman W (2011) The making of autobiographical memory: intersections of culture, narratives and identity. Int J Psych 46(5):321–345 Forsyth DR (1990) Group dynamics, 2nd edn. Wadsworth, Belmont Fox A (1971) A sociology of work in industry. Collier Macmillan, London Frankfurt H (1988) The importance of what we care about. In: Frankfurt H The importance of what we care about: philosophical essays. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 80–94. First published in Synthese (1982), 53(2):257–272 Guillaume YRF, Dawson JF, Otaye-Ebede L, Woods SA, West MA (2017) Harnessing demographic differences in organizations: what moderates the effects of workplace diversity? J Organ Behav 38(2):276–303 Hall W, Schmader T, Aday A, Inness M, Croft E (2018) Climate control: the relationship between social identity threat and cues to an identity-safe culture. J Pers Soc Psychol 115(3):446–467 Heyes C (2018) Identity politics. In: Zalta EN (ed) The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/identity-politics/ Hogg MA, Turner JC (1987) Intergroup behaviour, self-stereotyping and the salience of social categories. Br J Soc Psychol 26:325–340 Kang SK, Bodenhausen GV (2015) Multiple identities in social perception and interaction: challenges and opportunities. Annu Rev Psychol 66:547–574 Kanter RM (1977) Work and family in the United States: a critical review and agenda for research and policy. Russell Sage Foundation, New York Korsgaard CM (2009) Self-constitution: agency, identity, and integrity. Oxford University Press, Oxford Legge K (1995) Human resource management: rhetorics and realities. Macmillan, London Leidner R (2006) Identity and work. In: Korczynski M, Hodson R, Edwards P (eds) Social theory at work. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 424–463 Locke J (1964) An essay concerning human understanding. Fontana, London. First published 1690 MacIntyre A (1985) After virtue, 2nd edn. Duckworth, London. First edition 1981

45

Organizations, Virtue Ethics, and Narrative Identity

835

McAdams DP, McLean KC (2013) Narrative identity. Curr Dir Psychol Sci 22(3):233–238 Michaels WB (2006) The trouble with diversity: how we learned to love identity and ignore inequality. Metropolitan Books, New York Nelson K (2003) Narrative and the emergence of a consciousness of self. In: Fireman GD, McVay TE Jr, Flanagan OJ (eds) Narrative and consciousness: literature, psychology, and the brain. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 17–36 Newman KS (1988) Falling from grace: the experience of downward mobility in the American middle class. Free Press, New York Nisbett RE (2003) The geography of thought. Nicholas Brealey, London Nishii LH, Khattab J, Shemla M, Paluch RM (2018) A multi-level process model for understanding diversity practice effectiveness. Acad Manag Ann 12(1):37–82 Parker SK, Ohly S (2009) Extending the reach of job design theory: going beyond the job characteristics model. In: Wilkinson A et al (eds) The SAGE handbook of human resource management. Sage, London, pp 269–285 Phillips A (1993) Democracy and difference. Polity Press, Cambridge Provis C (2009) Ethics and HRM. In: Wilkinson A et al (eds) The SAGE handbook of human resource management. Sage, London, pp 475–489 Ramarajan L, Reid E (2013) Shattering the myth of separate worlds: negotiating nonwork identities at work. Acad Manag Rev 38(4):621–644 Rudd A (2007) In defence of narrative. Eur J Phil 17(1):60–75 Schechtman M (2011) The narrative self. In: Gallagher S (ed) The Oxford handbook of the self. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 394–416 Schieman S, Milkie MA, Glavin P (2009) When work interferes with life: work-nonwork interference and the influence of work-related demands and resources. Am Sociol Rev 74(6):966–988 Sison AJG, Beabout GR, Ferrero I (eds) (2017) Handbook of virtue ethics in business and management. Springer, Dordrecht Steele CM (2010) Whistling Vivaldi: how stereotypes affect us and what we can do. WW Norton, New York Stone RJ (2008) Managing human resources, 2nd edn. Wiley, Milton Strawson G (2004) Against narrativity. Ratio 17:428–452 Tajfel H (1981) Human groups and social categories. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Tajfel H (1982) Social psychology of intergroup relations. Annu Rev Psychol 33:1–39 Velleman JD (1991) Well-being and time. Pac Philos Q 72:48–77

Confucianism and Ethics in Management

46

Matthias Niedenführ and Alicia Hennig

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brief History of Confucianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Confucian Concepts and Their Managerial Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

838 840 841 845 847 847

Abstract

We argue that, apart from ethics derived from Judeo-Christian traditions, Chinese philosophy – notably Confucianism – can also be a repository of ethical considerations that could facilitate the implementation of good business practice. Confucianism, with its many forms during Chinese history, is preoccupied with human relationships and the way virtues such as benevolence, righteousness, and reciprocity can be beneficial to a harmonious society. Life-long learning and a constant process of self-reflection are emphasized for leaders, who lead by moral example. The application of Confucian values and virtues to management is focused on doing business in an ethical way, that is, reconciling profits with ethics in the concept of the “honorable merchant.” Keywords

Chinese philosophy · Confucianism · Ethics · Management

M. Niedenführ (*) China Centre Tübingen, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] A. Hennig Technical University, Dresden, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_48

837

838

M. Niedenführ and A. Hennig

Introduction In his 2005 article “Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices,” Ghoshal brought to light the specific ideologies underlying and driving management education and practice today. His critique of the simplistic and presumed “value-free” scientific model taught at universities and consequently used in practice challenged the academic community to question the meaningfulness of current ideas and practices, and highlighted the importance of ethics as an integral part of good management, including management theories (cf. Gapper 2005; Pfeffer 2005). In so doing, Ghoshal took up the call of earlier scholars, such as Peters and Waterman (2012 [1982]), who had criticized the prevailing quantitative and rationalist view on business; Drucker (1996 [1957]), who had spoken of a mechanistic and Cartesian view; and Visser (1995), who stressed that we need to consider management and individuals in a more holistic way. In short, as these scholars argue, good management requires a holistic approach (where “holistic” can range from the inclusion of the context of business operations, such as care for workers’ health and stakeholder dialogues, to more esoteric notions) and the inclusion of ethical principles. Western business ethicists’ notions of ethical management have hitherto been mainly based on Judeo-Christian values, but does this tradition provide the only philosophies and ethical theories on which business ethics can be based? We can answer with a firm “no,” arguing in this chapter that there are numerous concepts in other traditions that could facilitate the implementation of ethical business practices. Specifically, we examine philosophical traditions from China, especially Confucianism, that can provide a complement or alternative to conventional Western approaches. Chinese scholars have already been exploring how indigenous traditions can contribute to the formulation of business ethics, especially since the inclusion of China into globalized supply chains in the 2001 WTO accession (for more details on Chinese discourse about business ethics, see Lu and Enderle 2006). Therefore, following Leung (2009, 2012), we argue that ethical principles derived from Chinese philosophy can contribute substantially to the development of management theories across cultures. Yet, we remain aware of the difficulties created by “transplanting exogenous processes” (Warner 2011, p. 111), which means we need to be context-sensitive when suggesting ethical principles derived from other philosophies and cultures. Chinese civilization is notable for its great cultural, religious, and philosophical diversity. Confucianism and Daoism are both indigenous philosophies, and came into existence between the sixth and fourth Centuries BCE, that is, during the Zhou-Dynasty (周 1046–256 BCE) (for an introduction to Chinese philosophy, see Fung 1947 and Bauer 2001). At that time, the territory that today constitutes the Eastern part of China was a plethora of dukedoms, connected loosely by the ceremonial function of the Zhou rulers as arbiters of the “will of heaven” (tianming 天命). “Heaven” or “Heavenly principle” (tian 天) had already supplanted the idea of a personal deity (shangdi 上帝) venerated during the preceding Shang Dynasty (商 1600–1046 BCE).

46

Confucianism and Ethics in Management

839

The central power of the Zhou, however, was fading, which in turn led to countless wars between rival dukedoms fighting for domination. However, this chaotic period was, at the same time, an age of great invention, with many influential schools of thought competing to find the best way out of the crisis. Of these schools, Confucianism and Daoism would become extremely influential in the Chinese cultural sphere for the next 2.5 millennia. According to Bettignies et al. (2011), “[t]he humanistic doctrine of Confucius, and the naturalistic ideas of Laozi are the two towering cultural forces” in China (p. 625). Both of these “two grand traditions” deeply influenced and shaped the Chinese mind (ibid.). As emphasized by Yan (2011), “it is impossible that a single school of thought or theory can represent the entirety of Chinese thinking” (p. 254). Similarly, Vermander (2011) points out that “Chinese traditions are plural” (p. 697), and that the foremost present sources of wisdom derived from religious and spiritual traditions evolved through oral traditions being passed on through storytelling. Attempts to classify Chinese schools of thought using Western categories of “philosophy,” “religion,” or “ethical systems” ignore the fact that these schools have characteristics of each of these categories but are not fully compatible with any one of them. In this chapter, we use “philosophy” to refer to the Confucianist school of thought and not to a religious tradition. Although ancient wisdom does not directly translate into “ready-made” managerial knowledge (Vermander 2011), it can be used as a source of inspiration for some guiding ethical principles in business life. What makes Chinese philosophy in general relevant in this context is that many of these schools of thought are primarily concerned with solving mundane real-life problems. According to Chen (2016), Chinese philosophy, independently of its specifics, is inherently tied to practice. Moreover, it often proposes a more holistic and relational view of the world than Western philosophy (cf. Fung 1958; Lin 1936; Miller 2013). We believe that insights drawn from Confucianism could inform both Chinese as well as Western theories of management by providing a profoundly different perspective. Especially since Confucianism is inherently pragmatic, everyday “management” is already implicit in this way of thinking. Instead of being “scientific,” Chinese philosophy presents an intuitive approach based on common sense (Lin 1936; Fung 1958; Granet 1985). In China, “Confucianism” is called “scholarly tradition” (rujia 儒家), as well as “Ru teaching” or “Ruism” (ruxue 儒學). According to Confucian scholar Tu Wei-ming (杜維明), Confucianism is “one of the longest-continuing spiritual traditions in human history” (Tu 2010, p. 37). It is a philosophy that highlights the development of moral standards and virtues as the ultimate goal of a moral individual, who should ideally grow into a person of “all-round virtues” (Liu 2018, p. 87; Fung 1947, p. 69). Confucian thinking sees the moral roles of the individual, considered alone and in society, as inseparable, since “personhood is not and cannot be compartmentalized: the self is at once social, moral, political, and intellectual” (Lai 1995, p. 259 as in Liu 2018, p. 17).

840

M. Niedenführ and A. Hennig

In the next subsections, we offer a short introduction to this philosophy and its history, then focus on a selection of themes that are characteristic of Confucianism, and outline some relevant managerial implications.

Brief History of Confucianism Confucius (Kong Zi 孔子 551-479 BCE) lived during the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BCE). His primary concern was the decline of morals in that turbulent age. For guidance, he referred to writings of earlier periods, known as the “five classics” (wu jing 五經), such as the “Book of Changes” (Yijing 易經), the “Book of Rites” (Liji 禮記), the “Book of Odes” (Shijing 詩經), the “Book of Documents” (Shujing 書經), and the “Spring and Autumn-Annals” (Chunqiu 春秋). These classics and their interpretation, which describe a “Golden age” of virtuous leaders (Yao 2000, pp. 57–62), were the foundational texts by reference to which Confucian thought has developed over millennia. Confucius surrounded himself with an entourage of disciples who later compiled his sayings in the “Analects” (Lunyu 論語), a written collection of his teachings. Subsequent thinkers, most notably Mencius (孟子 372–289 BCE) and Xunzi (荀 子 313–238 BCE), further expanded this ethical system. Confucianism became the dominant school during the Former Han-Dynasty (前漢 206 BCE–9 CE), when the ruling dynasty adopted it as state philosophy and it became “the most powerful intellectual persuasion in China proper” (Tu 2010, p. 37). The eminent philosopher Fung Yu-lan (馮友蘭 1891–1990) divided the development of Confucianism into a “creative age” (which ended in the first century BCE, where early teachings were transformed into a cohesive tradition), and an “interpretative age” (from first century BCE to date) (Fung 1952, p. 2, Yao 2000, p. 5). Although competing schools, such as Daoism and Buddhism, later contested its central position, Confucianism survived and thrived (Yu Yingshi 1959 as in Schmidt-Glintzer and Jansen 1994, p. 61). A considerable factor in favor of Confucianism was the design of the official examination system, which reinforced Confucian orthodoxy. This meritocratic system for recruiting the bureaucratic elite limited hereditary positions and turned the imperial state into what Max Weber called a “patrimonial order [that] was extraordinarily stable” (Weber 1976, p. 585 and Schmidt-Glintzer 1989, pp. 148–158, 204–209 as in Ertman 2017, pp. 10–12). An important transformation of the Confucian system of thought occurred in the Song-Dynasty (宋 960–1279), when Zhu Xi (朱熹 1130–1200) compiled and rearranged a second set of classics called the “Four Books” (sishu 四書), including the “Great Learning” (Daxue 大學) and the “Doctrine of the Mean” (Zhongyong 中 庸) (Yao 2000, pp. 63–37, 115–138). This revival of Confucianism, known as Neo-Confucianism, became the cultural and ideological backdrop for orthodox morality in China (Ip 2008), and also embodied one “manifestation of East Asian spirituality” (Tu 2010, p. 38) that influenced Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Although in the twentieth century the iconoclastic May Fourth Movement and Cultural Revolution almost eradicated Confucianism in China, recently, traditional

46

Confucianism and Ethics in Management

841

culture, notably Confucianism, is seeing a revival (Lam 2002). New Confucian thinkers in the Chinese diaspora have preserved and modified Confucian philosophy in order to adapt it to the modern age (Kam 2011).

Confucian Concepts and Their Managerial Implications A growing number of business people in China today endeavor to revive traditional value orientations. Hence, (more or less) Confucian management models have been developed in the last two decades (Warner 2011, p. 206). More recently, we find a number of research studies on Confucian values in entrepreneurship (Vermander 2011) that may become the “building blocks of a Chinese model of management” (Warner 2011, p. 61), or “new Chinese management” (Niedenführ 2018, p. 66). These “Confucian entrepreneurs” (rushang 儒商), as well as scholars in China today, refer back to the Confucian traditions and attempt to develop these principles in ways that are compatible with modern business. These models try to “take on new norms but may hold onto core values” of Confucianism (Warner 2011, p. 63). A number of Confucian concepts have become relevant to contemporary managerial practices – namely, benevolence and proper conduct; reciprocity; profit and righteousness; moderation; self-cultivation; and learning. We elaborate on each of these concepts below, and emphasize relevant managerial applications. Benevolence and Proper Conduct. The core value of Confucianism is ren (仁) – “benevolence,” “humanity” (Chan 1969, p. 788), or “human-heartedness” (Fung 1947, p. 68). It can be understood as a general disposition of goodwill toward other people. Tu (1979) called it the “highest human achievement of self-cultivation and the fullest manifestation of humanity” (Tu 1979, p. 7). Ren stands for the way people should interact with each other, which can be seen in the Chinese character, the combination of the characters for “person” (ren 人) and “two” (er 二). An “exemplary person” ( junzi 君子) must attain “benevolence” through the practice of virtues, foremost the cardinal virtues of “respectfulness, tolerance, trustworthiness in word, quickness and generosity” (Liu 2018, p. 88), that is, the so-called five constants (wuchang 五常). According to this concept, virtues are practiced in a web of social interactions, in relationships of mutual obligations and responsibilities. To Confucius these were the five familial relations (wulun 五倫) of ruler and subject, husband and wife, parent and child, older and younger brother, and among friends. Please note that ren is not universal love as in Christianity or Buddhism for instance – but, according to sociologist Fei Xiaotong (費孝通 1910–2005), it is applied in decreasing intensity within concentric circles around the individual (Fei 1947, p. 63 as in Yan 2001, p. 242). Social relations, guanxi (關係) in Chinese, a term often narrowly understood as exploitable connections to people with power, are an important tool for individuals to situate themselves within society and garner support in the absence of reliable institutions of social security. Guanxi can be positive, as long as it is based on ethical values (Sardy et al. 2010, p. 8).

842

M. Niedenführ and A. Hennig

According to Lu (1997, 2009), the ethical dimension is not extrinsic to the business world but a constitutive factor. The social role of the entrepreneur is therefore embedded in the abovementioned web of social relations, and has to make a contribution to social stability. By providing job opportunities, goods, and services, entrepreneurs support the spread of wealth to the broader community, and it is in virtue of this role that capital accumulation is justified. In addition, poverty relief (Lunyu 6:1) and support for neighbors (Lunyu 6:5) were desirable notions compatible with contemporary ideas about social responsibility. In this sense, managers can be encouraged to look beyond their immediate personal benefit and focus on the contribution of their work to stakeholders in the community. Entrepreneurs and managers should focus less on the short-term performative side of their company and more toward the underlying moral development that could lead to long-term success (Lunyu 15:32). The practice of ren is a precondition for the development of “trust” (xin 信). Ways in which this might be implemented include managers incorporating Confucian values in their daily business lives (Koehn 2001, p. 419). Tu (2016) argues that ren is a virtue firmly based in real life. He also states that the expressions of virtue in society hinge upon economic security, which is, in turn, the precondition for everybody to develop their potential and values fully and freely (Tu 2016, p. 4). Earning people’s trust (be they customers, suppliers, bankers, and so on) is an important basis for any economic activity. Ren is closely connected to li (禮), that is, “proper conduct” or “ritual.” In all social contexts, it is important that the proper rites and etiquette are employed. Social relationships are understood in a hierarchical way and proper conduct relates to different people differently, since one’s own position vis-à-vis the other has to be taken into account. So, li was both “a political and legal system and a set of moral norms” (Liu 2018, p. 89), as well as the “externalization of Ren in a specific context” (Tu 1972, p. 187). Confucius believed that a “structured society” (Liu 2018, p. 90) was the only basis on which harmony and stability could be built, and that “social harmony” (he 和) was the primary goal of personal and societal life. This view favors the group over the individual (Ip 2008, 2009). Virtues, from this perspective, are means to realize group harmonization. Managers apply this concept of li in the modern corporate environment when they seek to establish adequate behavior toward people, both within the company, such as between superiors and subordinates, and outside the company, such as with business partners, customers, authorities, as well as with the neighboring community. Therefore, in its modern form, li supports notions of stakeholder dialogue and consideration. Reciprocity. Confucian humanistic ideals are encapsulated in Confucius’ saying: “Do not do to others as you would not wish done to yourself” (yi suo bu yu, wu shi yu ren 己所不欲, 勿施於人) (Lunyu 12:2, Legge 1893). This negative formulation of the Golden Rule has a well-known positive match in the Christian tenet “Do to others what you want them to do to you” (Matthew 7:12 NIV). Both positive and negative formulations can be found in most religions and belief systems.

46

Confucianism and Ethics in Management

843

The Golden Rule is based on the notion of “reciprocity” (zhongshu 忠恕), which is deeply embedded in social structures. Although it is applied selectively with a preference for in-group members (Whitcomb et al. 1998), it does emphasize a certain degree of equality (Chan 2008; Ip 2009). Tu stresses that “reciprocity” helps to avoid imposing one’s own view on others (Tu 2018, p. 465). In a globalized world, where groups of people from different cultural backgrounds have to cooperate, the ability of managers to reach a consensus without imposing on others can be a vital resource. This ability is also related to the idea of trying to see things from the perspective of the other. Profit and Righteousness. There has been a long-standing Confucian bias against commercial activity, rooted in a negative view of “profit making” (li 利), which is typically considered to come in conflict with “righteousness” (yi 義). Confucius warns repeatedly (Lunyu 4:11, 4:12, 4:16) that pursuit of li is not the preoccupation of a junzi. Consequently, merchants were held in disdain in imperial China (Kam 2011, p. 91). While virtuous forms of wealth accumulation that are not driven by personal interests are accepted (Lunyu 19:1), unethical means, such as mere favor seeking, are deplored (Lunyu 7:16). Mencius, who understood human nature as inherently good and with potential for betterment (Tu 2018, p. 458), prioritizes righteousness over profit in the same manner. The Daxue justifies profit and wealth only as long as it supports the ultimate goal of self-cultivation (Chan 2008, p. 349). The Liji emphasizes a ban on the distribution of poor-quality products and regulates behavior in trade (Harvey 1999, p. 88). An ethical way of making profits is necessary in order to find a way from li to yi – that is, from profit to righteousness (Lu 1997, 2009). Criticism of “profit making” does not mean that in traditional Chinese society “wealth” ( fu 福) was not recognized as legitimate. On the contrary, “‘prosperity and wealth’ [were] not only perceived as a socially fully legitimised concept of individual happiness; they were also seen as a guarantor of morality” (Mittag 2011). However, “fair” (though not equal) distribution of wealth is seen as a prerequisite for social stability (Lunyu 16:1). Managers can be inspired by this notion of “fairness in profit making” in ensuring that their wealth acquisition opportunities are filtered through moral considerations. Not everything than can be done within legal limits is allowed within ethical boundaries, and this becomes even more relevant when one engages in markets that are insufficiently supported by legal oversight and institutions. Moderation. According to Confucianism, all behavior in social and political life should be guided by the notion of “moderation” (zhongyong 中庸). In order to balance conflicting social relationships, one is required to act with a certain sense of “balance, moderation and appropriateness” in order to avoid the “extremes of either deficiency or excess” (Liu 2018, p. 92). In the Analects, Confucius juxtaposes the “exemplary person” against the “petty man” (xiaoren 小人) who does not manage to bring his or her potential for virtue (de 德) to full fruition. The junzi is able to achieve harmony by allowing differences to exist, while small-minded people prefer conformity (Lunyu 13:23). Chinese managers interpret this concept of moderation – epitomized in the term du (度), that is, “proper degree” – when they implement a

844

M. Niedenführ and A. Hennig

management style that favors lenience and empathy over “harsh, strict and penal approaches” (Liu 2018, p. 90). They try to avoid firing employees who make mistakes, and instead attempt to educate them to a level that allows them to perform – so that letting them go becomes unnecessary (Niedenführ 2018, p. 67). Self-cultivation. A core principle in Confucianism – for Fung, the core principle (1947, p. 4) – is the development of “sageness within and kingliness without” (neisheng waiwang 內聖外王) (Tang 2016, p. 9). “Sageness within” refers to a constant process of self-reflection and “self-cultivation” (xiuji 修己) oriented toward the realization of Confucian humanistic values in one’s own personality (Tu 2001, p. 248). “Kingliness without” refers to the Confucian individual acting according to these values in social interactions, with one’s own family, with the community, even encompassing all humanity and the natural environment (Tu 2010, p. 383). “Family” here especially includes elderly parents (Bell 2011, p. 89). The underlying humanist premise in Confucianism is that people are able to improve in the right circumstances, when they can learn and have access to good examples to emulate. “Self-cultivation” (ideally) translates into exemplary behavior by people in leadership positions. Mencius put forward the idea of “benevolent government” (renzheng 仁政), where a leader exercises “government by means of virtue” and, by doing so, motivates the people to follow him (Chan 1969, p. 50; Liu 2018, p. 88). Management by example is certainly not exclusive to Confucian contexts but it is highly valued and particularly well-illustrated in Confucian teachings. Business leaders guided by this approach tend to emphasize “uprightness, sincerity, unselfishness, and loyalty” (Liu 2018, p. 90). Exemplary behavior by superiors encourages loyalty among employees. A higher rate of talent retention, in turn, justifies investment in the training of employees. “Human-hearted persons establish others if they want to establish themselves” (Lunyu 6:30, Ni 2017, p. 57). “Self-cultivation” requires managers to not only consider personal advancement (or the goals of the company) but also the careers of others. Managers should therefore not only content themselves with personal improvement but also consider how to implement virtues in social interactions. Koehn (2001, p. 421), for instance, emphasizes that Confucian ethics enable one to take the energy stemming from frustration about others and channel it inwardly in a process of self-reflection. Other people are not judged, but rather (cautiously) taught. Also, success in business is closely tied to the application of “pragmatism in personal relationships” (St Clair and Norris 2012, p. 4). Attaining a high position or being rewarded for good work is considered as something fitting a virtuous person, since a country would be ill-advised to allow small-minded people to access positions of power (Lunyu 8:13). Although advancement and ambition are central to hardworking people, these thoughts should, nonetheless, be controlled and not allowed to take over. For Confucius, exemplary persons avoid situations of competition (Lunyu 3:7). On the other hand, for managers operating within a market, competition is an important driver of development and innovation. However, managers can strive to act fairly as competitors, and make sure that, “even in contesting, they are exemplary persons” (Lunyu 4:4, Ames and Rosemont Jr. 1999).

46

Confucianism and Ethics in Management

845

Learning. While Confucius emphasizes the need for trust in others, to be effective this trust has to be accompanied by a deep dedication to constant learning. The Confucian appreciation of education is present in the Analects from the first line, which refers to learning (xue 學). Learning is understood not only as a cognitive process but also as a constant review of what was already studied and the continued practice of its implementation (xi 習) (Lunyu 1:1). Life-long learning is therefore a core requirement. A mind informed by Confucianism is not dominated by rigidity but kept open and flexible in order to incorporate new insights (Koehn 2002, p. 418). This flexibility can be a vital resource for modern managers, who have to operate in a quickly changing business landscape. In sum, managers can incorporate Confucian values embodied in the concepts discussed here. These values can function as an inspiration for self-reflection and improvement, and as a set of guiding principles to positively influence people inside and outside the company. Corporations can adopt Confucian principles just as well as individuals can, and thus develop responsibility toward the community as a whole. Research and practice have indicated that the managerial thinking and decisions of Chinese political and business leaders are profoundly influenced by Chinese philosophy (Liu 2018, p. 17). As Confucius’ thinking still influences contemporary management practices across Asia, it can also be a moral repository for business practices beyond China.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have analyzed the potential contribution of Confucianism specifically to ethical management practices today and in light of organizational practices in the twenty-first-century knowledge society. This philosophy emphasizes the moral cultivation of individuals as the basis for a stable state (Yan 2011) – or, when applied to management, for a stable and sustainable business. With regard to moral self-cultivation, Confucianism draws from the Zhou rites and hence moral cultivation based on rituals (ibid.), stressing the “responsibilities of man” in the larger social context (Fung 1958, p. 22). As elaborated in ▶ Chap. 47, “Daoism and Ethics in Management,” in contrast, Daoism advocates spontaneous and “natural” behavior in accordance with dao (Fung 1947, pp. 160–162). Contemporary Confucian values and virtues are focused on doing business in an ethical way, that is, reconciling profits with ethics in the concept of the “honourable merchant,” as reflected in “Confucian Entrepreneurship” (rushang) today. They entail a larger social vision, a clear contribution to social harmony and hierarchy, or a living social system. When we compare the Confucian mode of thinking with the Daoist mode (see ▶ Chap. 47, “Daoism and Ethics in Management”), it seems that these two modes of thinking could have quite different, perhaps even conflicting, impacts when used in practice: for example, how should we reconcile the emphasis on society and ritual (Confucianism) with the emphasis on the individual and “naturalness” (Daoism)? Yet, many strands of Chinese philosophy allow for this outcome, as they have a

846

M. Niedenführ and A. Hennig

tendency toward synthesis of opposites, allowing for tolerance of seemingly contradictory views (Chan 1967; Fung 1958; Granet 1985; Moore 1967). This form of “synthesis” clearly leans toward what some scholars (Li 2016; Keller and Lewis 2016) associate with “paradox.” It indicates a coexistence in the sense of “eitherand” which some authors consider as better suited for paradox management than the Western logic, since it appreciates inherent interdependencies between opposites, instead of emplacing sharp separations in the sense of “either/or” (Li 2014; Peng and Nisbett 1999). Accordingly, the concept of “Confucian Entrepreneurship” is not exclusively Confucian but also absorbs other philosophical worldviews such as Buddhism ( foshang) and Daoism (daoshang). These three schools – Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism – are called the “three teachings” (sanjiao 三教), which have been influencing each other in China for centuries. In this context Herrmann-Pillath (2015) mentions a few examples of companies drawing on some Daoist principles to inform their corporate ethics. Yet, the business philosophy of these companies does not rest exclusively on Daoist values and principles but also on Confucianism and other philosophies. Furthermore, the Confucian concept of rushang has been found to fuse with values from Islamic or Christian traditions (Niedenführ 2018). Beyond the managerial implications of Confucianism in specific situations, Chinese philosophy provides us with broader insights as well. Firstly, particularly in a management context, the abovementioned tolerance of contradictions can be a useful resource in situations of imperfect information. Instead of being stuck with the impossible task of waiting for complete information before solving a conundrum, one can maintain contradictory thoughts in mind while at the same time concentrate on issues that are solvable or manageable. This tolerance also allows for more “flexibility” with regard to the application of ethical principles in situations of uncertainty and ambiguity. Instead of applying strict rules in a Kantian sense, the more pragmatic and contextual approach of Chinese ethics generally allows for customized solutions to challenging problems. Secondly, according to Liu (2018), managers in China tend to be generalists, developing broad knowledge that involves many different areas of expertise and function, “with an overall concern for the final outcome as a result of the integration of the different areas” (p. 6). This is a general reminder for managers to broaden their horizon and to overcome silos of specialized occupations and compartmentalized thinking (cf. Moore 1967; Lin 1936). Thirdly, in an increasingly complex and globalized world, contemporary managers are constantly urged to learn and update their “positive knowledge” through executive education like MBA and DBA courses, or language courses and other forms of training focusing on self-optimization, such as self-management or time management. Yet, referring to Chinese philosophy, Fung argues that substantial learning is not equivalent to “the increase of positive knowledge [. . .] but the elevation of the mind” (Fung 1947, p. 8). In management contexts, this refers more to a general positive transformation of the manager’s mind-set rather than to teaching specific management tools.

46

Confucianism and Ethics in Management

847

In conclusion, what we can learn from more general approaches to Confucianism, beside applications to specific contexts, is a dedication to learning that is not limited to acquiring factual knowledge alone. Rather, “learning” is self-cultivation in order to reflect on the impacts of one’s own actions on both the social and the natural environment, and to strive for higher values.

Cross-References ▶ Daoism and Ethics in Management

References Ames R, Rosemont H Jr (1999) The Analects of Confucius: a philosophical translation (Classics of Ancient China). Ballantine Books, New York Bauer W (2001) In: van Ess H (ed) Geschichte der chinesischen Philosophie. Konfuzianismus, Daoismus, Buddhismus [History of Chinese philosophy. Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism]. C.H. Beck, Munich Bell DA (2011) Introduction. In: Yan X (ed) Ancient Chinese thought, Modern Chinese power. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp 1–18 Chan W-T (1967) Chinese theory and practice, with special reference to humanism. In: Moore CA (ed) The Chinese mind: essentials of Chinese philosophy and culture. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, pp 11–30 Chan W-T (1969) A source book in Chinese philosophy. Princeton University Press, Princeton Chan GKY (2008) The relevance and value of Confucianism in contemporary business ethics. J Bus Ethics 77(3):347–360 Chen M-J (2016) Competitive dynamics: Eastern roots, Western growth. Cross Cult Strateg Manag 23(4):510–530 de Bettignies H-C, Ip PK, Bai X, Habisch A, Lenssen G (2011) Practical wisdom for management from the Chinese classical traditions. J Manag Dev 30(7/8):623–628 Ertman TC (ed) (2017) Max Weber’s economic ethic of the world religions – an analysis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Fei X (1947, 1992) From the soil: the foundations of the Chinese society (trans: Hamilton G, Zheng W). Reprint, University of California Press, Berkeley Fung Y-L (2007, 1947) A short history of Chinese philosophy [Zhongguo Zhexue Jianshi]. Tianjin: Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences Press Fung Y-L (1958) A short history of Chinese philosophy. Macmillan, New York Gapper J (2005) Comment on Sumantra Ghoshal’s ‘Bad management theories are destroying good management practices’. Acad Manag Learn Edu 4(1):101–103 Ghoshal S (2005) Bad management theories are destroying good management practices. Acad Manag Learn Edu 4(1):75–91 Granet M (1985) Das Chinesische Denken (trans: Porkert M). Suhrkamp, Frankfurt Harvey B (1999) Graceful merchants: a contemporary view of Chinese business ethics. J Bus Ethics 20(1):85–92 Herrmann-Pillath C (2015) Wachstum, Macht und Ordnung eine Wirtschaftsphilosophische Auseinandersetzung mit China. Metropolis, Weimar (Lahn) Ip PK (2008) The challenge of developing a business ethics in China. J Bus Ethics 88:211–224 Ip PK (2009) Is Confucianism good for business ethics in China? J Bus Ethics 88(3):463–476

848

M. Niedenführ and A. Hennig

Kam L (2011) Confucius the chameleon: dubious envoy for ‘Brand China’. Boundary 2 38(1):77– 100 Keller K, Lewis MW (2016) Moving towards a geocentric, polycultural theory of organizational paradox. Cross Cult Strateg Manag 23(4):551–557 Koehn D (2001) Confucian trustworthiness and the practice of business in China. Bus Ethics Q 11(3):425–429 Lai KL (1995) Confucian moral thinking. Philos East West 45(2):249–272 Lam K-CJ (2002) Confucian business ethics and the economy. In: Conference proceedings – international conference on business ethics in the knowledge economy. School of Business, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, pp 1–24 Legge J (1893, 2009) Confucius – the Confucian analects, the great learning & the doctrine of the mean. Cosimo Classics, New York. http://oaks.nvg.org/sa3ra8.html. Accessed 5 Sept 2007 Leung K (2009) Never the twain shall meet? Integrating Chinese and Western management research. Manag Organ Rev 5(1):121–129 Leung K (2012) Indigenous Chinese management research: like it or not, we need it. Manag Organ Rev 8(1):1–5 Li PP (2014) The unique value of Yin-Yang balancing: a critical response. Manag Organ Rev 10(2):321–332 Li PP (2016) Global implications of the indigenous epistemological system from the east: how to apply Yin-Yang balancing to paradox management. Cross Cult Strateg Manag 23(1):42–77 Lin Y (1936) My country and my people. The Windmill Press, Surrey Liu H (2018) Chinese business – landscapes and strategies, 2nd edn. Routledge, London Lu X (1997) Business ethics in China. J Bus Ethics 16:1509–1518 Lu X (2009) A Chinese perspective: business ethics in China now and in the future. J Bus Ethics 86:451–461 Lu X, Enderle G (eds) (2006) Developing business ethics in China. Springer, Berlin/ Heidelberg/New York Miller J (2013) Daoism and development. In: Clarke M (ed) Handbook of research on development and religion. Edgar Elgar, Cheltenham, pp 113–123 Mittag A (2011) Wirtschaftsethik. In: Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit. J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart Moore CA (1967) Introduction: the humanistic Chinese mind. In: Moore CA (ed) The Chinese mind: essentials of Chinese philosophy and culture. University of Hawaii, Honolulu, pp 1–10 Ni P (2017) Understanding the analects of Confucius – a new translation of Lunyu with annotations. SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture. SUNY Press, New York Niedenführ M (2018) Managementinnovation aus China? Der Ermerging Trend des,Confucian Entrepreneur‘. In: Deutsch-Chinesische Wirtschaftsvereinigung Jahrbuch 2018. Cologne, DCW, pp 67–76 Peng K, Nisbett RE (1999) Culture, dialectics, and reasoning about contradiction. Am Psychol 54(9):741–754 Peters TJ, Waterman RH (2012 [1982]) In search of excellence: lessons from America’s best-run companies (Collins Business Essentials). Harper Collins. Kindle-Version, New York Pfeffer J (2005) Why do bad management theories persist? A comment on Ghoshal. Acad Manag Learn Edu 4(1):96–100 Sardy MJ, Munoz M, Sun JJ, Alo I (2010) Dimensionality of business ethics in China. Competitiveness Rev 20(1):6–30 Schmidt-Glintzer H (ed) (1989) Max Webers Gesamtausgabe I, Bd. 19, Mohr & Siebeck, Tübingen Schmidt-Glintzer H, Jansen X (1994) The scholar-official and his community: the character of the aristocracy in medieval China. Early Medieval China 1:60–68 St Clair NS, Norris JT (2012) Business ethics and social responsibility in contemporary China. J Acad Bus Ethics 5:1–9 Tang Y (2016) Anthology of philosophical and cultural issues: an exploration into new frontiers. Springer, Hamburg/Berlin Tu W (1972) Li as a process of humanization. Philos East West 22(2):187–201

46

Confucianism and Ethics in Management

849

Tu W (1979) Humanity and self-cultivation: essays in Confucian thought. Asian Humanities Press, Berkeley Tu W (2001) The ecological turn in New Confucian Humanism: implications for China and the World. Daedalus 130(4):243–264 Tu W (2010) The global significance of concrete humanity – essays on the Confucian discourse in cultural China. Centre for Studies in Civilizations, New Delhi Tu W (2016) Multidimensional “Benevolence”: cultural identification of Modern Confucian Merchants. In: Conference proceedings – Confucian Entrepreneur Seminar 2016: Modern Confucian businessmen and entrepreneurs’ cultural identity. Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, Peking University, Beijing, pp 1–9 Tu W (2018) Spiritual humanism: self, community, earth, and heaven. In: Conference proceedings – the XXIV world congress of philosophy. Peking University, Beijing, pp 456–474 Vermander B (2011) Chinese wisdom, management practices and the humanities. J Manag Dev 30(7/8):697–708 Visser W (1995) Holism: a new framework for thinking about business. New Perspect 7:1–4 Warner M (2011) Understanding management in China. Routledge, London/New York Weber M (1976) Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 5th edn. Mohr & Siebeck, Tübingen Whitcomb LL, Erdener CB, Li C (1998) Business ethical values in China and the U.S. J Bus Ethics 17(8):839–852 Yan Y (2001) Practicing kinship. In: Franklin S, McKinnon S (eds) Relative values: reconfiguring kinship studies. Duke University Press, Raleigh/Durham, pp 224–245 Yan X (2011) Ancient Chinese thought, modern Chinese power. Princeton University Press, Princeton Yao X (2000) An introduction to Confucianism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Yu Y (Yü Ying-Shih) (1959) Han Jin zhi ji shi zhi xin zijue yu xinya yu xinshichao [New self awareness and new thought of scholars between the Han- and Jin-dynasties]. Yinya Xuebao 4(1):25–144

Daoism and Ethics in Management

47

Alicia Hennig and Matthias Niedenführ

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Brief History of Daoism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dao and Virtue: Central Themes in Daoist Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Managerial Implications: Leadership, Corporate Culture, and Values for the Knowledge Society to Come . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

852 852 853 856 859 859 860

Abstract

We argue that apart from ethics derived from Judeo-Christian traditions, Chinese philosophy – notably Daoism – can also be a repository of ethical considerations that could facilitate the implementation of good business practice. Daoism is concerned with the individual and the relationship with nature and the cosmos. This school of thought emphasizes natural virtues, such as generosity, kindness, and humbleness, as well as the reflecting and realizing of one’s own natural self. As will be illustrated in this chapter, Daoist values can be applied on the individual level for the purpose of self-realization, self-management, and good leadership practices but also on the corporate level, for a positive corporate culture and a productive organizational environment.

A. Hennig (*) Technical University, Dresden, Germany e-mail: [email protected] M. Niedenführ China Centre Tübingen, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_14

851

852

A. Hennig and M. Niedenführ

Keywords

Chinese philosophy · Daoism · Ethics · Management

Introduction Continuing the argument put forward in our chapter on Confucianism, we contend that insights drawn from the philosophy of Daoism could inform both Chinese as well as Western theory of management by providing a significantly different perspective from those emulated in Western thought. Especially since Chinese philosophy is inherently pragmatic, focusing on actual problems, “management” on a daily basis is already implicit in this way of thinking. Instead of being “scientific,” Chinese philosophy presents an intuitive approach based on common sense (Lin 1936; Fung 1958; Granet 1985) and this will be illustrated in our discussion of Daoism in the next subsections of this chapter.

A Brief History of Daoism Both Confucianism and Daoism came into existence in the Warring States Period (475–221 BC). Two major representatives of Daoism are Laozi, who supposedly wrote the Dao De Jing 道德經 (henceforth only named Laozi 老子, after its “author”), and Zhuang Zhou 庄周 (365–290 BCE), who wrote (parts of) the Zhuangzi 莊子. Today, however, it is commonly acknowledged that the Laozi must have had multiple authors and must have been composed over several years, which is typical of traditional works in Chinese philosophy (Chan 1969; Hansen 2000; Kirkland 2004). Vital to the understanding of Daoist philosophy is, however, that its ideas became known later, under the Former Han-Dynasty (前漢 206–8 CE) (Chan 1969; Hansen 2000; Kirkland 2004), more than 200 years after this “school” of thought initially emerged. Hence, the key works attributed to Daoism, such as the Laozi and the Zhuangzi, share some core ideas but otherwise differ with regard to purpose, key message and style (Feldt 2010; Hansen 2000). According to Fung (1958), they are even representing two different phases in Daoist thought. This section focuses on the Laozi, based on Wing-Tsit Chan’s (1969) translation. Daoism is the philosophy of the dao, that is, the Way, and first appeared in the context of political thought (Moeller 2004; Creel 1970). It is about the order and organization of nature and the cosmos, on which political strategy needs to be ideally modeled (Moeller 2004). Daoism, however, is not the only philosophy referring to dao, as this is a rather generic term used in Chinese philosophy to imply guidance of some sort, and it is the specific type of guidance that is then made more explicit in each thinker’s philosophy (Hansen 2000; Moeller 2004). However, only Daoism created an entire philosophy exclusively centered on this concept. Daoist philosophy is based on the concept of opposites, that is, yin-yang pairs, a concept that is not unique to Daoism (Kohn 1998). Generally, Daoism incorporated

47

Daoism and Ethics in Management

853

many elements from other systems of thought and philosophies, such as the abovementioned Yi Jing or the “Yin-Yang School,” among others (Kohn 1998; Kirkland 2004). Yet, Daoism was never a monolithic, coherent system of thought (Kirkland 2004). When trying to understand Daoism, three different kinds of background information are vital here: history, geography, and the way of life in China up to the time of the Laozi. The Laozi was written and composed to provide guidance to the political elite and/or the ruler on how to re-establish order during times of turmoil (Moeller 2004; Bell 2011). Containing a number of strategic guidelines, it promotes the ideal of the “sage ruler” (shengwang 聖王), since only someone as wise as the sage should ideally rule the kingdom. Or, as Bell (2011) more explicitly states, in Pre-Qin political thinking “morality and interstate order are directly connected,” which means that “the level of personal morality of the leader” plays a vital role in “determining the stability of the interstate order” (pp. 4–5). Geography explains the roots of Chinese thinking more generally. According to Ball (2016), China is the “water kingdom” (p. 4), which very early on developed some system of hydraulic engineering to make use of the various waterways in the country. As Vermander (2011) adds, transportation via inland waterways was significantly cheaper during imperial times. Hence, water and the mastering of the waterways played an important role in ancient China (Ball 2016). Managing the dangerous aspects of water, that is, diverting disastrous floods through proper maintenance of dykes, was also a major part of the responsibility of government. This could also explain why water is such an important metaphor in Daoism (Allan 1997). Lastly, according to Bauer (2001), agrarian life of ancient China is an important theme in early Chinese philosophy more generally. In agrarian society, the rhythm of nature and the seasons determined the life of farmers (Granet 1985; Moeller 2004). Thus, nature’s attributes (e.g., the characteristics of water as outlined further below) became the ultimate model to strive for, as advised by the philosophy of Daoism (Gerstner 2011; Liu 2001; Moeller 2004, cf. Laozi Ch. 25).

Dao and Virtue: Central Themes in Daoist Philosophy In most writings, the meaning of dao still remains somewhat elusive. Literally translated, it just means “way”; so, the philosophical concept itself, according to Cheung and Chan (2005), represents “the Way,” meaning the “way of nature” (p. 49). Yet, according to Phan (2007), there are several daos, for example, a moral one, a political one, etc. However, it seems there is also one “overarching” dao with specific parts (Granet 1985), embodying “the perfect order for all proceedings.” On the other hand, Hansen (2000) opposes this view and regards the “great” dao as representing “world history” (p. 208). Moeller (2004) criticizes the fact that dao is often depicted as something overly mystical, beyond comprehension (see, e.g., Schwartz 1998), arguing that its meaning is rather “simple and natural and this-worldly” (Moeller 2004, p. vii, cf. Hansen 2000;

854

A. Hennig and M. Niedenführ

Sherman 2006). He is thereby echoing Granet (1985), who defined dao as a “principle of organization and order” (Author’s English translation of German original, cf. Granet 1985, p. 230), a “regulator” but neither a law (Moeller 2004, p. 180, cf. Granet 1985, p. 246) nor a prima causa (cf. Granet 1985, p. 252). Since dao is a complex concept, it shall be further elaborated based on three relevant subthemes – namely, the logic of opposites (yin-yang), water and virtue, and becoming natural (ziran and wuwei). Each of these is discussed in more detail below. The logic of opposites – yin-yang. Moeller’s (2004) explanation of the cartwheel metaphor (cf. Laozi Ch. 11) provides a vivid description of how the dao is conceptualized. The moving wheel, with its spokes and hub in the center, represents the structure of the dao as based on alternating, momentary opposites: “being” and “nothingness,” “emptiness” and “fullness,” and “presence” and “nonpresence.” The center, the hub, is “empty,” “single” (as there can be only one center), and “still” (since only the spokes move), whereas the spokes structure the wheel’s space without any overlap. The spokes are physically present; hence, they signify “being,” “full,” and “presence.” Together, hub and complementary spokes present a harmonious, clear, and efficacious order, in terms of structure and activity. Being in motion, the wheel illustrates a cycle, the rhythm of alternating opposites (yin yang) that structure space and time (Granet 1985; Moeller 2004). Accordingly, the dao imagined as a wheel has a structure, a process, and a rhythm – and all together represent the overarching order of heaven and earth but not the ultimate cause of its beginning (cf. Granet 1985). As vital as understanding the concept and function of dao is the concept of efficacy, that is, de 德. De represents the specifics, namely the manifold singular manifestations of dao, the overarching order (Granet 1985; Chan 1963). De is usually translated as virtue, yet virtue here refers more to power and does not connote any moral or ethical dimension. In this sense, it corresponds to the more basic Latin meaning of virtus as a premoral quality (Moeller 2006). The yin-yang opposites in Daoism do not represent permanent opposites drawing a clear line between right and wrong or good and bad, as it happens in other virtue ethics where the meaning of virtue is indeed a moral one (Fung 1958; Lai 2007; Moeller 2004). For example, Aristotle classified bad extremes, such as “too much” and “too little,” and contrasted them with the mean, which is good, and hence is virtue (Aristotle 2008 [349 BCE]). Confucius also, in seeking to establish a moral system, distinguished between good and bad/evil (Yan 2011; Chan 1969). As mentioned in our chapter on Confucianism, the Confucian classic Zhongyong elaborates in a moral fashion on the need to avoid extremes. However, in Daoism, these categories (right/wrong, good/bad) simply do not, and are not supposed to, exist (cf. Laozi Ch. 2). Rather, dao signifies a quality of utmost excellence and completeness (Granet 1934), a quality only to be found in nature. Hence, we are speaking of “natural virtues” and “natural ethics” derived from observing nature in contrast to ethics created by man (Moeller 2004; Hennig 2016). “Natural ethics,” however, needs to be differentiated from “naturalistic ethics.” The former presents ethics as derived from observations of nature and a metaphorical interpretation, whereas the latter is criticized by Lai (2007) for interpreting “nature” as a kind of moral standard in itself. The Daoist conception of “natural virtue” is embodied in the metaphor of water.

47

Daoism and Ethics in Management

855

Water and Virtue. As mentioned above, Allan (1997) and Ball (2016) both emphasize water as an important element in Chinese history and philosophy. Furthermore, Moeller (2004) and Chan (1969) highlight the water metaphor as an indispensable element of Daoist thought since it is mentioned in a number of chapters: cf. Laozi Ch. 8, 15, 32, 34, 36, 61, 66, 78 (including “river” as a metaphor). Moeller (2004) discusses the water metaphor in more detail: it is described as nourishing and beneficial (cf. Laozi Ch. 8), always seeking the lowest place, flowing downwards (cf. Laozi Ch. 61), soft overcoming the hard (cf. Laozi Ch. 32). Lastly, dao is also described as flowing, being in motion, and following its way spontaneously (cf. Laozi Ch. 34). Thus, water essentially embodies the characteristics of dao (Moeller 2004; Allan 1997). Accordingly, the person who can adopt the qualities of water is close to dao and to the optimal, most harmonious, conduct (cf. Laozi Ch. 8). This analogy also serves as important advice to the ruler, who is expected to nourish her people, to take a low position herself, and to rule in a soft style. Hennig (2017a) adds to these insights by relating the water metaphor to virtue and virtue ethics, connecting nourishment with the virtue of generosity and kindness, and the low position with humbleness. Becoming natural: Ziran and Wuwei. Although the “natural ethics” inherent in the Laozi is based on the concept of de (virtue), it also goes beyond it. The terms ziran 自然 and wuwei 無為, in particular, are prominent and part of any writing by scholars of Chinese philosophy referring to Daoism (see, e.g., Chan 1969; Hansen 2000; Moeller 2004). According to Wang (1997, 2000) and Lai (2007), ziran and wuwei are, in a way, complementary. However, the meaning of these two concepts is disputed among scholars. Whereas some translations refer to ziran as “nature” or “natural” (Liu 1998) or “self-so” (Moeller 2004; Miller 2013), “self-so-ness” (Lai 2007), and “it-self-becoming” (Wang 1997), others especially emphasize the notion of spontaneity (Lai 2007; Moeller 2004; Wang 1997, 2000) and spontaneous selftransformation (Miller 2006). Similarly, in the case of wuwei, there are different interpretations, such as “nonaction” in the sense of noninterference with dao (Miller 2006), “nonpurposive action” (Hansen 2000), or “effortless action” (Slingerland 2003), among others (for more interpretations of wuwei, see Hennig 2016). This section builds on interpretations by Lai (2007) and Wang (1997). Accordingly, ziran is related to “it-self-becoming” and “self-so-ness” – which, according to Lai, is the “self-as-it-is, the unconditioned, spontaneous self” (Lai 2007, p. 330). This means being essentially “natural” in the sense of being unconditioned, or more precisely “uncontrived” (ibid.), which implies being free and spontaneous – but still within certain boundaries (Lai 2007). In this context, wuwei is interpreted as “nonaction,” enabling and promoting exactly this spontaneity and spontaneous development (Lai 2007) of one’s own “being.” The “ziran-wuwei ethic” (Lai 2007, p. 334) is grounded in the recognition of spontaneity as an enabler but also as a requirement for ziran or “self-so-ness.” This also indicates noninterference and the absence of external force. Hence, this ethic places a strong emphasis on respect and freedom with regard to the other and to one’s own development beyond conventions, allowing for free expression within “their webs of interdependence and environing contexts” (Lai 2007, p. 335).

856

A. Hennig and M. Niedenführ

In sum, there are a number of “natural virtues”: drawing on the water metaphor, these are: nourishment in the sense of generosity and kindness, taking a low position, being humble and being soft, thereby being flexible enough to overcome obstacles. These “virtues” are the most efficacious way of conduct, as everything derived from “nature” is naturally efficacious and aligns us with dao and the natural rhythm. These “virtues” also enable a particular ethic that emphasizes an “other-regarding attitude” (Lai 2007, p. 325). In the context of Lai’s (2007) “ziran-wuwei ethic,” the virtues in the Laozi promote the uncontrived development of a human being, so that she can realize her “self-so-ness,” her “natural” human Wesen. These virtues enable spontaneity and absence of interference and force – in stark contrast with the rigid and diligent training of “proper” conduct and ceremonial rites advocated in Confucianism, for example.

Managerial Implications: Leadership, Corporate Culture, and Values for the Knowledge Society to Come As previously mentioned, the Laozi was written to guide the ruler on how to “manage” a country and its people. However, international academic literature on specific managerial implications derived from this philosophy is still sparse and scattered. Hence, in this section, the available insights are presented in relation to leadership and business more generally. Adding their own interpretations of Daoist values to these insights, we then develop a set of inspiring and progressive values relevant for twenty-first-century organizations. Daoist values applied to leadership. Leadership research has discussed the theoretical application of concepts such as “nonaction” or wu wei (Gerstner 2011), yin-yang and wu xing 五行 (the so-called “five elements” or “five phases”) (Bai and Roberts 2011), and water as virtue (Lee et al. 2008, 2013). Wu wei applied to leadership implies a less direct and controlling style, one that is supporting and empowering people. This style also recognizes people’s individuality, as there is no imposition from hierarchical levels above and people can develop in accordance with their own speed and needs (Gerstner 2011). Hence, this style also carries a notable ethical dimension. The dialectics and dynamics of yin-yang applied to leadership overcome the hierarchically fixed leader-follower relation. In the context of change, alternation, and yin-yang, the leader is also a follower and vice versa (Bai and Roberts 2011). Implemented in corporations, this approach may lead to more equal, “democratic” and flexible structures. Daoist “water-like” values in the context of leadership imply a more altruistic, other-serving, modest and flexible style, with an emphasis on reducing competition (Lee et al. 2008, 2013). Therefore, this approach goes hand in hand with the “stillness” of wu wei. Furthermore, a number of Daoist virtues like modesty (or humbleness), and a supportive and benevolent attitude, can be linked with virtue ethics and the question of how a Daoist selfcultivation of virtuous behavior could positively impact a corporate environment (Hennig 2016, 2017a, b).

47

Daoism and Ethics in Management

857

Recent empirical research on Daoist leadership and values illustrates how Daoist values are actually applied in business. For example, studies by Cheung and Chan (2005, 2008) have revealed that qualities of flexibility (in the sense of taking opportunities and looking for alternatives) and forbearance (as a part of yin-yang alternation, where being soft actually implies strength) are valued and applied by CEOs in Hong Kong. Another study, by Xing and Sims (2011), investigates how wu wei is applied by Chinese bank managers and distinguishes between wu wei as “selfprotection” and wu wei as “flow.” With regard to “self-protection,” participants used wu wei to justify certain circumstances – such as being “only” second best; or not pursuing an action further (interpreted as “stopping at the right time”) (ibid., p. 105); or not taking leadership roles; or as an excuse for failure. When seen from a “flow” perspective, wu wei justified not forcing/noninterference in a situation and concentration on the work process rather than on the result. A third study, by Lin, Ho, and Lin (2013), explores how a “Daoist” attitude of managers and employees plays out in a corporate environment, for example, by having weaker ties to the organization or by adopting a more detached perspective on both success and failure. This empirical study supports further insights from conceptual papers on Daoist values, with practical examples of selflessness (“no-ego”), not claiming credit and noncontention as outcomes of Daoist values applied in organizations. Daoist values applied to business more broadly. The practice of Daoist values in companies is captured under the label dao shang 道商, the “Daoist Entrepreneur.” Yet, there are only few examples of companies drawing on some Daoist principles to inform their corporate ethics. These are Haier, Huanqiu Tianxia (in the education sector), and the Chengdu Bus Company (Herrmann-Pillath 2015). Specifically, Haier 海尔, a Chinese company producing white goods (originally was part of a joint venture with the German company Liebherr), presents itself as an example of dao shang.1 The company’s metaphor of “Haier Is a Sea” (hai 海 is translated as sea) heavily draws on the Daoist water metaphor (Xing 2016). The company’s leadership culture is “extolling the virtues of living a selfless, simple, intelligent, placid, tolerant, and humble existence” (Xing 2016, p. 808), as well as receptiveness and flexibility. Leadership by these virtues is expected to eliminate employees’ selfish desires. Similarly, a cooperative spirit would be fostered by the Daoist principle of “not contending” or “not competing” (cf. Laozi Ch. 22). In contrast to ru shang, dao shang try to reconcile the conflict between running a successful business and avoiding aggressive competition, especially under consideration of the natural environment. Yet, the business philosophy of these companies does not rest exclusively on Daoist values and principles.2 It is not uncommon for Chinese entrepreneurs to choose values from several different Chinese philosophies as a basis

1

Others claim, Haier also draws on the wolf metaphor that stresses rivalries, especially in the context of foreign competitors (Chen 2014; Corporate Rebels 2018). 2 The idea that the Chinese often combine various Chinese philosophies is reflected in the saying wai ru nei dao 外儒内道 (which means Confucian/social on the outside, Daoist/quietism on the inside) (Hansen 2007).

858

A. Hennig and M. Niedenführ

to inform their corporate practices and ethics. In brief, what could be observed in these examples lends support to the idea that Daoist values can have significant impact on leadership and corporate culture. Daoist values for organizations in the twenty-first century. According to Drucker (2001), management is a general discipline, not limited to business management. As the Laozi is essentially about “managing” a state and its people, in light of Drucker’s statement the political guidance in the Laozi could also serve as a guide to management in business. Below we illustrate how Daoism can provide a meaningful foundation for Drucker’s “knowledge society” to come. Drucker’s postcapitalist, twenty-first-century “knowledge society” is a society without masters, as the “knowledge worker” is both employee and leader, depending on the situation, and as positions are interdependent but not hierarchically structured (Drucker and Wartzman 2010).3 In this context, Drucker defines management as “a social function” and a “truly liberal art” (ibid., p. 163). Management is all about making this knowledge productive to promote innovation. This requires an interplay of self-management by the knowledge worker to continuously learn and develop herself, and a corresponding leadership mode that promotes autonomy for this purpose (Drucker 2001; Wartzman 2014). Although we have not reached the postcapitalist knowledge society, we can already observe a change in contemporary career development, which affects employees’ skill requirements for jobs, for example. The traditional career path of working one’s way up in the corporate hierarchy is in decline and shifting towards more flexible, but also precarious, types of work such as on-demand service – which requires workers to adopt an attitude of continuous learning and self-management. Hence, some features of Drucker’s knowledge worker have already become reality. Further changes in skill and job requirements are to be expected with the increasing introduction of artificial intelligence into the work environment. In this context, the “ziran-wuwei ethic” (cf. Lai 2007) could provide a meaningful foundation for autonomy, self-management, and purpose. Applied to organizational culture and leadership, the concept of wuwei is essentially about promoting autonomy (cf. Gerstner 2011), which enables ziran in the sense of individual selfdevelopment, that is, that of realizing one’s own natural self. This autonomy for self-development in turn leads to more meaningful engagement, as “reflection” is a necessary part of the whole process of “becoming oneself” – whereby “reflection” means understanding one’s Wesen or natural self. Also, Drucker’s idea of selfmanagement resonates well with a wuwei organizational culture and leadership style that requires the employee to autonomously organize and manage herself. The ability to self-develop (ziran), resulting in self-reflection and self-realization, plays a vital role with regard to self-management. Both self-reflection and selfrealization lead to more self-awareness and hence could promote better selfmanagement.

Bai and Roberts (2011), for instance, derive this fluidity between roles from the yin-yang alternation.

3

47

Daoism and Ethics in Management

859

However, the ziran-wuwei ethic can only be realized through the practice of certain water-like “virtues” such as those previously described (cf. Lee et al. 2008). In the context of leadership, only a so-called “soft style,” meaning a humble, kind, and supportive approach in practice (cf. Hennig 2017b), can bring about wuwei in the first place. Hence, becoming a virtuous person by adopting these water-like characteristics is seen as an important part of self-cultivation (or, as translated here, self-development). Especially in the context of Drucker’s vision of fluid roles, adopting this kind of behavior is equally vital for fulfilling the role of both employee and leader (cf. Bai and Roberts 2011). Water-like characteristics promote cooperation over competition and superiority (cf. Laozi Ch. 4 on status/competition, Ch. 7 on the good character/water), as the last two tend to undermine the idea of equality espoused in Drucker’s vision. Lastly, adopting the yin-yang logic can lead to radically new ways to achieve selfdevelopment and self-management. As previously mentioned, the yin-yang logic underpins a worldview dominated by alternating, temporary opposites of yin-yang, which constitute a cycle. Adopting this view can make us more flexible and, at the same time, more resilient. It relieves us from thinking in binary categories of either/or and allows us to better tolerate paradox and contradictions, as these are all understood to be part of a larger whole (cf. Li 2014; Moore 1967; Peng et al. 2015). This tolerance then enables us to better manage uncertain, contradictory, or chaotic situations. With regard to resilience, the yin-yang logic of alternating opposites helps us to avoid hasty judgments of good and bad, given that we cannot know how the situation or issue will eventually turn out (cf. Jullien 2004; Wong 2014, cf. Laozi Ch. 62 on uncertainty and lack of control). Lastly, adopting this logic generally enables more outside-the-box thinking, as it significantly broadens our perspective and could, in turn, promote innovation.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have analyzed the potential contribution of Daoism to ethical management practices today and, more broadly, to organizational practices in the anticipated knowledge society – of the twenty-first century. This philosophy emphasizes moral self-cultivation of individuals as the basis for a stable state (Yan 2011) – or, in this context, a stable, sustainable business. With regard to moral self-cultivation, Daoism advocates spontaneous and “natural” behavior in accordance with dao over morality based on rituals and strictly ordered responsibilities as advocated by Confucianism (Fung 1958). Daoism emphasizes urgently needed values such as noncontention/noncompetition, humbleness/modesty, noninterference (which could be also understood as nonaggressiveness) and a supportive, benevolent (empowering) attitude that promotes a positive atmosphere of cooperation, appreciation, and respect.

Cross-References ▶ Confucianism and Ethics in Management

860

A. Hennig and M. Niedenführ

References Allan S (1997) Way of water and sprouts of virtue. State University of New York (SUNY) Press, New York Aristotle (2008 [349 BCE]) Nikomachische Ethik (trans: Wolf U), 2nd edn. Rowohlt-TaschenbuchVerlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg Bai X, Roberts W (2011) Taoism and its model of traits of successful leaders. J Manag Dev 30(7/8):724–739 Ball P (2016) The water kingdom: a secret history of China. Penguin Random House, London Bauer W (2001) Geschichte der chinesischen Philosophie. Konfuzianismus, Daoismus, Buddhismus [History of Chinese philosophy. Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism] (ed: van Ess H). C.H. Beck, Munich Bell DA (2011) Introduction. In: Yan X (Auth.) Ancient Chinese thought, modern Chinese power. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp 1–20 Chan W-T (1963) The way of Lao Tzu. The Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill, New York Chan W-T (1969) A source book in Chinese philosophy. Princeton University Press, Princeton Chen Z (2014) Nationalism, Internationalism and Chinese Foreign Policy. In S. Zhao (Ed) Construction of Chinese Nationalism in the Early 21st Century: Domestic Sources and International Implications. Routledge, London and New York, pp. 56–73 Cheung C-K, Chan AC-F (2005) Philosophical foundations of eminent Hong Kong Chinese CEOs’ leadership. J Bus Ethics 60:47–62 Cheung C-K, Chan AC-F (2008) Benefits of Hong Kong Chinese CEOs Confucian and Daoist leadership styles. Leadersh Org Dev J 29(6):474–503 Corporate Rebels (2018) The world’s most pioneering company of our times. https://corporaterebels.com/haier/. Accessed 29 Oct 2019 Creel HG (1970) What is Taoism? And other studies in Chinese cultural history. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago Drucker PF (2001) Management challenges for the 21st century. Harper Business, New York Drucker PF, Wartzman R (eds) (2010) The Drucker lectures: essential lessons on management, society and economy. McGraw-Hill, New York Feldt A (2010) Governing through the Dao: a non-anarchistic interpretation of the Laozi. Dao: J Comp Philos 9:323–337 Fung Y-L (1958) A short history of Chinese philosophy. Macmillan, New York Gerstner A (2011) Leadership and organizational patterns in the Daodejing. J Manag Dev 30(7/8):675–684 Granet M (1934) La Pensée Chinoise. Albin Michel, Paris. http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/ granet_marcel/A12_la_pensee_chinoise/pensee_chinoise.html. Accessed 19 Mar 2018 Granet M (1985) Das Chinesische Denken (trans: Porkert M). Suhrkamp, Frankfurt Hansen C (2000) A Daoist theory of Chinese thought: a philosophical interpretation. Oxford University Press, New York Hansen C (2007, 28 June) Daoism. Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/daoism/. Accessed 30 Nov 2019 Hennig A (2016) Three different approaches to virtue in business – Aristotle, Confucius, and Lao Zi. Front Philos China 11(4):556–586 Hennig A (2017a) Applying Laozi’s Dao De Jing in business. Philos Manag 16:19–33 Hennig A (2017b) Daoism in management. Philos Manag 16:161–182 Herrmann-Pillath C (2015) Wachstum, Macht und Ordnung eine Wirtschaftsphilosophische Auseinandersetzung mit China. Metropolis, Weimar (Lahn) Jullien F (2004) A treatise on efficacy: between Western and Chinese thinking. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu Kirkland R (2004) Taoism: the enduring tradition. Routledge, London Kohn L (1998) The Lao-Tzu myth. In: Kohn L, LaFargue M (eds) Lao-Tzu and the Tao-Te-Ching. New York State University (SUNY) Press, New York, pp 41–62

47

Daoism and Ethics in Management

861

Lai KL (2007) Ziran and Wuwei in the Daodejing: an ethical assessment. Dao: J Comp Philos 6:325–337 Lee Y-T, Han A-G, Byron TK, Fan H-X (2008) Daoist leadership: theory and application. In: Chen CC, Lee Y-T (eds) Leadership and management in China: philosophies, theories, and practices. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 83–107 Lee Y-T, Haught H, Chen K, Chan S (2013) Examining Daoist big-five leadership in cross-cultural and gender perspectives. Asian Am J Psychol 4(4):267–276 Li PP (2014) The unique value of Yin-Yang balancing: a critical response. Manag Organ Rev 10(2):321–332 Lin Y (1936) My country and my people. The Windmill Press, Kingswood Lin L-H, Ho Y-L, Lin W-HE (2013) Confucian and Taoist work values: an exploratory study of the Chinese transformational leadership behavior. J Bus Ethics 113:91–103 Liu X (1998) Naturalness (Tzu-Jan), the core value in Taoism: its ancient meaning and its significance today. In: Kohn L, LaFargue M (eds) Lao-Tzu and the Tao-Te-Ching. New York State University (SUNY) Press, New York, pp 211–228 Liu X (2001) Non-action and the environment today. In: Giradot NJ, Miller J, Liu X (eds) Daoism and ecology: ways within a cosmic landscape. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 315–339 Miller J (2006) Daoism and nature. In: Gottlieb R (ed) Handbook of religion and ecology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 220–235 Miller J (2013) Daoism and development. In: Clarke M (ed) Handbook of research on development and religion. Edgar Elgar, Cheltenham, pp 113–123 Moeller H-G (2004) Daoism explained: from the dream of the butterfly to the fishnet allegory. Open Court Publishing, Chicago Moeller H-G (2006) The philosophy of the Daodejing. Columbia University Press, New York Moore CA (1967) Introduction: the humanistic Chinese mind. In: Moore CA (ed) The Chinese mind: essentials of Chinese philosophy and culture. University of Hawaii, Honolulu, pp 1–10 Peng MW, Li Y, Tian L (2015) Tian-ren-he-yi strategy: an Eastern perspective. Asia Pac J Manag 33:695–722 Phan CC (2007) The Laozi code. Dao: J Comp Philos 6:239–262 Schwartz B (1998) The thought of the Tao-Te-Ching. In: Kohn L, LaFargue M (eds) Lao-Tzu and the Tao-Te-Ching. New York State University (SUNY) Press, New York, pp 189–210 Sherman TSJ (2006) “Being natural,” the good human being, and the goodness of acting naturally in the Laozi and the Nicomachean Ethics. Dao: J Comp Philos 5(2):331–347 Slingerland E (2003) Effortless action: Wu-wei as conceptual metaphor and spiritual ideal in early China. Oxford University Press, New York Vermander B (2011) Chinese wisdom, management practices and the humanities. J Manag Dev 30(7/8):697–708 Wang Q (1997) On Laozi’s concept of Ziran. J Chin Philos 24:291–321 Wang Q (2000) Heng Dao and appropriation of nature: a hermeneutical interpretation of Laozi. Asian Philos 10(2):149–163 Wartzman R (2014) What Peter Drucker knew about 2020. Harv Bus Rev. https://hbr.org/2014/10/ what-peter-drucker-knew-about-2020. Accessed 29 Mar 2018 Wong D (2014) Comparative philosophy: Chinese and Western. In: Zalta EN (ed) The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, Spring 2017 edn. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/ entries/comparphil-chiwes/. Accessed 19 Feb 2018 Xing Y (2016) A Daoist reflection on sea-like leadership and enlightened thinking. Manag Organ Rev 12(4):807–810 Xing Y, Sims D (2011) Leadership, Daoist Wu Wei and reflexivity: flow, self-protection and excuse in Chinese bank managers’ leadership practice. Manag Learn 43(1):97–112 Yan X (2011) Ancient Chinese thought, modern Chinese power. Princeton University Press, Princeton

Feminist Ethics Embodied Relationality as a Normative Guide for Management and Organizations

48

Marianna Fotaki

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Feminist Ethics: A Different Voice or a Different Positionality? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Feminine Ethics of Care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maternal Ethics of Care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Feminist Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Feminist Ethics in Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Ethics of Embodied Difference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Luce Irigaray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hélène Cixous . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Julia Kristeva . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Psychoanalytic Feminism in Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Relationality: Compassion, Cohabitation, and Coexistence with the Irreducible Other . . . . . . . Judith Butler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bracha Ettinger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Embodied Relationality for Management and Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

864 866 866 867 867 869 870 871 871 872 873 874 875 877 878 880 880 880

Abstract

The chapter considers developments in feminist ethics through the prism of poststructuralism and psychoanalysis. It proposes a notion of ethics based on interconnectedness and relationality as an intersubjective phenomenon that is embedded in the social norms, discourses, and political arrangements. The aim is to advance the new organizational ethics by drawing inspiration from diverse strands of feminism as a way of counteracting exclusionary organizational M. Fotaki (*) Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_15

863

864

M. Fotaki

practices. Specifically, the chapter develops an ethical proposition of the feminist embodied relationality by drawing on Bracha Ettinger’s productive engagement with psychoanalysis, philosophy, and art as an affirmative ethics of life. Ettinger’s work is foregrounded through engaging with Judith Butler’s thinking on precarity of human life and Jessica Benjamin’s work on “thirdness” as a space for relating emerging between the self and the other. Overall, the proposed ethical framing offers a new understanding of the work of organizations while striving to promote equality in management practice. Keywords

Feminist ethics · Relationality · Affect · Psychoanalysis · Precariousness · Cohabitation · Compassion · Interconnectedness

Introduction Centered around women’s emancipation, feminism aims to address the many social inequalities women experience by better understanding the causes of their discrimination and through political action. Feminists have often rejected dominant ethical approaches because of their inattention to gender oppression. They argue that this is partly responsible for perpetuating systems of social domination over women by undervaluing women’s moral experiences and insights (Derry 2002). Feminist ethics counteracts these issues by proposing a woman-centered approach that brings in neglected aspects and perspectives to redefine the notion of ethical care and rethink the issue of social justice (Gilligan 1982). It criticizes classic ethical theories’ exclusive focus on morality of rights, and their abstract notion of justice and individual autonomy. Debate about ethics of care typifies the divergent views between essentialist and social constructionist approaches to differences between the sexes as a basis for the division of labor (Ferguson et al. 2018) and various other forms of differential treatment experienced by women in patriarchal societies. However, analyses of the roots of women’s oppression reveal many other normative stances. Feminist ethical theory reflects a wide range of perspectives that combine various angles of feminist theory with broader sociopolitical, philosophical, and cultural analyses, including Marxism (Federici 1975), socialism (Jaggar 1992), class and work (Ferguson et al. 2018), psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism (Fotaki and Harding 2017). While drawing inspiration from various theoretical strands of feminism, the focus of the chapter is primarily on post-structuralist and psychoanalytically inflected approaches to gender. It specifically considers developments in feminist ethics through this prism for two reasons. First, post-structuralist feminism unearths and rejects the binary divide between “male” and “female” on which society and organizations rely and which they discursively reproduce to justify differential treatment and gender oppression (Fotaki and Harding 2017). Challenging the stability of both biological and constructed masculinity and femininity, they show them to be fluid and historically mutable. Psychoanalytic thinking provides feminists with

48

Feminist Ethics

865

an important resource to further this goal: it locates woman’s sexuality and identity in her body but rejects the essentializing assumptions of early writings by the fathers of psychoanalysis (Fotaki and Harding 2013). Second, there is linking psychoanalysis to discourses of power and social normativity in the work of many influential feminist theorists. Many influential post-structuralist feminists concerned with the role of discourse in the construction of gendered relations of power have drawn on psychoanalysis to theorize the material implications of such practices for the constitution of the female body, as will be elaborated in subsequent sections. This chapter highlights the affective nature of psychic mechanisms and their key role in supporting these discourses. It therefore draws on various insights by feminist writers inspired by post-structuralism and psychoanalysis to propose a notion of ethics based on interconnectedness and relationality as an intersubjective phenomenon sustained by social norms, discourses, and political arrangements. Taken together, post-structuralist, psychoanalytical feminist thinking offers a conception of embodied identity as partial and relational. It is based on cohabitation, sharing, and respect for the other, since it is argued cannot exist as autonomous and separate individuals. The work of feminist thinkers presented in this chapter traces the inspirations provided by early feminist writers working in this tradition such as Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous with their focus on language. Explaining women’s exclusion from the body of knowledge, their texts argue for bringing back the unrepresented woman into science, philosophy, and the arts. Julia Kristeva’s ideas on the preverbal and the role of the maternal in the formation of subjectivity, even before the process of symbolization, rehabilitate the body as a source of meaning and signification (Fotaki 2019). Her thinking on the abjection of the maternal (Kristeva 1982) has also influenced the understanding of how exclusion and othering take hold in organizations and society. Judith Butler (1993, 1997) developed this insight further by linking these processes to the operation of power relations to which we not only subject ourselves but also actively reproduce. Her idea of the subject as fluid and vulnerable to the flows of power also opens up possibilities for meaningful relationships with irreducible others (Butler 2004). Lastly, Bracha Ettinger’s (2006) productive engagement with psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the arts, which this chapter discusses, enables us to think about an affirmative ethics of life. While many of these ideas originate in post-structuralist theory, emphasizing the role of language and social discourses on the subject’s formation, a starting point for this analysis is women’s lived experiences, their material conditions, and how these are shaped by power flows. The proposed ethical framework therefore eschews any form of exclusion by virtue of being both contextually (socially, politically, and translocally) embedded and materially embodied (Fotaki and Harding 2017, s. 5 and 6). This reflects the common objective present in various connecting strands of feminist theory that this chapter aims to bring to bear on the work of management. To this end, it uses the aforementioned perspectives to demonstrate how political and cultural forces shape individual subjectivities and intersubjective encounters in the context of organizations. The feminist politics of emancipation are thus applied to develop an ethics of relationality to enable

866

M. Fotaki

organizations to reimagine and re-envision the feminist goals of equality, empowerment, emancipation, and inclusivity. Overall, this chapter has two specific aims: to advance the new organizational ethics by drawing inspiration from diverse strands of feminist traditions and to promote these to counteract exclusionary organizational practices. Specifically, it develops feminist embodied relationality as an ethical proposition for rethinking how we might productively connect with each other in organizations and management, and in all walks of social life more generally. The chapter begins by briefly reviewing feminist thinking about ethics, followed by an introduction to theories explaining women’s exclusion in language, the body of knowledge, and signification. It then develops a proposition of embodied relationality by combining insights from post-structuralist theory and psychoanalysis. It does so by incorporating ideas from Bracha Ettinger’s work, which is foregrounded by Judith Butler’s thinking on relationality and Jessica Benjamin’s extended work on “thirdness” (as a space for relating that emerges between the self and the other). Each section of the chapter concludes by outlining theoretical and practical contributions for organizations and management.

Feminist Ethics: A Different Voice or a Different Positionality? Various categorizations of feminine ethics focus on women’s uniqueness in ethical reasoning. These are often riven with considerations of care, contrasted with the concerns for rules and rights associated with males and masculine ways of thinking (Gilligan 1982). There are important distinctions in feminine ethics between feminine and feminist accounts, with the latter asking broader social and political questions to contextualize caring within them (Tronto 1995), as this section will explicate. In addition to politically situated feminist ethics, other research categorizations include feminine ethics of care, feminine maternal ethics, and lesbian ethics (Tong and Williams 2016; Derry 2002). In reality, these categorizations reflect divisions among feminists, including debates between essentialist and social constructionist approaches to differences between the sexes, which lead to different ways of knowing and ethical stances (Ferguson et al. 2018). Τhe arguments involved in these categorizations are briefly summarized below (for a more detailed exposition, see Fotaki and Harding 2017, Chap. 6).

Feminine Ethics of Care The feminine ethics of care originated with Carol Gilligan’s view stressing the value of care over traditional moral theories that give primacy to the abstract notion of justice. They reject the principles driven Western tradition in ethics as deficient, since it ignores, trivializes, or demeans values and virtues culturally associated with women (Tong and Williams 2016). Gilligan (1982) suggests that women develop a distinctive moral voice, speaking a language of care that emphasizes relationships

48

Feminist Ethics

867

and responsibilities. She argues that the embodied ethical caring practiced by women is about concrete ethical rules rather than the abstract ethics of justice constructed by men. Care ethics therefore claims that impartiality, following rules, and the use of reason to the exclusion of affect are all inappropriate for making moral decisions in the sphere of interpersonal relations (Keller 1997). In short, by raising objections to the male discourse in philosophy, this perspective offers a prism of care that views morality in different terms based on women’s uniqueness.

Maternal Ethics of Care The maternal ethics of care does not focus on the notion of care as a unique female attribute but draws on the maternal figure to reconceptualize ethics. For instance, Held (1993) uses a feminine model, of the mother figure, as the basis for an alternative approach to ethics. Specifically, she opposes traditional ethics because it not only discounts women’s morality but also presents men’s morality as gender neutral (Tong and Williams 2016). Unlike the feminine ethics of care, Held’s feminine mother model does not refer to females in a biological sense nor to women’s natural destiny or the actual lives of existing women (Sevenhuijsen 2003). Instead, she offers the mothering relationship as an excellent paradigm for human relationships in general and as a much-needed replacement for the fictional but ubiquitous rational economic man (Held 1993). Hence her valorization of an ethics of care through motherhood pays as much attention to women’s as to men’s moral experience. By implication, the private sphere is seen as superior, and one on which social relations should be molded, though sometimes these may be no less oppressive (Held 2006).

Feminist Ethics Feminist ethics situates the conception of care in a political and social context, connecting it to wider debates on justice, the relationship between women’s oppression and liberation, the class politics of the left, and various philosophical approaches to the concept of work in the public and private spheres (see Ferguson et al. 2018 for a discussion). Simply put, this exceeds the remit of the debate between rights and care framed by a care ethics perspective. Working from the feminist ethics perspective, Alison Jaggar, a socialist feminist and an activist, has developed a feminist theory of male domination based on the notion of women’s alienated labor. She uses this to argue for concerted interventions, offering moral critiques of action and practices that prolong women’s subordination; she also prescribes ethically justifiable ways of promoting women’s emancipation by taking their moral experiences seriously (Jaggar 1992). However, Jaggar is not uncritical of the elevation of impartiality over women’s ways of moral reasoning and opposes the view that moral problems should be regarded solely as impartial and concerned with conflicts of rights between individuals (Tong and Williams 2016). This is because women’s

868

M. Fotaki

experiences in the private sphere cannot readily provide a “normative model for behavior” in the public sphere nor can their “capacities for love and care for others come to be seen as a model to be emulated by others, and as a potential basis for public morality” (Mottier 2004, p. 330). Furthermore, care is not merely about moral sentiments but involves embodied work, and feminists of various persuasions have recognized that such “care work” is often precisely the type of work that the market does not value. As Ferguson et al. (2018) argue, the “sex/affective” work of mothering and wifely nurturing exploits women: women give more nurturing and satisfaction (including sexual satisfaction) to men and children than they receive and do much more of the work of providing these important human goods. More radically, Marxist autonomist feminists posit that women’s housework (and, by extension, affective/sex/care work) is part of the social reproduction of capitalism and that the anti-capitalist struggle cannot be confined to improving working conditions but must also question and consider abolishing exploitative work altogether (Federici 1975). Joan Tronto (2010) draws on ideas from political science to critique feminist care approaches that focus on women’s psychological development, providing a basis for a more wholesome ethics addressing the issue of work as part of a broader political process. She thus argues that caring institutions should be built through a political process that considers the needs, contributions, and prospects of women and many different actors (Tronto 1995). This suggests that care need not necessarily be opposed to independence and self-realization, implying the need for a redistribution of paid labor and caring tasks between men and women, as well as a new approach to justice, morality, and politics. As Sevenhuijsen (2003, p. 5, citing Tronto 1995) explains with reference to Tronto’s work on this topic: Judgements in the public sphere are usually associated with distance and impartiality, and with the ability to transcend the individual point of view in order to reach a ‘general viewpoint’. The virtues associated with care, such as compassion, attentiveness, empathy and attention to detail, in contrast, are depicted as belonging to a different sphere, that of interpersonal and private relationships. The modern ideal of citizenship demands that citizens free themselves from dependencies and loyalties in their political judgement in order to arrive at free and autonomous choices. As the American political theorist Joan Tronto has so aptly put it, modern political theory locates care both ‘above and below’ politics.

Following Tronto, other feminists have rejected the notion of care-based ethics as a politically loaded concept when predominantly applied to women, because it largely excludes men from the practice of care while implicitly associating the female work of care with lesser value. Many feminists counter that women’s emancipation should be a concern for ethicists of both genders (Derry 2002), because of its implications for justice and its indication that women’s struggle for equality promotes the goals of various groups of disadvantaged “others.” Another criticism leveled at ethicists of care and theorists of maternal ethics is that, in their attempt to redress the exclusion of women’s ethical perspectives from consideration, they regard care relations as immutable rather than as socially and

48

Feminist Ethics

869

historically contingent (Ferguson et al. 2018). This limits their ability to explain ethics as an individual attitude/choice vis-à-vis the other. Nonfeminist critics counter that “ethics cannot proceed from a specific standpoint – in this case, from the standpoint of women – and still be regarded as an ethics” (Tong and Williams 2016). Lastly, feminist philosopher, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2012), sees care as a way of knowing which is based on ontological rather than moral groundings because care is everything we do; and she also expands its remit beyond human agency. Overall, the contested status of care suggests a need to develop a more robust feminist ethics of care that includes men as well as women, rather than rejecting care (Tong and Williams 2016).

Feminist Ethics in Management In terms of applying the various developments in feminist ethics, there has been limited transfer of these ideas into organization and management scholarship and the business ethics field, although this may be changing (Fotaki and Harding 2017, Chap. 6). However, Fotaki and Harding (2017) express their misgivings about how feminist ethics (of care) is being adopted and understood in organization studies. Following Gilligan’s work, most organizational researchers define care as consideration for another person’s needs and interests (Lawrence and Maitlis 2012; Liedtka 1996) while cautioning that this may lead to instrumentalization of care if employed to improve organizational efficiency. However, it has also been argued that the ethics of care might make a valuable contribution to business organizations where relationships are defined primarily in economic and contractual terms (Wicks et al. 1994; Burton and Dunn 1996), as well as to critical management pedagogy (Gabriel 2009). While the re-evaluation of care from a feminist perspective is welcome, its focus on psychologically based notions of the ethics of care that emphasize various traits women are alleged to possess is not unproblematic. The discourse of “difference” not only runs the risk of becoming instrumentalized but may also serve as another tool for reframing, thus re-embedding, existing inequalities and injustices, rather than promoting social and political empowerment as advocated by Jaggar (Derry 2002). Another potentially undesirable consequence is that care-driven approaches tend to locate feminist ethics in the private sphere, implicitly undermining women’s moral agency and considering them as less interested and less able to function in the public domain (see, e.g., Tronto 1995, 2010). Women thus risk being excluded from the social and relegated to the spiritual (religious) and natural worlds, where care is associated with their reproductive functions (Fotaki and Harding 2017). This brief overview of various approaches to ethics reveals great diversity in feminist thinking about the best ways of counteracting patriarchy. The different strands of feminist ethics of care foreground debates on relationality: they highlight women’s unique ethical contributions that emphasize relationships and responsibilities. Such an ontology privileges the self as connected to others while valorizing

870

M. Fotaki

epistemologies relying on affective, situated, partial, and particular ways of knowing. The proposed ethical conception of relationality connects with the wider debates about care and justice that have been taking place among feminists. This chapter considers relationality from a feminist post-structuralist and feminist psychoanalytic perspective to explain how the notion of subjectivity is meaningless without consideration of others, because we cannot exist but in relation to others. The next section elaborates the influences of specific feminist post-structuralist and psychoanalytic writings to foreground the framework of embodied relational ethics presented in subsequently in this chapter.

The Ethics of Embodied Difference Theories of the positive value of sexual difference were first voiced evocatively by Luce Irigaray (1985, 1993), Hélène Cixous (1976), and other thinkers associated with French post-structuralist feminism in the 1970s. These authors argued passionately for a need to acknowledge the consequences of women’s absence from the body of knowledge and representation. They offered new ways for women to speak, since speak, since they had been silenced by patriarchal language that gave them no place and no language to speak and constitute themselves, except as men’s inferiors (Fotaki and Harding 2017; Fotaki 2013a). This movement was also associated with the “écriture feminine” and was influenced by a literary theory that developed in France in the 1970s among feminist students of Lacanian psychoanalysis, who sought to create a language expressing the specificity of the female body and female subjectivity. Hélène Cixous, a psychoanalyst, playwright and theoretician of feminism, was a very prominent representative of this trend combining theory and art. Julia Kristeva elaborated on the process of signification in language by proposing that it comprises two different but interacting elements: the symbolic associated with its cognitive, discursive, and normative aspects and the semiotic, preverbal rhythms of the body underlying this, which she termed the “chora” (Fotaki 2019). This was deepened through Kristeva’s engagement with psychoanalysis. Many other eminent feminists have been inspired by the theories and concepts of psychoanalysis almost since its inception (see Fotaki and Harding 2013 for a discussion in the context of organization theory), seeing it as means to change gender politics. Juliet Mitchell’s (1974) landmark book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, inaugurated a politically inspired transformation of psychoanalytical theories and concepts by feminist and gender theorists in the English-speaking world. Subsequently, Judith Butler has provided some of the most influential examples of the creative appropriation of psychoanalytic ideas for the purpose of retheorizing gender relations, as this chapter explains later. The French feminists of the 1970s used psychoanalysis explicitly to achieve their political goals of emancipation. On the one hand, they were concerned with how the unconscious enables symbolization through language and other forms of representation. On the other hand, they explored the possibilities for disrupting the misogyny and erasure of women produced by the patriarchal symbolic order (concerned with language and other forms

48

Feminist Ethics

871

of representation). Crucially for theorizing ethics, these feminist writers proposed liberating bodily practices. Their aim was to release women’s repressed creative agency, as a way of transforming the phallogocentric structures of the masculine symbolic order that ignored and excluded them. Judith Butler politicized psychoanalysis by developing these ideas further to show how psychic mechanisms sustain power, and by Bracha Ettinger, who used psychoanalysis to develop a feminist embodied ethics of compassion. The next section introduces some of the core ideas of Irigaray, Cixous, and Kristeva to illustrate how these connect with later developments in feminist ethics and politics.

Luce Irigaray Luce Irigaray was one of the first psychoanalyst feminists to denounce the representation of women in relation to, and exclusively through, male discourse (Fotaki 2013a). There was, she argued, an absence of adequate linguistic, social, iconic, theoretical, mythical, religious, and abstract scientific symbols for woman “due to too few figurations, images of representations by which to represent herself” (Irigaray 1985, p. 71). Irigaray has sought to deconstruct and subvert all kinds of male-dominated discourses from within by rereading them strategically. Through her feminist analysis of Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, she elucidates the equation of the feminine with matter and nature and exposes woman’s habitual absence from science and philosophy. In her lucid exposition of the habitual relegation of the feminine to the position of the matter, material or object against which the masculine defines itself in the tradition of Western thought (Irigaray 1985), she has greatly contributed to unearthing the social position of woman, who “is most often hidden as woman and absent in the capacity of subject” (Irigaray 1985, p. 132). However, her project to restore multiplicity beyond the singular male gender is more far-reaching and extends to challenging the one-subject culture by reimagining and bringing about a future that will be more hospitable to difference (Irigaray 1993). In other words, her aim is to decry “sameness” and its constrictive, omnipotent intent within prevailing systems of discourse. She does so by demonstrating how meaning is produced and reproduced; and by disrupting it from within, she illuminates its provisional nature and opens up ways for new significations (Fotaki et al. 2014). Irigaray also gives a firsthand account and demonstration of how the new way of writing from the body might redefine the symbolic order by allowing feminine desire to express itself (Fotaki and Harding 2013).

Hélène Cixous Hélène Cixous is one of the most celebrated and versatile feminist thinkers of our time, having maintained an unwavering commitment to the political emancipation of women through self-expression and transformation of their subjectivities

872

M. Fotaki

(Fotaki 2013b). She is best known for her invention and propagation of a new way of writing from the body, articulated in her path-breaking work, The Laugh of the Medusa (1976), an essay/manifesto calling for women to claim back what was foreclosed to them by centuries of masculine domination in thought and philosophy. In this chapter, she argues that women must reclaim their sexuality and create their own new language to express their subjectivity. Writing from the body is an example of how this might be achieved and is meant to free the bisexual (feminine) unconscious in both men and women. Participation in public life is another way of opposing the dominant masculine rhetoric, as Cixous stresses the unity between art, politics, and ethics. While some of her ideas may now have been superseded by queer theory and may not sound sufficiently radical, her lasting and influential contribution has been to pioneer the idea of “l’écriture feminine.” Arguably, her work somewhat foreshadows theoretical developments in feminist post-structuralist thinking on the genderless psyche (Butler 1997) and psychoanalytic advances in reconceptualizing the maternal body as “matrixial borderspace” in Bracha Ettinger’s (2006) work, as is discussed later.

Julia Kristeva Julia Kristeva is a linguist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher who focuses on the role of the body and language in constituting subjectivity. Her core contribution to developing embodied ethics is her reintroduction of the living body into language by bringing the semiotic and symbolic into “dialogue” with each other. The dialogic structure of subjectivity comprising body/language is grounded in a psychoanalytic understanding of the subject’s unconscious. Following Lacan, Kristeva’s subject exists primarily in the symbolic (language) but is also defined by the body, located in the semiotic chora that underlies the symbolic realm of language and culture. In her later work on otherness, Kristeva (1991) specifically demonstrates that, whereas a Lacanian rereading of Freud’s work conceives woman as a lack and a void, equating her with the negative and death itself, this is incomplete because it ignores the semiotic body as a source of signification. In asserting the importance of the symbolic order (and language) for subjectivity formation, Kristeva explains how, during the individuation process, “the child learns to repel and reject parts of the self that are associated with the feminine, which becomes the abject” (1982, p. 171). Abjection is necessarily directed at the maternal body, which is the locus of the undifferentiated fusion of object/subject existing in the state of presubjectivity. The notion of abjection has been particularly influential in feminist theory, social sciences, cultural studies, and the arts and has ethical implications for organizations and society. Kristeva’s theorization on abjection enables us to see the connection between the feminine/maternal body and the casting of woman in the role of the archetypal “other.” Abjection acquires broader political significance and metaphorical meaning and is associated with exclusion/inclusion as the foundation of the subject’s social existence. This has implications for

48

Feminist Ethics

873

understanding why women and conceptual others (e.g., people of color, the poor, sexual and religious minorities) are often separated from the social body and serve as a prototype for all subsequent forms of “othering” through which separation of unwanted parts of the self occurs (Fotaki 2019). Similar to Irigaray and Cixous, Kristeva holds the phallogocentric nature of the symbolic responsible for excluding women because of their closeness to body and nature (Fotaki et al. 2014). However, like repressed, unconscious fears and desires, the rejected body constantly threatens to return to reclaim the subject. Her ideas on intersubjectivity and the “strangeness” of our unconscious as a root cause of various forms of exclusion (Kristeva 1991) hold great potential for theorizing the dialectics of self and other (Braidotti 2003, p. 45).

Psychoanalytic Feminism in Management Work by feminist psychoanalysts has not been widely applied to management and organization studies, with the exception of some influential works analyzing various aspects of gender in organizations. For instance, Oseen (1997) and Lipton (2017) use Irigaray’s and Cixous’s ideas, respectively, to explore leadership, while Vachhani (2012) and Phillips et al. (2014) highlight the subordination and absence of the feminine voice and propose ways to change this by, for instance, speaking and writing differently about organizations and ourselves. Kenny (2009) examines the consequences of ignoring gendered aspects in the work of grand male theoreticians for the perpetuation of existing exclusions and inequalities as these ideas began to influence management and organization studies (Kenny 2009). Heeding her advice, Fotaki and Harding (2013) offer their own interpretation of Lacanian work as a parody of the phallic signifier and argue that Lacanian theorists should turn Lacan’s ideas back on themselves to question their own positions more critically. Fotaki et al. (2014) also use Irigaray’s work to offer insights on ways to change organizational language and discourses so that more beneficial, ethically founded identities, relationships, and practices can emerge between people in organizations. In her related work inspired by Irigaray’s ideas of women not having their own language, Fotaki (2013a) demonstrates that their underrepresentation in positions of power in academia is due to women’s absence from the symbolic body of knowledge that has been historically established and is still being reproduced. In further exploring the issue of women’s discrimination in academia, she turns to Kristeva’s notion of abjection of the female body and its functions, which are equated with nature and opposed to abstract thinking, to reveal the root cause of such exclusionary attitudes in academic institutions (Fotaki 2011). The concept of abjection has been taken up in organization and management studies to explore various excluded identities, but its psychoanalytic dimension has been underutilized. Nevertheless, Kristeva’s exploration of otherness as originating in unconscious fear of the other’s body may provide novel insights into the problems of exclusion in society, including the rejection of refugees and migrants (Fotaki 2019). Her pioneering idea of abjection may also be useful in counteracting the

874

M. Fotaki

marginalization of entire groups and categories of people by reclaiming their intelligibility and extending this to non-sanctioned, sexed, and gendered identities. This also has important implications for ethics. For instance, Kristeva’s primary identification based on love provides a counterpoint to the Lacanian symbolic that cuts off the body and negates the importance of the maternal function; she also foregrounds the work of feminists who offer a concept of embodied ethics such as Bracha Ettinger (Kenny and Fotaki 2015) and Rosi Braidotti (Fotaki and Harding 2017, Chap. 6). Kristeva’s ideas on the otherness of the unconscious and abjection are important for understanding both, Judith Butler’s notions of precariousness and embodied vulnerability as a foundation for ethical obligation toward the unknown other (Butler 2004), and Ettinger’s compassionate cohabitation with the other (Ettinger 2006), occupying an important position in the field of feminist ethics. The next section takes an inspiration from these ideas to develop the feminist ethics of relationality for organizations.

Relationality: Compassion, Cohabitation, and Coexistence with the Irreducible Other Relationality is a foundational concept in feminist thinking. It is concerned both with an understanding of the self as “relational” in the sense of “being socially constituted” and “being relationship-oriented” in terms of considering relationships in which the person is involved, which can be applied particularly to the context of ethics of care (Keller 1997). This conception of relationality does not contradict autonomy; indeed, developments in feminist thinking consider a relational conception of autonomy, addressing the limitations of the ethics of care discussed above (Meyers 1989). However, relationality is something more: it is a recognition of the integrity of both individuality and relatedness, both separation and connection, in co-creation and in tension with each other (Nelson 2001, italics in the original). The feminist psychoanalytic understanding of relationality elucidates how it is concerned primarily with intersubjectivity (Benjamin 2004) while encompassing both intrapsychic and interpsychic reality. It has origins in Freud’s theory of social life as depending on individuals’ ability to sublimate their sexual instincts and use them to bond within successively larger communal groupings. Jacques Lacan reread his theory through a linguistic prism, explaining why we cannot exist socially except in relation to an important other. People who care about us early in life, and with whom we form libidinal ties, are the literal others, while the social institutions and symbolic values onto which we transfer our affect are the big Other standing for a given symbolic order. It is in relation to literal (loved ones) and symbolic (community, nation, etc.) others that we strive to remake the world that surrounds us when we engage in political activities (Fotaki 2010). Yet in contrast to the traditional single-person focus in psychoanalysis (e.g., in Freud’s drive theory), feminist relational approaches take their inspiration from a two-person concept modeled on the mother/child dyad. As early as the 1920s,

48

Feminist Ethics

875

Melanie Klein introduced this concept to psychoanalysis as a centerpiece of her theory on human development. While many feminists continue to find psychoanalysis’s approach to gender and gender normativity exclusionary or oppressive, for others, it presents an opportunity to unearth the arbitrariness and tentative nature of gender norms which, as Fotaki and Harding (2017, Chap. 3) argue, are also painful, desiccating, and alienating for subjects occupying both the man’s and the woman’s place. Following Lacanian psychoanalysis, the authors also argue, that the very instability on which gendered and sexed identities are based opens up the possibility to change these norms in the symbolic social order. Judith Butler’s work proposes a concept of the social based on a reinterpretation of Lacanian notions of the unconscious psychic life (termed the imaginary and the real) and the symbolic as a system of social norms, rules, and discourses to introduce political considerations into psychoanalysis. She integrates insights from Lacan’s and Foucault’s work to identify intrapsychic aspects of power that eluded Foucault while focusing on social dimensions that tend to be absent from psychoanalytic theories (Butler 1993, 1997). Thus, feminist approaches to psychoanalysis enable us to unearth psychic mechanisms, including affect and fantasy, that individuals rely on and deploy, along with discursive strategies, when they both enact and traverse existing symbolic norms on which power structures rest. Butler’s engagement with post-structuralism and psychoanalysis allows her to develop the agonistic dimension of relationality – a space that is co-created between the self and the other. This implies that subjectivities are mutually constituted and mutually vulnerable. For instance, Butler’s work shows how individuals subject themselves to the circulating discourses of power and how they passionately attach themselves to these discourses to avoid abjection (Kenny 2010). The desire for a socially intelligible identity and recognition by the others causes us to embrace social normativity, which becomes affectively inscribed in our psyche. The next section explains how her and Jessica Benjamin’s ideas are brought together with Bracha Ettinger’s theoretical concept of the matrixial in the proposed framework of embodied relationality. The chapter then concludes by applying this framework to guide potential developments and implications for management and organizations.

Judith Butler Judith Butler, a feminist post-structuralist philosopher, offers a political account of the formation of subjectivity influenced by affective exchanges and circulating discourses. She draws on the key Lacanian idea and her reading of Hegel’s work – that individuals’ desire for recognition causes them to reproduce social relations and norms through intra- and interpsychic phenomena, offering an account of how the symbolic order is sustained through the psychic life of power (Butler 1997). Specifically, she proposes that this occurs through individuals subjecting themselves to social norms in order to gain recognition as social beings, which sets limits on the self-constitution of the subject and its transparency to itself.

876

M. Fotaki

Butler developed her theoretical ideas in earlier writings on the politics of social intelligibility in the context of gender (Butler 1990, 1993), and in her more recent work on what constitute liveable lives under neoliberalism (Butler 2004). I shall argue that this is crucial to understanding how our own precarity and vulnerability to subjection. Butler uniquely deploys the idea of performativity to explain why our subjectivities are socially constituted through power relations bind us to others (see also Fotaki (2014) for an organizational example on the importance of trust between patient and doctor in the context of health care). She also elucidates how we all depend on the other under conditions that are inevitably precarious, and how fears about our own survivability link us to others whom we do not know (Butler 2004). According to Butler (2005, p. 101), this precarity is both material and symbolic. It gives meaning to our individual experiences while transforming us into social beings: We are in our skins, given over, in each other’s hands, at each other’s mercy. This is a situation we do not choose. It forms the horizon of choice, and it grounds our responsibility.

This existential vulnerability and precarity, which Butler developed from reading Melanie Klein’s work, suggests that the subject’s implication in the other and her dependency on the other for intelligibility carry the potential for altruism as well as harm. Yet since this is how we become subjects, we cannot evade but must rather acknowledge this condition of mutual dependency, fully recognizing its ethical and political implications. Butler’s idea of relationality therefore entails an ethical obligation toward the irreducible other and differs from identification-based empathy. She takes inspiration from Emmanuel Lévinas about the face of the other belonging to the sphere of ethics in positing that our infinite capacity for being injured obliges us to protect the other. Yet if the face of the other, in its defenselessness and precarity, is at once a call to kill and a call for peace (Benjamin 2004), then the possibility for violence creates its own responsibility. Without this possibility, no ethical stance would be involved. But how do we arrive at “the felt experience of the other as a separate yet connected being with whom we are acting reciprocally?” (Benjamin 2004, p. 6). In her own conception of relationality, which she terms “thirdness,” Benjamin, a psychoanalyst feminist, offers a clinical category (as a mental space) that has social significance for the subject and other who are intertwined in it without one prevailing over the other. Because this space is governed by patterns of recognition and co-creation involving rapture and reparative disruption, Benjamin’s (2004) proposition is a call to surrender to the thirdness to avoid enacting our most destructive urges. This corresponds with Butler’s renouncing the illusion of our finite, self-constituted identity – which is simply an act of performance that we are compelled to enact as we are subjected to power flows – and to recognize the vulnerability and dependency intrinsic to the human condition as an empowering relational condition of humanity, and an opportunity to discharge responsibility toward the irreducible other.

48

Feminist Ethics

877

Bracha Ettinger Bracha Ettinger’s new insights from psychoanalytic feminist thinking develop these ideas further by proposing an ethics of “difference,” based on connectedness, coexistence, and compassion toward the other. These are grounded in our corporeal and embodied connections. Ettinger (2006), a French-Israeli psychoanalyst, philosopher, and artist who works with various media, including painting, video, graphical works, diaries, and notebooks, has produced one of the most innovative theories to emerge recently – that of the matrixial borderspace and “trans-subjectivity.” These ideas, which are both symbolic and material, imply an absence of separateness of the subject from the other. “Matrixial” is a symbolic concept but also entails the bodily memory of our cohabitation with the mother, representing interconnectedness and compassion, and is opposed to the phallogocentric lack and masculine law (Ettinger 2006). The idea of the matrix figure is developed: within the framework of the search for difference, that is linked as well to the search for sexual difference but it can neither belong to the visual or plastic field nor to the textual field because of its radical and absolute difference . . . it is androgynous because her difference is banished to non-appearance. (Ettinger 2006, p. 77)

Matrixial trans-subjectivity denotes that the “I” is always inextricably linked to the unknown “non-I” or the other/mother that co-emerges through the process of cohabitation in the womb (Ettinger 2006). The subject is therefore always a partial subject, comprising the symbolic and the material remnant of the mother, and the baby that cohabited with her (see Kenny and Fotaki 2015 for more details). The so-conceived subjectivity is always an emerging one and is characterized by the notion of an encounter rather than a lack or split: “In the matrixial feminine, however, this alternative does not arise from the absolute Other (as it does for Lévinas or Lacan) but from borderlinking with the Other” (Ettinger 2006, p. 85). Ettinger’s idea of the subject co-emerging through an encounter with an unknown other presents us with a compelling ethical proposition that connects Lévinasian responsibility for the other with the feminist thought of the other defined as “becoming together” (Fotaki and Harding 2017, Chap. 6). In invoking the idea of cohabitation and the joint relational space, it raises the concept of compassionate borderspaces (Kenny and Fotaki 2015) as a new ethical proposition that acknowledges our shared predicament as humans. Ettinger reconceptualizes the idea of ethical responsibility for the other by theorizing it through the prism of the feminine body, and in so doing she overcomes the restricted position that both Lévinas and Lacan assign it, namely, as the untheorizable other par excellence. In proposing the notion of the compassionate matrixial, she reconsiders the concept of the other as trauma to the self, which Lévinas could never fully negotiate. Ettinger does so by restituting the womb at the symbolic and imaginary level, equating it with life giving rather than death. She thus refuses the common association of the womb with the intrauterine enclosure and the site of the uncanny, which according to Kristeva (1991) originates in the

878

M. Fotaki

strangeness of our unconscious to ourselves. However, her intention is not to antagonize Freud, Lacan, or Kristeva by exposing and counteracting their arguments but rather to introduce the matrixial as an encompassing parallel to the phallic universe, as a second consciousness determining structure (Fotaki and Harding 2017, p. 151). The matrixial is symbiotic with this universe, because her ethical proposition has cohabitation and coexistence at its center. Ettinger thus develops her unique theory of subjectivity to provide a foundation for ethics that can be applied to management and organizations.

Embodied Relationality for Management and Organizations The relational reconsideration of subjectivity vis-à-vis the other outlined above, which brings together insights from diverse feminist psychoanalytic thinking, has powerful implications for both ethics and the ethics of care. It indicates that caring and relating share conceptual and ontological resonance, because everything we do involves care. Puig de la Bellacasa (2012, p. 198), a sociologist, is specific on this point, reaching similar conclusions: “for not only do relations involve care, care is itself relational.” She continues: “In worlds made of heterogeneous interdependent forms and processes of life and matter, to care about something, or for somebody, is inevitably to create relation.” Butler’s understanding of the human as a relational social being who craves recognition by others allows us to appreciate the role of social norms in the subject’s formation. Her reframing of subjectivity in relational terms also has important implications for understanding and rethinking developments in public policy under neoliberalism, offering ways to incorporate these into public policy (Fotaki 2017). It does so by urging us to recognize the role of governments in how people understand, treat, and relate to one another, why public policies must emerge from a recognition that all our lives are precarious and that we all depend on society for survival. Because our shared vulnerability obliges us to assign irreducible value to human lives, it is important not simply to rely on people’s ethical values but to promote policies and politics that account for our shared precariousness and the uncertainty we all face under the neoliberal regime. This chimes with Tronto’s political conception of ethics care concerned with the distributional consequences of care and those on whom falls the responsibility for providing it (Tronto 2010). The relational perspective views the issues of freedom of choice and control over and responsibility for our own decisions entirely differently from that proclaimed by market liberals. This may help us understand the utter failure of consumerist policies to redefine caring relationships in terms of individualized market-type exchanges rather than as a socially conditioned and dynamic process. For instance, they negate the introduction of the market ethos in health services provision, claiming that patients are individualistically minded consumers who are allegedly insatiable and driven predominantly by the need to increase their own benefit, in institutions where care services are offered in the context of engaging with fundamental “facts of life” such as disease and aging (Fotaki 2014). Overall, this creates an opportunity to

48

Feminist Ethics

879

rethink the role of public policy in terms of care and the notion of care as the foundation of policy. Applying the feminist ethics perspective focusing on relational care might lead to a re-evaluation of the dominant public policy, which is characterized by a shift to the market in public services. Yet until now such policy has led to condoning neglect for the (precarious) other in almost every form of organized life. The dispossession and inequality experienced by increasing numbers of people in the developed and developing worlds are arguably at the root of many political and social problems. In the business and management context, the dominant market logic of profit maximization at any cost often ends up disregarding the lives of “others” and turning them into saleable commodities. This makes possible and acceptable conspicuous and compulsive consumerism to coexist with abject poverty, allowing entire groups of people to be treated instrumentally and disposed of in distant parts of the world (Fotaki 2017). However, in the midst of affluent Western societies, we are also witnessing a rapid increase in various categories of undeserving “others,” such as the new poor, refugees, and migrants, who are often rejected, stigmatized, and refused a duty of care. Excluded others are seen as absolute “monstrous others,” or as people with no human rights worth protecting. Yet reframing our subjectivities and our own lives as inevitably precarious (Butler 2004) compels us to reconsider ourselves in relation to all lives, and as inextricably interwoven with the lives of unknown others. Ettinger’s ideas, that the chapter applied to develop the concept of embodied relationality, demonstrate how our subjectivities and social encounters can be rethought. Her theory of the matrixial borderspace, which is all but unknown in management and organizations (the only exception being work by Kenny and Fotaki 2015), focuses on the materiality of the body and affect that might help re-envisioning coexistence with the unknown and unknowable other, since this, as she argues, is our primary condition that we carry within ourselves. Rethinking the notion of compassion, cohabitation, and care through this prism may help us think new, inclusive forms of researching, teaching, and writing to oppose exclusion and “othering.” It could also have an impact on academic research in terms of research subjects and methods we choose for our investigations. For instance, this might enable us to write differently as we rely on affective engagement as a source of knowledge and learning about others. Furthermore, drawing on our shared notion of vulnerability may be useful in reframing the “problem” of the dispossessed, or even the “migration issue,” from an abstract global debate into something that resonates in people’s lives, thus challenging the perception of the refugee as an unrelatable “other.” This also suggests that research on gender and subjectivity more generally must be analyzed in relation not only to “sexual difference” but also to race, forms of desire, kinship, and power, including colonialism, for unearthing how the historically established relations continue to operate at an intersubjective level (Fotaki and Harding 2017, Chap. 5, for organizational examples). Relationality also has implications for redefining ethics of care and allowing us to reconsider the place of care in society. For instance, David Graeber (2018) argues that the majority of work in late-capitalist societies is to do with tending and

880

M. Fotaki

maintaining our well-being or sustaining the lives of others, making the world a better place. Yet such jobs, often involving heavy emotional and grueling physical labor, are routinely underpaid and undervalued. Putting resources into the services and activities we care about as a society extends beyond the debate of female unique attributes and is about political decisions care as either a commodity or as a basis for relating.

Conclusion In summary, the proposed concept of embodied relationality offers a way to reconsider our engagement in the private and public spheres through the prism of our shared precariousness. The first requirement is to be in relation with the “irreducible other,” which simply means that all humans have an inalienable right to liveable and protected lives, irrespective of whether or not we are able to identify with them. This is because it is only through relating to others that we gain a sense of value and significance, since, literally and metaphorically, we do not exist without the other. The second and related action is to break away from the public/private division by reconsidering ethics beyond the realm of personal choices. At bottom, ethics are about involvement with the other. This is essential for our individual survival in society and for the survival of societal norms, including “everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012, p. 198). This chapter makes a small contribution to this goal, specifically by drawing on the ideas of eminent feminist thinkers to propose a concept of relationality that will enable a better understanding of the work of organizations and promote equality in management practice. As Fotaki and Harding (2017, p. 131) put it: “Our belief is that only by assuring these conditions can we hope to promote flourishing of individuals in organizations and ensure our survival as societies in which all human beings can have liveable lives.”

Cross-References ▶ Critical Moral Philosophy and Management ▶ The Role of Aesthetics in Ethical Action

References Benjamin J (2004) Beyond doer and done to: an intersubjective view of thirdness. Psychoanal Q 73:5–45 Braidotti R (2003) Becoming woman: or sexual difference revisited. Theory Cult Soc 20:43–64 Burton B, Dunn C (1996) Feminist ethics as moral grounding for stakeholder theory. Bus Ethics Q 6(2):133–147 Butler J (1990) Gender trouble. Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge, London

48

Feminist Ethics

881

Butler J (1993) Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of ‘sex’. Verso, London Butler J (1997) The psychic life of power: theories in subjection. Routledge, London Butler J (2004) Precarious life: the power of mourning and violence. Verso, London Butler J (2005) Giving an account of oneself. Oxford University Press, Oxford Cixous H (1976) The laugh of the Medusa (trans: Cohen K, Cohen P). Signs 1:875–893 Derry R (2002) Feminist theory and business ethics. In: Frederick R (ed) A companion to business ethics. Blackwell, Oxford, pp 81–87 Ettinger B (2006) The matrixial borderspace (essays from 1994–1999). University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Federici S (1975) Wages against housework. In: Malos E (ed) The politics of housework. New Clarion Press, New York, pp 187–194 Ferguson A, Hennessy R, Nagel M (2018) Feminist perspectives on class and work. In: Zalta N (ed) The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, Spring 2018 edn. Available via https://plato. stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/feminism-class/. Accessed 25 Oct 2018 Fotaki M (2010) Why do public policies fail so often? Exploring health policy making as an imaginary/symbolic construction. Organization 17:703–720 Fotaki M (2011) The sublime desire for knowledge (in academe): sexuality at work in business and management schools in England. Br J Manag 22:42–53 Fotaki M (2013a) No woman is like a man (in academia): the masculine symbolic order and the unwanted female body. Organ Stud 34:1251–1275 Fotaki M (2013b) Hèléne Cixous. In: Gibbons M (ed) Encyclopaedia of political thought. WileyBlackwell, Oxford Fotaki M (2014) Can consumer choice replace trust in the National Health Service in England? Towards developing an affective psychosocial conception of trust in health care. Sociol Health Illn 36:1276–1294 Fotaki M (2017) Relational ties of love: a psychosocial proposal for ethics of compassionate care in health and public services. Psychodyn Pract 23:181–189 Fotaki M (2019) Julia Kristeva: speaking of the body to understand the language of organizations. In: Pullen A, McMurray R (eds) Foundational women writers. Routledge, London Fotaki M, Harding N (2013) Lacan and sexual difference in organization and management theory: towards a hysterical academy? Organization 20:153–172 Fotaki M, Harding N (2017) Gender and the organization: women at work in the 21st Century. Routledge, London Fotaki M, Metcalfe B, Harding N (2014) Writing materiality into organization theory. Hum Relat 67:1239–1263 Gabriel Y (2009) Reconciling an ethic of care with critical management pedagogy. Manag Learn 40:379–385 Gilligan C (1982) In a different voice: psychological theory and women’s development. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Graeber D (2018) Bullshit jobs: a theory. Allen Lane, London Held V (1993) Feminist morality: transforming culture, society, and politics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Held V (2006) The ethics of care: personal, political, and global. Oxford University Press, Oxford Irigaray L (1985) This sex that is not one. Cornell University Press, Ithaca Irigaray L (1993) An ethics of sexual difference. Cornell University Press, Ithaca Jaggar A (1992) Feminist ethics. In: Becker L, Becker C (eds) Encyclopaedia of ethics. Garland Press, New York, pp 363–364 Keller J (1997) Autonomy, relationality, and feminist ethics. Hypatia 12:152–164 Kenny K (2009) Heeding the stains: Lacan and organizational change. J Organ Chang Manag 22:214–228 Kenny K (2010) Beyond ourselves: passion and the dark side of identification in an ethical organization. Hum Relat 63:857–873 Kenny K, Fotaki M (2015) From gendered organizations to compassionate borderspaces: reading corporeal ethics with Bracha Ettinger. Organization 22:183–199

882

M. Fotaki

Kristeva J (1982) Powers of horror: essay on abjection (trans: Roudiez L). Columbia University Press, New York Kristeva J (1991) Strangers to ourselves (trans: Roudiez L). Columbia University Press, New York Lawrence T, Maitlis S (2012) Care and possibility: enacting an ethic of care through narrative practice. Acad Manag Rev 37:641–663 Liedtka J (1996) Feminist morality and competitive reality: a role for an ethic of care? Bus Ethics Q 6:179–200 Lipton B (2017) Writing through the labyrinth: using l’écriture feminine in leadership studies. Leadership 13:64–80 Meyers D (1989) Self, society, and personal choice. Columbia University Press, New York Mitchell J (1974) Psychoanalysis and feminism: a radical reassessment of Freudian psychoanalysis. Allen Lane, London Mottier V (2004) Pragmatism and feminist theory. Eur J Soc Theory 7:323–335 Nelson J (2001) Value as relationality: feminist, pragmatist and process thought meet economics. J Specul Philos 15:137–151 Oseen C (1997) Luce Irigaray, sexual difference and theorizing leaders and leadership. Gend Work Organ 4:170–184 Phillips M, Pullen A, Rhodes C (2014) Writing organization as gendered practice: interrupting the libidinal economy. Organ Stud 35:313–333 Puig de la Bellacasa M (2012) ‘Nothing comes without its world’: thinking with care. Sociol Rev 60:196–216 Sevenhuijsen S (2003) Citizenship and the ethics of care: feminist considerations on justice, morality and politics, 2nd edn. Routledge, New York Tong R, Williams N (2016) Feminist ethics. In: Zalta E (ed) The Stanford encyclopaedia of philosophy, Winter 2016 edn. Available via http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/ feminism-ethics/. Accessed 25 Oct 2018 Tronto J (1995) Caring as the basis for radical political judgments. Hypatia 10:141–149 Tronto J (2010) Creating caring institutions: politics, plurality, and purpose. Ethics Soc Welf 4:158–171 Vachhani S (2012) The subordination of the feminine? Developing a critical feminist approach to the psychoanalysis of organizations. Organ Stud 33:1237–1255 Wicks A, Gilbert D, Freeman R (1994) A feminist reinterpretation of the stakeholder concept. Bus Ethics Q 4:475–497

Is Moral Growth Possible for Managers? A Pragmatist Look at Managerial Ethics

49

Frank Martela

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Is Pragmatism? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How to Be a Pragmatist About Morality? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Commitment to Moral Growth as the Key Moral Responsibility of a Manager . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moral Growth Without Objectivism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How to Grow Morally as a Manager? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Admit the Incompleteness of Your Current Moral Outlook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Seek Opportunities to Expand Your Moral Horizon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Give Others’ Opinions and Viewpoints a Charitable Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Keep Your Values and Beliefs up to Date . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Engage in Moral Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ensure that Your Subordinates Dare to Challenge You . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

884 885 886 887 889 890 891 891 892 892 893 893 894 895 895

Abstract

Every managerial choice is an opportunity to either grow or decline morally. Pragmatism, at least the Deweyan version presented here, maintains that there are no objective moral facts or values. Instead, our current moral outlook is the result of our past experiences and social interactions, and prone to evolve in the future. The function of morality in human lives is to make living together possible, but the morality that we inherit from our social surroundings is almost inescapably plagued by blind spots, biases, and narrowness. Like any other human being, the manager

F. Martela (*) School of Business/Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland e-mail: frank.martela@aalto.fi © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_18

883

884

F. Martela

cannot choose their social background or inherited biases. What one can choose is to commit oneself to moral growth and a conscious attempt to expand one’s moral outlook. Some of the key habits in this path are remaining open to other perspectives, consciously seeking opposing and novel voices, interpreting them charitably, and engaging in moral imagination. The resulting progress is not “objective” growth but moral growth – in the sense that, through such cultivation, one’s moral outlook can better serve the basic function that such a system has in human lives and in one’s role as a manager. Given that morality is not something fixed but a continuous process, the key moral responsibility of a manager is to commit oneself to moral growth. Keywords

John Dewey · Moral development · Moral growth · Moral habits · Pragmatism · Constructivism

Introduction Morality is a continuing process not a fixed achievement. (Dewey 1998, p. 322)

Every choice the manager makes is an opportunity to either grow or decline morality. Every choice sustains a double relation to the self, as John Dewey (1998, p. 342) notes: It “reveals the existing self” – making visible the past that has shaped you into the being you are. But it also “forms the future self.” Herein lie human freedom, human agency, and the opportunity to become a better person than what one used to be: “In choosing this object rather than that, one is in reality choosing what kind of person or self one is going to be” (Dewey 1998, p. 342). Pragmatism pushes ethics back to the everyday. Ethics is not about esoteric philosophical theorizing or formal documents about “organizational values.” Precisely this “idolatrous worship of systematized rules” (Fesmire 2003, p. 3) has made moral philosophy so remote and irrelevant for everyday conduct. Instead, morality permeates the organizational life; potential for good or worse is present in all choices and interactions of all organizational actors. At the same time, pragmatism reminds us that there are no objectively right or wrong choices. There’s no pre-existing list of principles from which one can check what action is definitely right. You and your organization most probably have a set of guiding principles, values, codes of conduct, and so forth, and they can be more or less formal and explicit or informal and implicit. But one can never rest on one’s oars, believing that one’s principles and conduct are already perfect. Instead, one has to remain open to the possibility that one’s current moral outlook could have significant self-serving biases, crucial blind spots, and other shortcomings. The only way to handle such a situation responsibly is to commit oneself to moral growth – as a manager, as a human being. We may say that the good person is precisely the one who is most conscious of the alternative, and is the most concerned to find openings for the newly forming or growing self. (Dewey 1998, p. 353)

49

Is Moral Growth Possible for Managers?

885

But, if no objective moral principles exist, how can moral growth be even possible?

What Is Pragmatism? Pragmatism as a philosophical movement saw its inception in the late nineteenth century as the first truly American school of philosophy. The most prominent founding fathers were Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910), and John Dewey (1859–1952) – who, inspired by the rapidly developing science, saw room for more action-oriented, practically relevant ways of thinking as compared to the existing philosophical alternatives. Although – as the often-repeated quip goes (originally from Meyer 1908, p. 326) – there are as many pragmatisms as there are pragmatists, pragmatism in general is characterized by seeing thinking (and philosophizing) as a situated activity of a goal-oriented agent, the fruits of which are fallible and ultimately cashed out in action (Martela 2015a). While some versions of pragmatism come quite close to realism (Pihlström 2005, e.g., Rescher 1999) and others lean toward postmodernism, interpretivism, and constructivism (e.g., Rorty 1999), the Deweyan experientialist version of pragmatism, which aims to go beyond the classic realism vs. anti-realism distinction, seems to be, in the words of Hildebrand (2003, p. 5), “more original and, indeed, more defensible” than other versions of pragmatism (Martela 2015b). Hence, when talking about pragmatism in this chapter, I mainly have this Deweyan version in mind. We are already engaged in an unfolding stream of experiencing in which we need to act to the best of our abilities. That is the starting point for the pragmatist way of approaching life and philosophizing (Martela 2015a, b). The stream of experiencing is constantly happening; we can never close it off. And we care about the outcomes, in that some experiences are more preferable to us than others. At the same time, it seems that we have some power to influence these outcomes: a sense of agency and a sense of being able to make choices are also part of our human condition. Ontologically, pragmatism emphasizes that the world is not something to be observed but something within which we already aim to live our lives as best as we can. This is not realism or constructivism but might be better labeled as ontological experientialism (Martela 2015b; see also McGilvary 1939). From an evolutionary perspective, human capacity for thinking did not evolve to describe the world but to enhance our capability to act in that world (Clark 2016). Cognitive knowledge is fundamentally one special form of action, which “like any other action, brings about changes to the world” (Baert 2003, p. 97). Accordingly, pragmatism emphasizes that all our beliefs, theories, ideas, and rationalizations are in final analysis future-oriented “rules for action” (James 1907, p. 23). Instead of talking about fixed knowledge, Dewey recommends that we should only talk about warranted assertions, to emphasize the ever-evolving nature of human convictions (Dewey 1938, p. 7). Pragmatism puts a strong emphasis on the fallible nature of all human beliefs. We cannot ignore the historicized and particular nature of all our convictions.

886

F. Martela

Whether we want it or not, we “cannot recover any form of privileged neutrality, objectivity, universality, apodicticity, a priority, or modal necessity” (Margolis 1996, p. 7). Instead of examining the supposed “objectivity” of knowledge, pragmatism evaluates various convictions based on their capacity to aid the agent in reaching one’s goals. Conclusions reached through inquiry are, in a way, like maps of the experiential world, giving us tools to interpret it in ways that help us orient ourselves within it. When certain beliefs and convictions have “repeatedly proved effective” in guiding us toward desired directions, these warranted assertions can serve as stable conclusions on which future inquiry can build (Dewey 1938, p. 521). The epistemological position of pragmatism might thus be labeled as fallibilistic instrumentalism (Martela 2015b), in that any knowledge is ultimately in the service of guiding our lives (instrumentalism) and there is nothing objective or immutable about it, as it is subject to be revised if it proves incapable of explaining or guiding future experiences (fallibilism). To summarize, in pragmatism you are already in a situation. There is no neutral, God’s-eye view. There are no objective facts upon which to build and no pure “rationality” leading to inevitable conclusions. There’s only you, already living your life, already equipped with a broad set of convictions, beliefs, and values, with which you have to navigate your life as best you can. How does morality fit into this picture?

How to Be a Pragmatist About Morality? Pragmatism grants no privileged status to moral principles, rules, theories, or values. The same fallibilism applies to them as to all our other intellectual tools (Martela 2017). Instead of being in some sense “objective,” “absolute,” or “definitive,” they should be seen as “intellectual instruments to be tested and confirmed – and altered – through consequences effected by acting upon them” (Dewey 1960, p. 277; see also Fesmire 2003, p. 59). Further, in Dewey’s own words: A moral principle, such as that of chastity, of justice, of the Golden Rule, gives the agent a basis for looking at and examining a particular question that comes up. It holds before him certain possible aspects of the act; it warns him against taking a short or partial view of the act. It economizes his thinking by supplying him with the main heads by reference to which to consider the bearings of his desires and purposes; it guides him in his thinking by suggesting to him the important considerations for which he should be on the outlook. (Dewey 1932, p. 309)

Moral reasoning and moral principles are thus instruments that we use to change our behavior for the better. Every type of analysis, including the analysis of moral activity, requires that one is in possession of certain working tools. When facing a morally complicated situation at work or elsewhere, I cannot resolve it by merely looking at it. Instead, “I must attack it with such instruments of analysis as I have at hand. What we call moral rules are precisely such tools of analysis” (Dewey 1891, p. 194 emphasis in the original). Acquired principles and rules are records “of past

49

Is Moral Growth Possible for Managers?

887

moral experimentation” (Fesmire 2003, p. 59), and they are indispensable for “economizing effort in foresight” (Dewey 1922, p. 244). We should thus see moral rules as generalizations that have proved their functionality in the past moral dilemmas. They are instances of concentrated moral wisdom through which we can criticize and attempt to improve our present behavior and particular ways of living. As Pappas (1997, p. 548) accurately concludes, “a moral theory can be an effort to articulate and make explicit ideals (in the form of kinds of character and ways of life) in order to make it available for criticism of present beliefs and institutions.” The moral life of an organization emerges through the constant interaction between various actors. “Men who live together inevitably make demands on one another,” as Dewey (1930, p. 318): We expect certain behavior from each other; we hold each other responsible for their acts; we enter into debates about the proper ways of behaving in our organization; we explain and justify to others our conduct in particular situations; we educate the new recruits about the proper conduct in our organizations; we signal our moral praise and blame both verbally and nonverbally; we codify certain principles into formal rules. Through this constant interacting emerges the morality of a particular organization. As Dewey observed, people live together naturally and inevitably, and the social relations they have with each other “are expressed in demands, claims, expectations” in a way where “one persons conviction of his rights becomes for other obligations” (Dewey 1998, p. 354). Out of the interplay of these claims and obligations, “there arises the general concept of Law, Duty, Moral Authority, or Right” (Dewey 1998, p. 354). Morality as a more explicit and principled set of guidelines thus emerges through the constant everyday morally loaded interaction. These principles are not objective but ought to be taken so seriously that a person allows them to guide one’s big and small decisions in life. A pragmatist is, in the words of Putnam (1990, p. 229), “staking one’s life on one’s ideals while recognizing that they are, in the nature of things, not final and may, (we hope, will) be improved on in the progress of the species.” In other words, while moral rules, principles, obligations, virtues, and expectations emerge through constant, daily interactions between human beings, they become so dominant in the worldview of most individuals that they become criteria for judging human behavior, be it their own or that of others.

Commitment to Moral Growth as the Key Moral Responsibility of a Manager I grew up a bigot, living in a land of bigots. I walked, talked, acted, thought and imagined like a bigot. I had no acquaintance with blacks, and no experience or habits to prompt me to change my bigoted habits. I enjoyed my (relatively) privileged status, although I did not see my status as privileged – I saw it as reflecting some natural order of things. My upbringing and social norms blinded me to my bigotry. At that point I was unlikely to change my racist ways, since the same conditions which shaped these habits also shaped my deliberative abilities. How could I see my flaws? (LaFollette 2001, p. 409)

888

F. Martela

When did Professor Hugh LaFollette, who grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, in the 1950s, become morally responsible for his bigotry? Was he responsible for having racist attitudes when he was five? How about when he was 15? People’s current thinking habits – their attitudes, principles, beliefs – are the results of the encounters and experiences they have had thus far in life. Growing up in a certain society leads one to adapt the norms and attitudes of that society. Should we blame a white farm-owner’s son in the early nineteenth century for accepting slavery as a normal practice? Should we blame Aristotle for not condemning the slavery that was widespread in the Athens of his time? We, as members of another era, might find much to blame about the moral standards of previous eras. But can we blame the individual for growing up in that society? If one never encounters any dissonance with one’s current moral habits, how can one come to question them? In pragmatism, the focus is not on what you were in the past but what you can be in the future. Hugh LaFollette (2001, p. 409) started to encounter dissonances with the morality he was raised up with: “I watched and listened as blacks challenged their inferior legal and moral status. Their elegant words and courageous deeds clashed with my bigoted habits.” At first he found ways to discount these clashes, but in the early 1960s, he felt he was “forced to evolve” away from his outdated moral habits. He readily acknowledged that the alternations in his external environment had been necessary for opening the door for deliberation about his racism. Without those external changes, he would likely never have abandoned his bigoted ways. But here is the key point: while he did manage to evolve morally, many others remained the same, sticking firmly to their bigoted ways. All of us necessarily start with a relatively narrow and less thought through moral outlook. “The presuppositions, prejudices, and confusions of one’s cultural inheritance set the inescapable context for value inquiries,” as Fesmire (2003, p. 12) notes. As children we simply adapt the values of our parents, friends, and surrounding society, most often without any conscious reflection. Many of our moral attitudes, habits, and likings occur automatically, without us having never consciously chosen them (Haidt 2001). This automatic adoption of the moral habits of one’s social surroundings is inevitable, and we have no possibility to choose in which society and era we are born. Moreover, this process goes on well beyond childhood. As freshman students in a business school, we eagerly adopt the values and norms of our professors and our fellow students. In reading business literature, we not only acquire facts and theories but also learn how we should think as business leaders and what we should value in order to succeed in this world. Unfortunately, mainstream business thinking typically allows only certain voices to be heard. Certain ideological positions are taken seriously; others are mocked and instantly dismissed. More often than not, becoming a business leader means adopting a certain worldview, certain values, and certain way of living. If one mainly engages with like-minded people who have gone through the same adaptation process, one’s moral outlook can become quite narrow. If one never has to justify the values one holds to others, who may hold different values, they can remain relatively undeveloped. Values might guide one’s behavior even in an undeveloped state, but one might not be able to offer any good reasons for why these values (and not others) should be adopted in the first place.

49

Is Moral Growth Possible for Managers?

889

Given this inevitable narrowness and incompleteness of one’s current moral outlook, the key responsibility of an individual – be that a manager or anybody else – is to aim to grow morally. What one cannot choose is the moral values one has grown into through one’s upbringing. What one can choose is the attitude one has toward one’s current moral outlook and principles: whether one is open to revise one’s moral principles and allow them to evolve or whether one forecloses the possibility of any progress. Dewey notes that moralists have a tendency to talk about lower and higher selves and to think that the difference between the two is due to a difference in “definite qualities and traits” (Dewey 1998, p. 353). But perhaps, along with Dewey, the real difference should be made between those that are satisfied with their current system of morality and those that commit to an attitude of moral growth and continuous revision of their moral outlook. With regard to high and low selves: The only distinction [- -] that can be drawn without reducing morals to conventionality, selfrighteous complacency, or a hopeless and harsh struggle for the unattainable, is that between the attained static, and the moving, dynamic self. (Dewey 1998, p. 353)

Hence, there are no objective moral standards providing protected, final judgments behind which the manager could hide. Instead, one is regularly exposed to various moral conflicts that one has to deal with to the best of one’s ability, utilizing one’s current, limited moral outlook. The best one can do is to aim to grow morally – that is, to transcend the limits of one’s current moral outlook. Before going to the more practical part of how one can make such moral progress happen, a remaining intellectual challenge must be met: Can we even talk about “moral progress” or “moral growth” if there are no objective moral standards that could be used to evaluate such growth?

Moral Growth Without Objectivism Let’s return to the example of Hugh LaFollette, who grew up in a land of bigots but was able to abandon his bigoted ways of thinking when encountering new experiences and perspectives. It is tempting to say that the moral habits of Hugh LaFollette not only changed but changed for the better. Accepting the equal rights of a previously oppressed group of people sounds like moral growth, if anything. But if we maintain that there are no objective moral standards – and to be consistent in our pragmatism, we must maintain that – how can we say that one moral outlook is better than another? The solution to this riddle is to acknowledge that, although there are no objective standards standing outside our moral practice, there are virtues that are internal to such practice. Morality as a practice has evolved (both biologically and culturally), to make living together possible. As anthropologists Rai and Fiske (2011, p. 60) argue, morality “emerges out of our need to regulate our social relationships.” While our biologically emerged dispositions to care about people close to us (Barclay and van Vugt 2015; and see Chudek and Henrich 2011) might have been enough to hold

890

F. Martela

together small tribes, the expanding size of human communities generated an acute need for a more functional system of behavioral regulation (Kitcher 2011, p. 68). Such a system was needed to allow us to be certain that even our encounters with unknown others would be peaceful and we could trust them to behave in expected ways. Without such trust, these larger human societies would collapse. Morality as a system and practice thus “functions to promote beneficial social cooperation” enabling communal life through “requiring behavior that is cooperative and considerate of the interests of others” and through refining and giving expression to feelings that make people promising partners in social cooperation (Wong 2006, p. 39). Morality fulfills this function by offering tools “to regulate cooperation, conflicts of interest, the division of labor and to specify the conditions under which some people have authority over others with respect to cooperative activities” (Wong 2006, p. 37). Acknowledging this function of morality already makes it possible to list a number of virtues that would make a person’s moral system better able to fulfill its function. Without going into details, we could state that – other things being equal – a moral system becomes better when it (1) is more consistent internally, (2) is based on more defensible premises about human nature, (3) is based more firmly on principles that are appealing to people beyond cultural boundaries, or (4) offers guidance that actually improves people’s chances to live together harmoniously. These, and other potential virtues of moral systems, are not “objective” attributes but stem from an understanding of the function that morality plays in human lives (Martela 2017). To invite an educative analogy, let us consider for a moment humankind’s ability to build bridges: here we could state that significant progress and growth has taken place, compared to the Middle Ages. Modern bridges are more reliable, less laborious to build, and able to transcend much greater distances than Medieval bridges. This is not “objective growth” but progress in the sense that modern bridges fulfill the functions assigned to bridges better than the old ones. Similarly, growth and progress in moral perspectives does not mean “objective” or “absolute” growth but growth in the capacity of a moral system to fulfill its function in a society and in people’s lives (Martela 2017). Growth is thus a notion that is internal to the individual, stemming from the function of morality in one’s life. As Dewey (1998, p. 322) states: “We move on from the worse and into, not just towards, the better, which is authenticated not by comparison with the foreign but in what is indigenous.”

How to Grow Morally as a Manager? Some people seem to be able to grow morally, while others remain stuck in the values, attitudes, and judgments they acquired in their youth, no matter how much the world around them has changed. What distinguishes these two groups of people from each other? Our thinking habits and meta-moral attitudes can significantly influence the chance for such growth. Certain attitudes prohibit the process of growth, while others enhance it. Dewey notes that humans are by their very nature

49

Is Moral Growth Possible for Managers?

891

inclined to stick to their current habits: “there is always a tendency to rest on our oars, to fall back on what we have already achieved. For that is the easy course. . .” (Dewey 1998, p. 353). This is why we need both a conscious commitment to growth and certain, more specific, thinking habits to make growth possible. The following paragraphs will outline a few such habits considered especially important in ensuring moral growth.

Admit the Incompleteness of Your Current Moral Outlook First, one has to admit the narrowness and incompleteness of one’s current moral outlook. As Margolis aptly notes: “The most monstrous crimes the race has ever (been judged to have) perpetrated are the work of the partisans of ‘right principles’ and privileged revelation” (Margolis 1996, p. 213). There is nothing more dangerous than a person or a group that has put the blindfolds on, completely convinced of the righteousness of their cause. Moreover, it is hard to grow morally if one is confident about the unerring correctness of one’s current moral outlook. By emphasizing the fallible nature of all human knowledge, pragmatism preaches intellectual humility: one ought to remember the particularity of one’s current moral outlook and acknowledge that, whether one wants it or not, this outlook will evolve throughout one’s life course. In the future, it is quite possible for any one of us to find fault in some of our current moral principles and attitudes. If we accept that this is likely to happen, then we are more open to see the blind spots we already have. Self-assuredness makes us blind to our blind spots and defensive when encountering them. Thus, we easily refuse to admit that we have blind spots, even when they become evident. A commitment to growth means, instead, that encountering a blind spot is a reason to celebrate, because this encounter makes it possible to do something about the discovered shortcoming and thus to grow.

Seek Opportunities to Expand Your Moral Horizon Second, one should seek out opportunities to expand one’s moral horizon through engagement with people and ideas that are opposed to one’s current beliefs. For Hugh LaFollette (2001, p. 409), for example, the process of moral growth started when he encountered the “elegant words and courageous deeds” of the members of civil rights movement. In order to become even aware of our personal convictions and attitudes, we need contradicting voices. The various viewpoints provided by people who are different from us are necessary tools that enable us to truly see and critically evaluate our own views. Corporations tend to have a certain kind of culture that attract a certain kind of people, and this homogeneity of thinking too often intensifies at the higher levels in the organizational hierarchy. To avoid the dangers of groupthink (see Aldag and Fuller 1993) and the blind spots resulting from lack of diverging perspectives, managers should consciously ensure that they engage with people from diverse backgrounds. Within the organization, this means considering

892

F. Martela

and encouraging boardroom heterogeneity. Hafsi and Turgut (2013), for example, show that boardroom diversity is positively related to corporate social performance, and Bear et al. (2010) demonstrate that a higher number of women on boards tend to be associated with better corporate social responsibility. Outside the work context, managers would benefit from interacting with other people, books, documentaries, works of art, and various media that provide a broad set of perspectives, including those that are far from their own current worldview. A manager who wants to expand their moral perspective needs to break free from the “usual circles” of like-minded fellow managers and seek out and listen to those voices that provide more critical opinions about current managerial practices and ways of conducting business.

Give Others’ Opinions and Viewpoints a Charitable Interpretation Third, when encountering a view different from one’s own, it is critical to approach such a view in the right way. When someone disagrees with us or criticizes us, we have a tendency to enter into a protective combat mode, where our key concern is to downplay the other’s arguments. We look for weaknesses in the argument, we deliberately misinterpret it to more easily dismiss it, and so forth. Unfortunately, such antagonistic approach does not help us grow morally but rather locks us even more firmly into our current belief system. In approaching a contradicting viewpoint, we should remember the first of Daniel Dennett’s (2013) so-called Rapaport’s Rules: “You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, ‘Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.’” Peter Elbow (1973) notes that, when encountering new arguments, we tend to play the “doubting game,” critically looking for errors and weaknesses. While this is important, we should put equal emphasis on playing the “believing game.” In the believing game, one intentionally aims to believe the argument. One tries “to have that experience of meaning” as regards the argument (p. 165): How should the argument be interpreted so it would be most believable and make most sense? Although it is often difficult from a psychological point of view, the principle of charitable interpretation is our best friend on the path toward learning from the arguments of others. As Elbow notes: By believing an assertion we can get farther and farther into it, see more and more things in terms of it or ‘through’ it, use it as a hypothesis to climb higher and higher to a point from which more can be seen and understood. (Elbow 1973, p. 163)

Keep Your Values and Beliefs up to Date The world around us keeps evolving. Beliefs and convictions that were seemingly well-grounded in a certain time and place might become increasingly outdated. To keep up, one needs to follow one’s time. Pay attention to the values of the next generation: How are they challenging the status quo and the convictions you grew up

49

Is Moral Growth Possible for Managers?

893

with? We tend to become protective and defensive when confronting such challenges to our dearly held values and convictions, but moral growth requires us to overcome this instinctive defensiveness: A self that was truly moral under a set of former conditions may become a sensuous, appetitive self when it is confronted with a painful need for developing new attitudes and devoting itself to new and difficult objectives. (Dewey 1998, p. 353)

Engage in Moral Imagination Dewey emphasized the role of imagination in our moral growth. Humans have a unique capability of upholding various convictions in their mind to see how the world would look if viewed through those convictions. This mental simulation allows us to momentarily abandon our current attitudes and beliefs (at least partially) and imagine how we would react, act, and think if we approached the world from a different worldview. In other words, “creatively tapping a situation’s possibilities” (Fesmire 2003, p. 65) becomes possible through imagination. Such leaps of imagination are conducive to growth, as they allow us to broaden the perspectives from which to approach various moral dilemmas. They also allow us to look at our own present convictions “from the outside,” from a point of view that we presently do not hold, which often is illuminative. In organizational contexts, moral imagination is also about the ability to understand one’s actions “from a number of different perspectives, the actualizing of new possibilities that are not context-dependent, and the instigation of the new process of evaluating those possibilities from a moral point of view” (Werhane 1999, p. 5). As Werhane (1999) argues, often managers experience moral failure because they are entrapped in a narrow economic focus, thus failing to judge their decisions from the point of view of moral standards. Consequently, moral imagination is about remembering to imagine the moral consequences of one’s actions and is thus a key part of the manager’s moral growth.

Ensure that Your Subordinates Dare to Challenge You Finally, it is important to note that being in the position of a manager places an increased burden on the individual to take personal responsibility for their moral growth. This is because the higher up you are in the hierarchy, the less others dare to challenge you. Usually, people can outsource part of their moral growth to people around them: others can tell us when we have transgressed moral boundaries, they can teach us about the currently upheld moral norms through praise and condemnation, they can make visible our blind spots and our shortcomings. But the steeper the power distance between ourselves and others, the less likely it becomes that people dare to say anything to us when we engage in morally questionable practices. To take a contemporary example, one key reason for why film producer Harvey Weinstein was able to keep on sexually harassing and abusing young actresses for decades was

894

F. Martela

that nobody dared to challenge him. He had too much power: he could make or break people’s careers. Thus, as a manager, our best insurance against a path of moral decline is to ensure that those around us dare to challenge us. A morally responsible manager must create an atmosphere where people know that they will not suffer even when they bring up inconvenient truths and opinions about their manager’s behavior. One must encourage people to speak up and be straight with one. And when somebody dares to do that, the manager must reward the behavior even if it hurts, to set an example and encourage others to similarly speak up. It might even make sense to come up with structural solutions like anonymous whistle-blowing channels that ensure the manager will hear what subordinates really think about the behavior of their superiors. Remaining calm and praising people who challenge us is psychologically difficult. But part of the process of growing up to become a manager is being able to behave according to what the role requires while overcoming one’s own primitive protective feelings. Being the top dog can easily lead to a vicious circle: the higher up an individual is positioned in the management hierarchy, the harder it is for subordinates to speak their mind in this individual’s presence. This can easily lead to the manager feeling that, instead of being frank, people are scheming behind one’s back. This anticipation of hidden threats leads the manager to become overly defensive in reaction to any challenges, thus further discouraging subordinates from speaking up. To break this self-reinforcing cycle, the higher up one is in the management hierarchy, the more one should make a conscious effort to ensure that the organization’s culture and practices, as well as one’s own behavior, encourage people across the organization to speak up.

Conclusion In a world without objective moral standards, the morality of a manager is a neverending journey. Despite its fallible and incomplete nature, the moral outlook we happen to presently hold is all we have when facing a morally loaded situation. The only remedy is to attempt to grow morally. In other words, the lack of external evaluative standards means that one is responsible for cultivating and developing one’s moral outlook to escape the blind spots, biases, and narrowness that almost inevitably plague the morally uncultivated self. Through self-cultivation, we aim to develop a moral outlook that is more capable of considering the same situation from a wider set of viewpoints, ensuring a more reflectively chosen, and more defensible, course of action. As Dewey puts it: The more numerous our habits the wider the field of possible observation and foretelling. The more flexible they are, the more refined is perception in its discrimination and the more delicate the presentation evoked by imagination. (Dewey 1922, pp. 175–176)

Making moral growth happen requires humbleness with regard to one’s current moral outlook, a curiosity toward conflicting moral outlooks, and a commitment to the goal of expanding one’s moral outlook to better accommodate a variety of

49

Is Moral Growth Possible for Managers?

895

contradicting voices, perspectives, and values. The bad news is that we never arrive at a point where our morality is foolproof and ready. The good news is that the attitude of moral cultivation makes it easier to find common ground with others and especially with people who initially disagree with us. Advertising the superiority of one’s moral position usually leads to the other participant not listening to you and thus refusing to change. Being less self-assured can lead to a more humble and dialogical path, which in the best case leads to the moral growth of both participants. By placing a moral growth-focused attitude at the forefront of managerial action, pragmatism offers one way to look at the quality of managerial morals. Irrespective of the content of a manager’s current moral commitments and actions, it is also important to examine how open they are to moral growth: Do they allow new information to change their views, and do they actively seek new perspectives and welcome views that challenge them? When criticized, or after having committed a moral transgression, do they become defensive and closed, or are they able to remain open and receptive to a possible expansion of their moral horizon? These are the questions that determine the moral growth potential of a manager. As Dewey notes, a good person is precisely the one who “is the most concerned to find openings for the newly forming or growing self” (Dewey 1998, p. 353). In other words, one becomes a morally good manager by actively looking for chances to grow morally, to cultivate one’s morality. Moral goodness is not about being good but constantly becoming good.

Cross-References ▶ How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business ▶ How Utilitarianism Can Inform Decent Managers in Plural and Culturally Diverse Contexts

References Aldag RJ, Fuller SR (1993) Beyond fiasco: a reappraisal of the groupthink phenomenon and a new model of group decision processes. Psychol Bull 113:533–552 Baert P (2003) Pragmatism, realism and hermeneutics. Found Sci 8:89–106 Barclay P, van Vugt M (2015) The evolutionary psychology of human prosociality: adaptations, byproducts, and mistakes. In: Schroeder DA, Graziano WG (eds) The Oxford handbook of prosocial behavior. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 37–60 Bear S, Rahman N, Post C (2010) The impact of board diversity and gender composition on corporate social responsibility and firm reputation. J Bus Ethics 97(2):207–221. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s10551-010-0505-2 Chudek M, Henrich J (2011) Culture–gene coevolution, norm-psychology and the emergence of human prosociality. Trends Cogn Sci 15:218–226 Clark A (2016) Surfing uncertainty: prediction, action, and the embodied mind. Oxford University Press, Oxford Dennett DC (2013) Intuition pumps and other tools for thinking. W. W. Norton, New York Dewey J (1891) Moral theory and practice. Int J Ethics 1:186–203

896

F. Martela

Dewey J (1922) Human nature and conduct. Henry Holt and Company, New York Dewey J (1930) Three independent factors in morals. In: Hickman LA, Alexander TM (eds) The essential Dewey, Volume 2: Ethics, logic, psychology. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, pp 315–320 Dewey J (1932) Ethics – revised edition. Henry Holt and Company, New York Dewey J (1938) Logic – the theory of inquiry. Henry Holt and Company, New York Dewey J (1960) The quest for certainty. Capricorn Books, New York Dewey J (1998) The essential Dewey, Volume 2: Ethics, logic, psychology. Indiana University Press, Bloomington Elbow P (1973) Writing without teachers. Oxford University Press, New York Fesmire S (2003) John Dewey and moral imagination: pragmatism in ethics. Indiana University Press, Bloomington Hafsi T, Turgut G (2013) Boardroom diversity and its effect on social performance: conceptualization and empirical evidence. J Bus Ethics 112(3):463–479. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551012-1272-z Haidt J (2001) The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychol Rev 108:814–834 Hildebrand DL (2003) Beyond realism and antirealism: John Dewey and the neopragmatists. Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville James W (1907) Pragmatism. Prometheus Books, New York Kitcher P (2011) The ethical project. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA LaFollette H (2001) Pragmatic ethics. In: LaFollette H (ed) The Blackwell guide to ethical theory. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford Margolis J (1996) Life without principles: reconciling theory and practice. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford Martela F (2015a) Pragmatism as an attitude. In: Zackariasson U (ed) Nordic studies in pragmatism 3: action, belief and inquiry – pragmatist perspectives on science, society and religion. Nordic Pragmatism Network, Helsinki, pp 187–207 Martela F (2015b) Fallible inquiry with ethical ends-in-view: a pragmatist philosophy of science for organizational research. Organ Stud 36:537–563 Martela F (2017) Moral philosophers as ethical engineers: limits of moral philosophy and a pragmatist alternative. Metaphilosophy 48:58–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12229 McGilvary EB (1939) Professor Dewey: logician – ontologician. J Philos 36:561–565 Meyer M (1908) The exact number of pragmatisms. J Philos Psychol Sci Methods 5:321–326 Pappas G (1997) Dewey’s moral theory: experience as method. Trans Charles S Peirce Soc 33:520–556 Pihlström S (2005) Pragmatic moral realism: a transcendental defense. Rodopi, Amsterdam Putnam H (1990) Realism with a human face. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Rai TS, Fiske AP (2011) Moral psychology is relationship regulation: moral motives for unity, hierarchy, equality, and proportionality. Psychol Rev 118:57–75 Rescher N (1999) Realistic pragmatism: an introduction to pragmatic philosophy. State University of New York Press, Albany Rorty R (1999) Philosophy and social hope. Penguin Books, London Werhane PH (1999) Moral imagination and management decision-making. Oxford University Press, New York Wong DB (2006) Natural moralities: a defense of pluralistic relativism. Oxford University Press, Oxford

Innovation as Ethos Moving Beyond CSR and Practical Wisdom in Innovation Ethics

50

Vincent Blok

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contrasting Responsibility in CSR with Responsibility in Innovation Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Responsible Innovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Applicability of Virtue Ethics and Practical Wisdom in Innovation Ethics: A Critical Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Innovation as Ethos: Toward an Action-Based Concept of Responsible Management of Innovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

898 899 902 904 906 907 908 908

Abstract

In this chapter, I philosophically reflect on the management of corporate responsibility in the case of innovation. I first set the scene by contrasting responsibility in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and innovation ethics, and arguing that classical conceptualizations of backward and forward looking responsibility are inappropriate in the case of innovation. Next, I introduce the concept of responsible innovation as a lens to understand the management of corporate responsibility in the case of innovation and show that the notions of virtue ethics and practical wisdom are inappropriate for understanding what is at stake in innovation ethics, because the notion of practical wisdom is at odds with the nature of innovation. I conclude this chapter by proposing a concept of action-based responsible management of corporate innovation, which will be framed in terms of innovation as ethos.

V. Blok (*) Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_19

897

898

V. Blok

Keywords

Innovation ethics · Responsible innovation · Corporate social responsibility · Corporate social performance · Action-based responsible management

Introduction An emerging topic in the field of business ethics and philosophy of management concerns innovation ethics. While the main attention of the business ethics literature focuses on the strategic and operational level of corporate social responsibility (CSR) or on the individual level of leaders, professionals, and employees, the particular context of research and development (R&D) and innovation is often not addressed (see Lee 2005 for an exception). This is surprising because innovation can, on the one hand, be seen as the key driver for the competitive advantage of companies in highly competitive markets while, on the other hand, the development of new high-tech products and services involves high risks and raises societal resistance, ranging from questions related to unforeseen risks of new product developments like fracking to long-term health impacts of new nano-technological products, and from questions regarding privacy infringements via algorithms to inter-generational justice in light of our current exhaustion of scarce earth metals by the production of consumer products. One would expect that questions regarding innovation ethics can be explored by applying the CSR literature in the context of innovation (Iatridis and Schroeder 2015). This is legitimate to the extent that CSR is concerned with the responsibility of a firm beyond their traditional objective of profit maximization, i.e., the ethical norms and social values that have to be taken into account in corporate decisionmaking processes. Extended to innovation processes, CSR is then concerned with the consideration of these ethical norms and social values in innovation practices. And yet, the extension of the domain of application of CSR to innovation practices is not self-evident and may turn out to be inappropriate. Such an extension is not selfevident, first, because CSR is part of the governance processes or supporting processes of a company, comparable with communication or human resource management (HRM), while innovation is part of the primary process of R&D-based companies like Philips and Google. Therefore, CSR is often embedded at the corporate level, for instance as a corporate CSR department and as part of the higher management structure, while innovation takes place at the level of new product development as part of the R&D and business operations. We can argue therefore that innovation ethics requiring that responsibility is no longer an issue of higher management, and becomes integral part of the business operations. Second, while the innovation process directly contributes or should contribute to the competitive advantage of the firm, CSR often contributes only indirectly, or in a derivative sense, such as safeguarding brand reputation or compliance, i.e., in parallel with other product characteristics that directly add value for customers. We can argue that innovation ethics requiring that responsibility is no longer a “side event” of

50

Innovation as Ethos

899

the company but becomes part of the core business. These two arguments show that the extension of the domain of application of CSR to innovation processes is inappropriate because CSR and innovation have different roles, functions, and locations in the structure of the firm. In this chapter, I philosophically reflect on the management of corporate responsibility in the case of innovation. I do not ask whether corporate social responsibility is possible but focus on how the moral role of managers can be employed in the particular domain of innovation. In the first section, I set the scene by contrasting responsibility in CSR with innovation ethics, and argue that classical conceptualizations of backward and forward looking responsibility are inappropriate in the case of innovation. In the second section, I introduce the concept of responsible innovation (RI) as a lens to understand the management of corporate responsibility in the case of innovation. I find that the contrasting concepts of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Corporate Social Performance (CSP) are mirrored in two approaches of RI, namely the substance normative approach and, respectively, the procedural approach, and call for the integration of the two approaches in innovation ethics. In the third section, I critically discuss the notion of virtue ethics and practical wisdom as a potentially progressive way to integrate both approaches in the responsible management of corporate innovation. It will turn out that the notion of practical wisdom is at odds with the nature of innovation and has to be rejected. In the fourth section, I propose a concept of action-based responsible management of corporate innovation, which will be framed in terms of innovation as ethos. The fifth section summarizes my conclusions.

Contrasting Responsibility in CSR with Responsibility in Innovation Ethics If we compare the notion of responsibility applied in CSR with the one at stake in innovation, we note a substantial difference. In practice, CSR is often restricted to backward looking responsibility (Pellé and Reber 2015). A company can be held responsible in case it performs an act that transgresses a pre-existing rule or norm; it breaks the law or transgresses an ethical norm. The firm is accountable in case it can be blamed for this outcome – carcinogens in paint or plastics, for instance – and liable to pay for the damage caused in case a consumer actually gets cancer due to the use of these products. This type of responsibility is called backward looking because responsibility is retrospectively assessed based on pre-existing norms and standards. A first problem with this “legalistic” account of responsibility in the context of innovation is that regulation is often not able to catch up with new innovations (Lee and Jose 2008; Owen et al. 2013; Pellé and Reber 2015). While new laws and norms are often developed as a response to past challenges, innovations concern new situations that are often not covered by existing rules and regulations. Furthermore, while rules may prevent hard impacts like death and harm, soft impacts on society or human wellbeing, such as shale gas or digitalization of health care, are often too subtle to be covered by new laws or too ambiguous because impacts are not univocally

900

V. Blok

harmful (Swierstra and te Molder 2012). Furthermore, innovations often influence the way we conceive values, norms, and responsibilities. For instance, the improvement of prenatal screening and diagnostic technologies changes the responsibility we have for children that suffer from Down syndrome or dwarfism. This example of a technomoral change (Swierstra 2017) shows that rules are not just applied on new innovations; in turn, these innovations may change or even disrupt dominant rules and values. Finally, while rules may prevent irresponsible corporate behavior in the case of a clear causal link between the individual innovator and the negative outcomes, rules are not so easily applied in the case of innovations that have many different origins and complex or uncertain impacts, and where many actors are involved (van de Poel et al. 2012). If many individuals can be held responsible, the risk is that nobody can be held responsible anymore. In other words, backward looking responsibility may be at stake in traditional CSR but is not appropriate in the context of innovation ethics. There is also a stream in the CSR literature that is more concerned with forwardlooking responsibility. It concerns the anticipation of what the company wants to achieve with its CSR policies, for instance reduced climate impact or improved livelihood of smallholder suppliers in developing countries. Instead of being held responsible, the company takes responsibility for certain outcomes and becomes aspirational. By monitoring a product’s life cycle and by measuring the long term social and environmental consequences of that product based on a set of norms (e.g., ISO 260000), CSR can proactively assess the consequences of new product innovations (Pavie et al. 2014 cf. Pellé and Reber 2015). This assessment of consequences requires additional investments in anticipatory and reflective capabilities. On the one hand, taking responsibility for one’s own actions this way requires that companies reflect on the possible consequences of corporate behavior and anticipate negative future impacts. On the other hand, a particular course of action becomes dependent on the corporate assessment of the anticipated risks or desired state, while the context of application may change over time and transform the way we assess this desired state or anticipated risks retrospectively (Grinbaum and Groves 2013). It is often argued that ideal consequentialism would require the calculability of the societal benefits of corporate actions to the happiness of all, which in turn requires optimism about the role of knowledge and rationality (Pellé and Reber 2015). However, this is practically impossible in case of complex challenges like global warming and world poverty (Blok et al. 2016). Similar difficulties occur in the case of corporate innovation, since: 1. Knowledge is always contested because many stakeholders apply different value frames and have different assessments of the risks involved. 2. Knowledge is always fallible because our understanding of ethical issues is always biased by our own interests and value frames (Blok 2014) and by our cognitive biases (Kahneman 2012). 3. Knowledge can be used as an excuse to not be held responsible (exculpatory ignorance): if one does not have (scientific) knowledge about possible consequences of innovations one cannot be held responsible (Grinbaum and Groves 2013).

50

Innovation as Ethos

901

4. Knowledge is insufficient because innovations will always have unexpected outcomes and are, in fact, unpredictable (Blok and Lemmens 2015; Ozdemir et al. 2011): they become “black boxes” that are embedded in, interact with, and are intimately interconnected with the natural environment, and this increases their autonomy and unpredictability (Nordmann 2005). In other words, forward-looking responsibility may be at stake in CSR but its effectiveness is questionable in the context of innovation, where our epistemic insufficiency becomes salient: our knowledge of the problem (e.g., climate change or world poverty) is essentially imperfect and therefore insufficient to distinguish between ultimately good and bad innovations relative to solving this problem (Blok 2018a). If consequentialism requires knowledge about future impacts of innovation, while we are confronted with our epistemic insufficiency regarding innovations and their consequences, this raises the question of what responsibility actually means in the context of innovation. Even if we argue that corporates can be held responsible for the future impacts of their innovation, given their ignorance and lack of foresight (which are part of the risk they take), the question is how ethical considerations can be made part of corporate decision-making processes regarding innovation. Risk-taking is not necessarily problematic from an entrepreneurial perspective, because risk is traditionally seen as one of the main characteristics of entrepreneurship. Knight (1921) distinguishes between insurable and uninsurable risk, and argues that corporations take an uninsurable risk by exploiting business opportunities that are highly uncertain upfront, for instance investments in new innovations without any guarantee of sufficient returns on investment. The future impact of innovations can be seen as an uninsurable risk, but this does not concern the entrepreneurial risk that can in the end lead to the success or bankruptcy of the company (Blok 2018a). The difference between entrepreneurial risks and the risks concerning the future impacts of innovations is that the uncertainty relating to entrepreneurship is not necessarily problematic – one could argue that the free market decides which entrepreneur will be successful in his or her risk assessment – whereas uncertainty relating to future impacts of innovations is in fact problematic because it may have enormous negative societal consequences and can disrupt the sociopolitical order. On the one hand, no insurance can cover the risk of negative impacts of new technologies like GMOs, nanotechnology, or synthetic biology for future generations. On the other hand, corporations will have an interest in reducing these risks by lobbying for the societal acceptance of new technologies, for governmental interventions to increase the public acceptance of innovations (one can think of GMOs), or for new rules and regulations that decrease their risk of compensation in case of a catastrophe (one can think of the US Prince Anderson Act, that limited the insurance that nuclear power industry had to pay in case of a nuclear catastrophe, cf. Dusek 2006, p. 107). The question therefore remains: what does responsibility entail in the context of innovation, and how can corporations “take” this responsibility beyond the mere acceptance of the risks involved, and beyond the false sense of security provided by the consequentialist calculation of future impacts?

902

V. Blok

Responsible Innovation It is in this context that the emerging concept of Responsible Innovation (RI) is important to consider. Emerging in the European policy context to align ethical concerns and societal interests with public investments in research and innovation (R&I), responsible innovation has developed as a governance framework in which “societal actors and innovators become mutually responsive to each other with a view to the (ethical) acceptability, sustainability and societal desirability of the innovation process and its marketable products” (von Schomberg 2013). Although the concept of RI is sometimes criticized because it lacks an explicit reflection on the notion of ethical responsibility (Pellé and Reber 2015), while its application in industry is still in its infancy (Lubberink et al. 2018), it may provide a good starting point for the development of a forward looking innovation ethics which, at the same time, acknowledges our epistemic insufficiency. In the literature on responsible innovation, two broad traditions can be distinguished. First, there is a normative substantial approach that starts with norms and values as predetermined (substantial) inputs in the innovation process in order to generate responsible outputs, i.e., products and services that serve society (von Schomberg 2013). Secondly, there is also a procedural approach, which focuses primarily on the innovation process and the way actors anticipate risks, reflect on desirable outcomes, and engage stakeholders to this end (Ruggiu 2015). The procedural approach does not proclaim predetermined normative claims regarding the output of the innovation process but focuses primarily on the responsible governance or management of the innovation process itself (Lubberink et al. 2018). According to the dominant view on the responsible innovation process, responsible management concerns four dimensions: anticipation of possible and unexpected risks; reflection on intentions and purposes; inclusion of and deliberation with societal actors; and responsiveness toward societal concerns and needs (Owen et al. 2013). While the normative substantive approach of RI is criticized because unilateral and shared values cannot be identified in case of complex societal problems like global warming (stakeholders have in fact different and often opposed value frames), the procedural approach is criticized because stakeholder inclusion and deliberation cannot replace the normative questions involved in such complex situations and cannot replace ethical considerations (Blok 2019a). Agreement among stakeholders does for instance not necessarily exclude biases regarding race, gender, etc. The dominance of the procedural approach to RI in the European context may be explained by the fact that unilateral and shared values are currently lacking. One explanation is the dominance of political scientists and sociologists in the discourse, who see responsibility as a social construction that emerges from practices and processes (cf. Pellé and Reber 2015). Beside this disciplinary explanation, however, there is also a cultural one: it is questionable whether a pluriform society like the European Union can in fact share any substantive value. Recent tensions between western and eastern European countries regarding the democratic values of Europe and the desirable attitude toward refugees clearly shows a heterogeneity of values that are difficult to align. And even if we disregard these cultural differences, the

50

Innovation as Ethos

903

earlier mentioned epistemic insufficiency regarding complex challenges like global warming makes it difficult to select a limited set of shared values. Because of this, the procedural approach to responsible innovation often leads, implicitly, to a relativistic position regarding ethics, where the normative dimension of innovation is dismissed in favor of a sociopolitical agenda. The debate between the normative substantial approach and the procedural approach in the RI literature can be compared with the debate between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Corporate Social Performance (CSP) in the business ethics literature. CSR is criticized because its operational meaning is vague, no institutional mechanisms are available to operationalize it in practice, and practical guidance is missing in how to make trade-offs between economic and social or environmental dimensions of business operations (Frederick 1994). As a response to the impracticality of CSR, CSP is developed and focuses on practical company performance (Swanson 1999). CSP can be defined as “a business organization’s configuration of principles of social responsibility, processes of social responsiveness, and policies, programs, and observable outcomes as they relate to the firm’s societal relationships” (Wood 1991, p. 693). Instead of ethical responsibility, CSP focuses on practical responsiveness, as it is substantiated in social policies that formulate corporate goals (e.g., see corporate goals formulated in terms of emission targets), in social programs that list the instruments and measures to achieve these social policy goals (e.g., ISO 14000), and in social impact as a result of the social programs that are put in place. Through this approach, CSP seems to avoid complex ethical questions about what we should do and the ethical values involved in the decision-making process, and focus on the practical question of what we can do (Wartick and Cochran 1985). However, it is doubtful that CSP is possible without any normative framework, i.e., without CSR. If there is no ethical principle, what else can in the end persuade companies to engage in CSP? Swanson (1999) convincingly showed the interdependency of theory (responsibility) and practice (responsiveness). Without the focus on corporate responsible performance, corporate social responsibility may indeed remain abstract. But without the focus on corporate social responsibility, corporate social performance may remain simplistic (Swanson 1999). In a similar vein, we can argue that, without the focus on the responsible management of the procedures and practices of value inclusion and value attunement via public engagement and inclusion and deliberation practices, the normative substantial approach of responsible innovation remains abstract. And, at the same time, without the focus on substantive normative values, the procedural approach of responsible innovation remains simplistic because we are reducing the ethical issues to a matter of governance, i.e., we are limiting the nature and scope of the “problem” – its complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity – to an effort to find operational “solutions.” What we can learn from the debate about CSR and CSP is, first of all, that responsible management of the innovation process requires both predetermined substantive normative values and procedures to enhance the social desirability, ethical acceptability, and sustainability of corporate innovations. Secondly, we can also learn that our epistemic insufficiency regarding the future impacts of innovation

904

V. Blok

does not necessarily have to lead to an ethically relativistic position dominated by a procedural approach to responsible innovation: the normative question of what we should do in corporate innovation practices is still legitimate and necessary to ask, although not necessarily easy to answer with a limited set of substantive values. Thirdly, we can learn that ethical innovation is also needed in order to develop a concept of innovation ethics that integrates the advantages of both the normative substantive approach and the procedural approach to responsible innovation.

The Applicability of Virtue Ethics and Practical Wisdom in Innovation Ethics: A Critical Assessment Moral innovation is often found in a virtue ethical approach to innovation based on practical wisdom (Grinbaum and Groves 2013). The origin of virtue ethics can be found in the work of Aristotle, who sees eudaimonia (happiness) as the content of the good life, and virtues as character traits of a person that determine the actual behaviors needed to achieve the good life (Aristotle 1990, 1105b25–30). A responsible manager of innovation should not operate in a responsible and honest manner because he or she expects punishment or reward but because he or she values integrity, honesty, or telling the truth in itself. Because it is quite difficult to exercise virtues like integrity and honesty perfectly, we need practical wisdom (phronesis) to decide how we ought to innovate in a given situation in order to achieve responsible innovation: “Phronesis is the ability to assess a given situation and choose the best and most efficient action to achieve the universal highest human good, Eudaimonia. . . A key concept in this regard is deliberation as it allows the agent to see what he or she should do when facing a practical problem” (Mejlgaard et al. 2018). While an innovator lacking practical wisdom may sometimes disregard societal concerns or ethical objections against the innovation at hand (think of a corporation in the area of social media that sells customers’ private data to the market without any ethical restrictions), practically wise innovators know which level of privacy violation is acceptable (e.g., tailor made advertisements) or harmful (e.g., fake news to manipulate voting behavior) in a given situation. In this respect, applying Aristotle (1990, 1106a25–b10), virtuous innovations are conceived as innovations in between the extremes of excess (i.e., being too sensitive to privacy violation, which destroys any possibility to develop a viable business model) and deficiency (i.e., being irresponsible with regard to privacy rules and regulations). In other words, virtue ethics is concerned with the disposition or ethos of the innovator to do the right thing, and virtue in combination with practical wisdom is the ability to actually do this right thing in a given situation (Hursthouse 1999, cf. Blok et al. 2016). Virtues are only fully developed when deployed in combination with practical wisdom (Aristotle 1990, 1144b10–20). One can think of sustainable entrepreneurs who innovate in the best interest of their clients and for the environment by doing

50

Innovation as Ethos

905

the right thing in a given situation: defending unsustainable business opportunities in favor of profitability is not virtuous, just as giving up aspirations for responsibility too easily under pressure of market considerations fails to be virtuous. The practically wise innovator has this knowledge of how to act in a given situation shaped by the ambition to succeed as innovator as well as to apply virtues like honesty and integrity. As a result, he or she is able to innovate in a “good” way, i.e., in accordance with a happy (eudaimon), good, or virtuous life. For Aristotle, the good life consists in our actual living and acting virtuously, i.e., in the actual application of virtues in a way that is practically wise (Aristotle 1990, 1098b15–20; Kraut 2014; Blok et al. 2016). The advantages of virtue ethics in conceptualizing innovation ethics are clear. Because it focuses on the personal engagement and agency of the innovator in taking action and responsibility (Blok et al. 2016), virtue ethics solves the lack of normative engagement that occurs in legalistic conceptualizations of responsibility, as well as the lack of agency in institutionalized responsibility frameworks (Pellé and Reber 2015). It is for this reason that virtue ethics and phronesis are proposed in the context of responsible innovation (Sand 2018; Mejlgaard et al. 2018). They enable a conceptualization of responsible management of innovation processes where anticipation, reflection, inclusion and deliberation, and responsiveness play a major role. However, one can also question to what extent innovation and practical wisdom can tolerate each other. If we consider the history of innovation, starting with the Greek philosophers, we note that they are negative about innovation because it can disrupt the political order and can lead to revolution (Blok 2019b; Godin 2015). Aristotle’s idea that innovation (neotherizein) concerns the introduction of change in the established political order is consistent with contemporary concepts. Indeed, innovations like geoengineering and synthetic biology can disrupt the sociopolitical order and, especially because of this risk, we expect that these innovations be managed in a responsible way. This responsible management of innovation cannot be found in phronesis. According to Aristotle, practical wisdom is precisely the antidote to innovation. To counter innovation, Aristotle’s advice is to “avoid extremes” (Aristotle 1944, pp. 1310b1–1316a10). This “principle of the middle way” (Godin 2015) by avoiding extremes is practical wisdom (phronesis) defined as finding the middle ground. In this respect, innovation as disruption of the established sociopolitical order by the introduction of something radically new (i.e., the extreme) can be seen as opposed to practical wisdom as finding the middle ground by avoiding extremes. The argument in favor of phronesis as a strategy to develop responsible management of innovation may therefore sound progressive but, instead of making innovation more responsible, it disregards the nature of innovations that call for innovation ethics. This means that, in effect, the disruptive nature of innovations like geoengineering or synthetic biology, for example, cannot be served by practical wisdom. We may even argue that innovation and practical wisdom are opposed to each other.

906

V. Blok

Innovation as Ethos: Toward an Action-Based Concept of Responsible Management of Innovation The history of innovation also provides the point of departure for a more appropriate conceptualization of innovation ethics. Innovation is not primarily connected with cognition but with action and behavior. The vocabulary around innovation in the twentieth century is constituted in discussion with “invention” and “action” (Godin 2015). While invention is understood as a mental or cognitive process (i.e., the creation of a new idea), innovation is primarily practical in nature, involving the application of a newly invented idea in a marketable product or service. It concerns the action of the introduction of something new and the result of that action, namely the application of an invention in a new marketable product. As such, innovation is understood as doing something new as opposed to the cognitive or mental process of invention. It is not just putting ideas to work but the adoption of new behaviors and new practices, such as bringing new things into being, bringing goods and services to the market, etc. This action base of innovation also means that innovator’s job is primarily managerial, i.e., to “renew the purpose, content, and structure of his process . . . He is the selective agent of change, the catalyst, the mutation selector” (Morton 1968, p. 60 cited in Godin 2015, p. 252). Innovation is therefore not cognition oriented, but action and behavior oriented (Blok et al. 2016, cf. Starbuck 1983). This insight provides the opportunity to develop an action theoretical concept of innovation ethics, where knowledge and intentions are no longer decisive but only actual responsible innovation management practices constitute an innovation ethics. The ethical significance of this action-based concept of responsible innovation consists in the ability to actively involve oneself in responsible action and behavior to improve the social desirability, ethical acceptability, and sustainability of innovations (see Lu et al. 2012 for empirical findings in this direction). In this context, ethics becomes ethos, i.e., the human attitude of the responsible innovator or of the responsible manager of the innovation process. Elsewhere I have explored such an action-based notion of innovation ethics in greater detail, and in discussion with the CSR and responsible innovation literature (Blok 2019a). In the context of this chapter, I limit myself to the proposal of four action- and behavior-oriented characteristics of the responsible ethos of the manager of innovation processes that can constitute an innovation ethics: 1. Contrary to the cognitive approach to innovation ethics, which finds its point of departure in the stakes or interests of society, we find our point of departure in the social–ethical relation of corporate innovation practices with the societal demands and needs they represent to act and behave in a responsible way. It is to these situational and singular demands and needs of the society in which the company operates, that corporate innovation practices should be responsive and that should guide our responsible management of innovation processes. The demands and needs of society are normative without necessary calling for a universal norm. The ethical dimension of innovation consists in the responsible management of corporate innovator’s responsiveness to these demands and needs.

50

Innovation as Ethos

907

2. Contrary to the cognitive approach to innovation ethics, which finds its point of departure in the best intentions to respect the situational and singular demands and needs of society, we find our point of departure in the actual performance of ethical behavior in response to the demands and needs of society. Only in the responsible management of corporate innovation’s responsiveness toward society, the moral intention of corporate innovation is real. This performance of innovation ethics does not require universal norms but calls for action, here and now, and is dependent on the circumstances in which problems emerge and can be addressed. In this respect, the singularity of the circumstances in which ethical issues in innovation processes emerge and have to be managed highlights the limitations of cognitive orientations in innovation ethics. 3. Contrary to the cognitive approach to innovation ethics, which finds its point of departure in the self-expression of the interests and value frames of actors in order to convince other stakeholders, we find our point of departure in the possibilities society provides to become critical toward our current corporate innovation practices and to become responsive to the demands and needs of society. Instead of convincing the other, it primarily enhances self-criticism and calls for the active involvement of oneself in responsible action in innovation practice (see Riivari and Lamsa 2014 for empirical findings in this direction). In a mutually responsive process, societal needs can question the legitimacy of corporate innovation practices and, at the same time, corporate innovation practices can become responsive to the demands and needs of society. 4. Contrary to the cognitive approach to innovation ethics, which finds its point of departure in corporate immunization strategies to prevent societal criticism of their innovation practices, we find our point of departure in a vulnerability strategy in which the possibility of societal criticism is enhanced. Our understanding of the downside of innovation is always limited and biased by our own interests and value frames, while our epistemic insufficiency makes it impossible to predict future impacts of innovations. The vulnerability strategy of innovation ethics consists in an active engagement with society in order to define the appropriate impact of innovation, prevent innovation lock-in and path dependency, enhance corrigibility, and accommodate plurality in innovation strategies (Blok 2019a).

Conclusion In this chapter, I raised the question of how the moral role of managers can be employed in the domain of innovation. Firstly, I contrasted responsibility in CSR and innovation ethics, and found that classical conceptualizations of backward and forward looking responsibility were inappropriate in the case of innovation. Secondly, I introduced the concept of responsible innovation as a lens for understanding the management of corporate responsibility in the case of innovation; found that the contrasting concepts of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Corporate Social Performance (CSP) are mirrored in two approaches of responsible innovation, namely the substantive normative approach and the procedural

908

V. Blok

approach; and called for the integration of the two approaches in innovation ethics. Thirdly, I critically discussed the notions of virtue ethics and practical wisdom as a potentially progressive way to integrate both approaches in the responsible management of corporate innovation. My analysis suggests that the notion of practical wisdom is at odds with the nature of innovation and has to be rejected. Fourthly, I proposed an action-based concept of responsible management of corporate innovation, as well as four characteristics of innovation as ethos of responsible innovators and managers of innovation processes. This argument provides a first conceptual step in the development of an innovation ethics that can guide innovation managers in their responsible management of corporate innovation practices. Philosophical reflection on innovation ethics is still in its infancy. In 2018, a first special issue on philosophy of innovation was published in Philosophy of Management. In the introduction of that special issue, Blok (2018b) provided a research agenda for a philosophy of innovation, which can also inform the further development of a philosophical concept of innovation ethics. It raises general philosophical questions about the connection between innovation and market economy (cf. Schlaile et al. 2018; Hühn 2018), about the societal beneficiary of innovation, and about the compatibility between responsible innovation and market economy. It also raises questions such as: to what extent can firms be held ethically responsible in case of innovation with unknown and unintended consequences (cf. Kamishima et al. 2018; Hammershoj 2018)? and what does responsibility mean in case of unknown future impacts (Blok 2018b)? The argument presented here is a first step in answering these important questions.

Cross-References ▶ A Critical Approach to Civil Society: The Case of Corporate Social Responsibility ▶ Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics ▶ Reviving Methods of Speculative Philosophy

References Aristotle (1944) Politics. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Aristotle (1990) The Nicomachean ethics, trans. H. Rackham. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Blok V (2014) Look who’s talking: responsible innovation, the paradox of dialogue and the voice of the other in communication and negotiation processes. J Responsible Innov 1(2):171–190 Blok V (2018a) Information asymmetries and the paradox of sustainable business models: toward an integrated theory of sustainable entrepreneurship. In: Idowu SO et al (eds) Sustainable business models: principles, promise and practice. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 203–226 Blok V (2018b) Philosophy of innovation: a research agenda. Philos Manag 17:1–5 Blok V (2019a) From participation to interruption: toward an ethics of stakeholder engagement, participation and partnership in CSR and responsible innovation. In: von Schomberg R, Hankins J (eds) Handbook of responsible innovation: a global resource (forthcoming). Edward Elgar, Northhampton

50

Innovation as Ethos

909

Blok V (2019b) The ontology of innovation. In: Michelfelder D, Doorn N (eds) Routledge handbook of philosophy of engineering (forthcoming). Routledge, New York Blok V, Lemmens P (2015) The emerging concept of responsible innovation: three reasons why it is questionable and calls for a radical transformation of the concept of innovation. In: Koops EJ, van den Hoven J, Romijn HA, Swierstra TE, Oosterlaken I (eds) Responsible innovation 2: concepts, approaches, and applications. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 19–35 Blok V, Gremmen B, Wesselink R (2016) Dealing with the wicked problem of sustainability: the role of individual virtuous competence. Bus Prof Ethics J 23(3):297–328 Dusek V (2006) Philosophy of technology. An introduction. Blackwell, Oxford Frederick WC (1994) The virtual reality of fact vs value: a symposium commentary. Bus Q 4:171–173 Godin B (2015) Innovation contested. The idea of innovation over the centuries. Routledge, New York Grinbaum A, Groves C (2013) What is ‘responsible’ about responsible innovation? Understanding the ethical issues. In: Owen R, Bessant J, Heintz M (eds) Responsible innovation. Managing the responsible emergence of science and innovation in society. Wiley, London, pp 119–142 Hammershoj LG (2018) Conceptualizing creativity and innovation as affective processes: Steve Jobs, Lars von Trier, and responsible innovation. Philos Manag 17(1):115–131 Hühn MP (2018) Responsible innovation: a Smithian perspective. Philos Manag 17(1):41–57 Hursthouse R (1999) On virtue ethics. Oxford University Press, Oxford Iatridis K, Schroeder D (2015) Responsible research and innovation in industry:the case for corporate responsibility tools. Springer, Dordrecht Kahneman D (2012) Thinking fast and slow. Penguin, New York Kamishima YB, Gremmen B, Akizawa H (2018) Can merging a capability approach with effectual processes help us define a permissible action range for AI robotics entrepreneurship? Philos Manag 17(1):97–113 Knight FH (1921) Risk, uncertainty, and profit. Houghton Mifflin, Boston Kraut R (2014) Aristotle’s ethics. In: Zalta EN (ed) The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy Lee E (2005) The ethics of innovation: P2p software developers and designing substantial noninfringing uses under the sony doctrine. J Bus Ethics 62(2):147–162 Lee R, Jose PD (2008) Self-interest, self-restraint and corporate responsibility for nanotechnologies: emerging dilemmas for modern managers. Tech Anal Strat Manag 20(1):113–125 Lu L, Lin BJY, Liu JS (2012) Ethics in nanotechnology: what’s being done? What’s missing? J Bus Ethics 109(4):583–598 Lubberink, R., Blok, V., Ophem, J. van, & Omta, O. (2018). Responsible innovation by social entrepreneurs: an exploratory study of values integration in innovations. J Responsible Innov (forthcoming) Mejlgaard N, Christensen MV, Strand R, Buljan I, Carrió M, Giralt M, Griessler E, Lang A, Marušić A, Revuelta G, Rodríguez G, Saladié N, Wuketich M (2018) Teaching responsible research and innovation: a phronetic perspective. Sci Eng Ethics:1–19. (in press) Morton J (1968) The innovation of innovation. IEEE Trans Eng Manag 15(2):57–65 Nordmann A (2005) Noumenal technology: reflections on the incredible tininess of nano. Techne 8(3):3–23 Owen R, Macnaghten P, Stilgoe J, Gorman M, Fisher E, Guston D (2013) A framework for responsible innovation. In: Owen R, Bessant J, Heintz M (eds) Responsible innovation. Managing the responsible emergence of science and innovation in society. Wiley, London, pp 27–50 Ozdemir V, Faraj SA, Knoppers BM (2011) Steering vaccinomics innovations with anticipatory governance and participatory foresight. OMICS: J Integr Biol 15(9):637–646 Pavie X, Scholten V, Carthy D (2014) Responsible innovation: from concept to practice. World Scientific, Singapore Pellé S, Reber B (2015) Responsible innovation in the light of moral responsibility. J Chain Netw Sci 15(2):107–117

910

V. Blok

Riivari E, Lamsa A-M (2014) Does it pay to be ethical? Examining the relationship between organisation’s ethical culture and innovativeness. J Bus Ethics 124(1):1–17 Ruggiu D (2015) Anchoring European governance: two versions of responsible research and innovation and EU fundamental rights as ‘Normative Anchor Points’. NanoEthics 9(3):217–235 Sand M (2018) The virtues and vices of innovation. Philos Manag 17:79–95 Schlaile MP, Mueller M, Schramm M, Pyka A (2018) Evolutionary economics, responsible innovation and demand: making a case for the role of consumers. Philos Manag 17(1):7–39 Starbuck WH (1983) Organizations as action generators. Am Sociol Rev 48(1):91–102 Swanson DL (1999) Toward an integrative theory of business and society: a research strategy for corporate social performance. Acad Manag Rev 24(3):506–521 Swierstra T (2017) Economic, technological, and socio-epistemological drivers behind RRI. In: Asveld L, van Dam-Mieras R, Swierstra T, Lavrijssen S, Linse K, van den Hoven J (eds) Responsible innovation 3. A European agenda? Springer, Dordrecht, pp 9–20 Swierstra T, te Molder H (2012) Risk and soft impacts. In: Roesser S (ed) Handbook of risk theory. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 1050–1066 van de Poel I, Fahlquist JN, Doorn N, Zwart S, Royakkers L (2012) The problem of many hands: climate change as an example. Sci Eng Ethics 18:49–67 von Schomberg R (2013) A vision of responsible research and innovation. In: Owen R, Bessant J, Heintz M (eds) Responsible innovation. Managing the responsible emergence of science and innovation in society. Wiley, London, pp 51–74 Wartick SL, Cochran PL (1985) The evolution of the corporate social performance model. Acad Manag Rev 10:758–769 Wood DJ (1991) Corporate social performance revisited. Acad Manag Rev 16:691–718

Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility of Organizations as Artificial Persons

51

Application David Ardagh

Contents Introductory Overview: Collective Responsibility and the Neo-Aristotelian Approach . . . . . . The Argument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Presupposition 1: A Neo-Aristotelian Application of Aristotle’s Philosophical Anthropology of Wellbeing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Presupposition 2: Analogy of Attribution, Natural Persons’ Moral Action, and Organizational Analogues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Presupposition 3: Assessing Justice Through Casuistry in Personal, Political, and Organizational Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Presupposition 4: A Revised Stakeholder Model for QPM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

912 919 920 924 930 935 937 939 939

Abstract

The argument presented in this chapter challenges three related positions: (i) that collective entities, such as organizations, do not, strictly speaking, have real existence; (ii) that organizations do not act, strictly speaking; and (iii) that, as non-agents, organizations are not responsible and so are amoral. Using the Neo-Aristotelian doctrine of analogy of attribution with regard to existence, action and goodness, with a quasi-person model of organizations, analogies are made between natural persons and artificial persons (organizations) in six respects grounding the use of an analytical procedure that assesses goals, repertoires, evaluations, acts, outcomes, and society (abbreviated as GREAOS). Organisations are not persons but act, exist, and make moral judgments in similar personal ways. In order to establish the collective ethical responsibilities of organizations D. Ardagh (*) Formerly Charles Sturt University, Newcastle, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_4

911

912

D. Ardagh

as organizations, this chapter describes the presuppositions underpinning the GREAOS procedure, presents an explanation of how its component criteria should be applied to define the ethical responsibility of an organization, and illustrates the utility of such an application for management. Keywords

Analogy of attribution · Aristotle · Artificial person · Collective responsibility · Ethical responsibility · Management · Metaethics · Organization · Quasi-person model

Introductory Overview: Collective Responsibility and the NeoAristotelian Approach Some months ago the news included an item about a particular nation boasting about its nuclear capability and another about some of the largest Internet corporations being named and shamed for tax evasion. In these reports, the news commentators rightly used moral language about states and corporations, attributing blame to them quite freely, mainly directed at their leadership groups. Yet, from the late 1970s until recently, there has been a continuous debate in applied ethics about whether collective entities can be said to be moral or immoral, with the negative side insisting that organizations, and presumably states, as in part a quasi-or macro-organization of organizations, are, strictly speaking, not really existent, non-agents, and so amoral. For a small sample, see Velasquez (1983), Ladd (1983), Danley (1999), and Miller (2002). Although they were separately argued positions, the advent of these doctrines closely followed in time the advent of the thesis that the business of business is business, set out in Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962), which is a doctrine convergent with the third amorality claim mentioned above. The 50-year-old debate over this issue should have been over years ago, because states, cities, and organizations, collectives composed of persons, while not themselves persons, clearly exist as the personal effects of persons. They can do good and wrongful acts, which can be sheeted home to their leadership group’s incumbent members and sometimes also to a lesser degree, to their subordinates. They do more powerful things, impossible for individuals alone or aggregates of these, like win wars, ball games, and market share. Their individual role incumbents come and go, while they continue. Individuals alone do not pass motions, or laws, or operate supply chains. Organizations, singly and jointly, do good and bad things through the plural intentions (Gilbert 2000) and joint actions of their CEOs and Boards, or those of other internal role incumbents, like operators (i.e., managers and workers) or enablers (e.g., investors and suppliers), in an ideally unified teleological role structure. Reference to their organizations as wholes is indispensable in defining what the relevant individuals are doing in their roles within them. Organizations and role incumbents can be said to have moral attributes like justice and fairness, by analogy, to varying degrees, depending on the flexibility, scope, and nature of the causality co-exercised by authorized incumbent agents in directing operational and enabling roles.

51

Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility. . .

913

This chapter will introduce and defend the case for organizational ethical agency, summarize four meta-ethical presuppositions supporting this case, and then defend them sequentially. The four metaethical presuppositions are (1) a teleological, dualist, Neo-Aristotelian philosophical anthropology, or theory of human nature, oriented to wellbeing (eudaimonia) or the human good; (2) the Aristotelian doctrine of analogy of attribution as applied to organizations (3) the application of a Neo-Aristotelian concept of justice featuring specified modes of freedom, equality, desert, and possibly limited need satisfaction, through group casuistry; and (4) a revised stakeholder model or theory, distinguishing internal and external stakeholders. The main suggestion emerging from, and supported by, these presuppositions is an acronym (GREAOS), describing the application of an organizational ethics based on justice. Natural persons design and cause artificial persons (e.g., organizations) to exist as effects, and act personally in running their artifacts, through cooperative role incumbents. The leadership groups in organizations, with operational staff and enablers, like investors and suppliers, direct the artificial quasi person, and thereby act and cause effects for which organizations are responsible through their role incumbents, in a different way to natural persons and in different degrees. As argued elsewhere (see Ardagh 2012, 2013, 2017), using a quasi-person model of organizations, responsibility for specific actions, composing collective organizational activities, can be sheeted back to the organization via select individual role incumbents – primarily, to leader groups as organizational representatives and, secondarily, to other internal stakeholders, like operational managers and staff, and enabling investors and suppliers. These incumbents jointly wield some degree of designated organizational role power or authority, in some respect, to some degree, relative to their role. Individual persons’ acts are necessary conditions for an organizational act, but they are simply not a sufficient condition without reference to their role, while, in role, they can act for the whole organization in some contexts. Reference to some individual’s group-created status as a role incumbent, voluntarily exercising distinctive and increased organizational role-power and authority, within a whole organized entity, and having an organizational identity, existence, and morality, is also necessary to identify or explain or assess ethically any organizational act attributed to individuals. Personal and organizational acts are not mere physical acts, like water freezing or steaming. Both are also voluntary, social, morally assessable acts. A formal joint decision procedure, like consensus or voting, is ideally used to set up and run an organizational role structure, which thereafter enables one to pick out both personal and joint organizational acts and individuals in the structure. If a leader group like a board, as quasi-intellect/will of the organization, behaves badly, so does the organization, in that way and to that degree. Both role incumbents and the whole organization are agents in different ways, with associated responsibilities. This chapter advocates the use of an acronym for ethical use of organizational authority. It is based on a quasi-person model of organizational agency (QPM). The quasi-person model, set out in the three abovementioned articles, can be used to spell out the limitations of both methodological individualism, espoused by Velasquez

914

D. Ardagh

and the other authors cited above, and those of the full corporate personhood position, espoused until recently by French (1979, 1992) and mocked by Korten (1995) and by Bakan in the movie The Corporation (2003). The imaginative projection model of corporate rationality and respect, found in Goodpaster and Matthews (1982), and the idea of organizational action being allowed or recognized in a secondary sense (De George 1996; Donaldson 1982; Donaldson and Werhane 2007) are much preferable as accounts of organizational ethics and allow for talk about corporate “conscience,” “reputation,” and “citizenship.” However, we need to build further on these preferable conceptions and ground them more explicitly in the general ethics of individual persons and in philosophical anthropology. The alternative Quasi-Personhood Model (QPM) of organization which can be provided to meet this need goes between the horns of the dilemma: an organization is nothing but an aggregate of individuals following a decision procedure to attain a goal; or an organization is a full person with such a goal and procedure. It rejects both individualistic reduction and the assumption of full personhood, of organization. It supports the last two accounts (Goodpaster and Mathews’ projection account and De George and Donaldson’s secondary meaning account), but allows for a fuller metaethical understanding of the coherence of organizational ethics, and of Business or Professional ethics as associated disciplines. It makes possible a more specific template for laying over organizational activity when assessing ethical matters. This template, labelled GREAOS (acronym to be explained shortly), helps to identify which organization and organizational power is being engaged, how, and by whom, in an organizational act. It canvasses some differences between organizational acts and outcomes for other parties not spelled out in a previous version of the acronym (Ardagh 2017). Using a version of Neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, hereafter NAVE, and Aristotle’s doctrine of analogy of attribution (as set out in his Metaphysics, 1003a33-1004b10 and in the Nicomachean Ethics, 1096a, 15–30), Ardagh (2012) argues, against the reductionist case, that organizations exist in a specifiable, determinate sense; they are good or bad and act well or badly; and the criteria for judging the worth of organized collective/corporate bodies, as artificial persons, are clear and systematically related to those of general ethics for judging natural persons. Organizational ethics is an analogical extension of Personal Ethics. The terms of the analogy are persons and organizations. Natural persons (NPs) are voluntary choosers, responsible for their ethical behavior. They exercise directing, operating, and enabling human capacities, which are vertically integrated and interdependent. Some of these capacities, like intellect and will, have characteristic formal objects of wide scope – such as “the intelligible”(for intellect) or “the desirable”(for will). These two capacities can normally be consciously flexed at will. One can think of, and wish for, a near infinity of things, more or less at will. Directing capacities, like intellect and will, are capacities with ideal objects, like knowledge and wellbeing, respectively. In the case of will, there are ingredient goods which are the ideal goals of the human constitutive wish for an indefinitely conceived wellbeing. Such goals shall from here onward be symbolized as examples of a G. Therefore, we shall say that, if a person wants a perceived good, she wants a G. NPs also have other, decreasingly flexible operating capacities of

51

Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility. . .

915

perception, sensation (the five senses), and limb mobility and enabling capacities of the body’s autonomic system, like respiration which she can, within limits, flex and some she cannot flex, e.g., digestion. Together with intellect and will, these capacities make up their personal capacity repertoires, in a three-tiered directing, operating, enabling teleological structure, R. In such a vertically integrated teleological structure of interdependent capacities at the three levels, the self, through intellect/ will, in the person’s action, directs other operations which humans share with other animals, like perception, sensation, and mobility, enabled by the body’s autonomic systems. Persons also evaluate, E, possible choices for their capacities or repertoire, using ethical decision procedures, like casuistry, in order to choose to perform good actions, A, in a particular context or domain. In their actions, good people seek good outcomes, O, and consequences for themselves and especially in moral choices for other persons and for the wider society, community, or state, S, which enables their activities. If, in a given context, all these six features are judged to be in good order and ethically acceptable, the person’s acts are probably ethical. The acronym GREAOS can be used to check whether the morally relevant features: goal, repertoire, evaluation/ethical decision, action, outcomes for self and especially other parties/persons; and impacts on society, represented by the State, as a proxy for a complex social reality, have all been found to be in good order in the NP’s action. If they are found to be so, then it is probably a successful personal ethical action. The last step in using GREAOS is to revisit the agent’s intent and motive in performing this token or instance of the action type now, in a particular context, by revisiting steps E and A. This may add a relevant factor to the description of the goal of the action type alone, or of its author/agent, R, or the foreseeability of its consequences at step O concluded at the first pass. We will call this final move the GREAOS tick. Analogues of the six features identified in a natural person’s ethical activity and the tick can also be picked out by the acronym GREAOS in organizations. These will be examined further in this chapter. Organizations are artificial, not natural, persons – but they are the effects of natural persons’ acts. As artificial persons, APs, they exist as agents of NPs and are quasi-agents in their own right. They exhibit analogues of each of these six properties, as well as others not discussed here. Organizations are quasi-selves, primarily personal effects of leadership groups, hereafter LGs, and of other authorized persons, who adopt or consent to enact a collective defining or constitutive master goal (G). Sub-goals are derived by practical reasoning and usually assigned to role incumbents by division of labor. In order to achieve sub-goals, LGs like boards design a related organizational repertoire which is, in the analogue, a role structure (R). This is something like a natural person’s repertoire, with analogues of the other features of direction, operation, and enablement, in the role structure. They engage in evaluation, or ethical collective decision-making (E) in, or alongside, other formal practical decisional procedures and authorize joint action (A) by operatives in a context, with resultant outcomes or impact on other stakeholders (O) and on the enveloping society, communities, and organizations represented in and by the state (S). One can finally canvass a particular organizational act at step A, for its performers’ intent and motive, here and now, and give it the GREAOS tick.

916

D. Ardagh

As directing quasi-minds and wills of AP, the organizational “self,” LGs like boards create lines of authority or reporting governance chains over operatives (managers and workers) and enablers (suppliers and investors). Through these authority lines, which overlay the NP’s direct intentional agent causality (Searle 1983; O’Connor 1995; Vollmer 1999), organizations can perform complex morally assessable organizational actions or activities. Both organizations and role incumbents can be responsible, in related ways, since organizations act through their incumbents. Individual role incumbents cannot act organizationally without organizations. Organizations (APs) need individual NP role incumbents. Degrees of responsibility are relative to role authority. The application of the acronym GREAOS to organizations will be outlined further in the following sections and the associated stakeholder model presented in this chapter, together with the underpinning analogy. The GREAOS criteria are used to give an account of organizational ethics. Application of the suggested acronym, GREAOS, can be used to challenge the alleged amorality of business corporations and, more generally, of organizations in business and other domains. Returning to the natural person case, for Neo-Aristotelians, and the NAVE account, what is morally right can reasonably be taken to be what tends to produce the common good and personal wellbeing. The natural, common goods of true human wellbeing are those exhibited in the ideal or best “congratulate-able” human lives, reflectively assessed on the whole and in the long run. The assessment is based on shared criteria of wellbeing which will be discussed further below in this chapter. One such criterion taken as a mark of wellbeing is enjoyment of perfected human capacity as far as possible, which involves knowing the true good, or the highest and best being or beings (whatever this turns out to be), and generally knowing the score with respect to how one measures up to this ideal, even if the individual’s own reality is bleak. Ethics seeks to articulate imperative principles, precepts, and decision procedures to guide virtuous practices like restraint and care in need-satisfaction of persons, families, and communities, balancing individual and group needs. Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and Confucian folk anthropologies, while conceptually or notionally different, also have a concept parallel to wellbeing (eudaimonia) and posit that certain capacities and attributes (such as consciousness and understanding, desire, sensation and mobility) characterize humanity, so are largely congruent at this abstract level. The concept of justice also crosses boundaries. For example, versions of the Golden Rule, formulated either positively (“Do as you would be done by”) or negatively (“Do not do what you would not want done to yourself”) appear in almost all cultures. In the Neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, justice, embodied in principles of equality, freedom, proportionality, and desert, tends to collective wellbeing. Some writers think society can be responsible under justice for enabling need satisfaction up to the threshold level of capacity operation (Nussbaum 1988). Justice is the bridging virtue of an interpersonal and intergenerational moral project or process and connotes the ideas of (i) a principle of reciprocity, such as the Golden Rule; (ii) equality of respect for fellow citizens and persons, of opportunity to satisfy needs to participate in public goods or benefits; (iii) freedom from violence

51

Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility. . .

917

and harm and freedom to pursue wellbeing; and (iv) reward for contribution and merit (Ardagh 2012). This NAVE agenda is expressed in persons and in different domains or arenas, like single or family homes; organizational offices and workplaces; semi-organized fields like markets, public, or civic spaces; or the natural wilderness – all balanced, in modern times, by the state as a political authority mediating domain boundaries for the general good. These are the contexts in which the ethical decision procedure of casuistry can be used to nominate the type of good in any given type of circumstance. The organizational domain, as one of several noted above, includes public sector bureaucracies, professional bodies, business corporations, and cooperative nonprofit entities, each with a set of differential practices, intrinsic goods, and institutions with cognitive social and moral relevance (MacIntyre 1999). Each organization will have a different set of internal and external stakeholders in several categories, as outlined below in this chapter’s discussion of the Quasi-Person Model (QPM) model. Justice pertains to ethical preferences in action regarding others and to wise apportioning or distribution of social burdens and benefits by political leadership groups. Ethical principles and precepts seek to maximize free and equal attainment by citizens of capacity enhancement, and so of wellbeing, ideally at least to threshold levels of capacity and need satisfaction. Examples are general imperatives like “Act reasonably/justly”; general principles like “Do as you would be done by”; positive injunctions to positive behavior, like “Be honest” or “Be compassionate”; more specific statements of obligation/duty, like “Pay your taxes”; or strict prohibitive rules against species of action causing harms/evils in different types of circumstance, like the primary precepts against murder, fraud, theft, and perjury. These exhortations, injunctions, obligations/duties, principles, precepts, and prohibiting rules are applied through virtuous dispositions and through the decision-making method of casuistry. Casuistry is the central method or decision procedure of teleological ethics. It is neither the hypocritical sophistry of the type pilloried by Pascal, nor legal extrapolation from precedents, nor similar to later Kantian versions of ethical decisionmaking that use the categorical imperative or universalizability test as set out in Hare (1958). In the natural person (NP) case, the relevant casuistic questions about the circumstances of the good of act types (and particular acts, such as who? what? and why?) are based on Aristotle’s Categories doctrine (1b24-2a3). They are linked to words connoting the types of being he recognizes in that work, like substance, action, passivity, relation, quality, quantity, time, place, and possession. Prime substances for him are the prime referents of being and good, entities which are in principle nameable, have characteristic independent actions and can cause change. Entities in the other categories (like action, relation, quality, etc.) are said to have being (to be) and goodness (to be good) by analogy. For example, Socrates (who?) is an independent substance, with a characteristic essence (humanity) defined by qualities (rational, animal) connoting humanity (what?) and human intentions/purposes (why?); with contingent relational qualities and properties, like color of eyes or being a husband; and with quantifiable traits, like height or weight (how much?) and who is capable of performative acts, like cutting

918

D. Ardagh

wood expertly (how?) or criticizing the authorities (action), suffering execution (passion), in Athens, in 399 BC (where? and when?). The associated casuistic interrogatives include who? with whom? and what kind of thing is acting? and in the action what type of thing is being done? (including: to what or to whom?; and, why?, including both intent and motive); how? by what means?; when?; and, where?. Aristotle addresses the moral relevance of circumstances in many places (e.g., Nicomachean Ethics II, 6, 1106b,36; III, 1,1110b24-33;V,2, 1130a24ff), and Aquinas follows (at S.T. 1-11ae,7,4;18–21), acknowledging Aristotle as his main source. In contrast to Kant’s perspective, where particularity and partiality of interest is downgraded, in NAVE, much of ethics in practice for Neo-Aristotelians is not only about “universalizability,” or about duty (be it perfect or imperfect), and not only matters subject to prohibition or requirement by rule. The circumstance elicited in answer to who? is allowed into the procedure of casuistry, and the last word goes to the particular intent of this agent here and now (the GREAOS tick). Ethics is also expressed in other moral modalities, like permission, recommendation, enjoinder, heroism or sainthood, or supererogation (“above and beyond duty”). An act can also be condemned as an ad hoc evil, i.e., a particular case of a type of evil in a type of circumstance, but totally unique and not covered by rule, or as an evil too egregiously disgusting, or too innovative, or complex in conception, to be prohibited beforehand, or even to be treated as taboo. One must often judge here ex post, on the basis of moral intuition, and casuistry, not by an antecedent rule. This is partly due to the variability of modality (must, ought, may, etc.) of the imperative relative to circumstances and to the range of moral modalities available (Chisholm 1968; Urmson 1968; Jensen and Toulmin 1988). Virtue builds discernment as one descends from the abstract principle to particular cases (Ardagh 1999, 2012). For such an application to particulars, the ethical decision procedure of casuistry adopted in NAVE, based on an overt teleological philosophical anthropology, works roughly as follows. First, identify what the type of act under moral scrutiny is, by reference to its object and end result; (2) establish the prima facie tendency of the end (why?) and object (what?) of this type of act to human wellbeing enhancement. This abstract state will be good, bad, or indifferent); then (3) add answers gleaned from canvassing the other circumstance types (like who, to whom, with whom, how, how much, when, and where) to the description, and repeat the question of tendency to wellbeing in this context, checking for any relevant moral notion, general principle, precept, or law relevant to the wellbeing of others and the wider community; and finally (4) identify the intent and motive of this agent in doing this token act in this particular act/circumstance, here and now, adding any ulterior motives or any extra circumstances in the agent’s mind or in the situation (see Aquinas, S.T. 1a -11ae 18–21; Porter 1995; Ardagh 1999, 2019). In the case of an organization, as will be shown below using GREAOS, this casuistic procedure can be jointly conducted by the LG or Board at an organizational meeting, and if the organization’s directing leadership within the role structure is morally inadequate and non-existent, or its design is mishandled, the organization can be ethically at fault. More often, in immoral cases, the potential organizational

51

Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility. . .

919

structure and procedure for incumbents to evaluate organizational acts is there, but is negligently operated by someone at director level with authority or by an answerable incumbent operational manager, in the organizational analogue of the causal role structure present in human personal capacities, to be set out below under Presupposition 1; or there is negligence by an enabler, like a supplier or investor. Someone in a leadership group role or operating staff or enablers usually knows that harm is being done to someone or something and that this harm could be averted, but does nothing (May 1987). This concludes the introduction of the general claim that organizations can do right or wrong acts.

The Argument Much has been presupposed above in claiming the reality of organizational agency and describing this quasi-person model (QPM) of organizational moral agency, so I will summarize the supporting presuppositions as follows: Presupposition 1: A Neo-Aristotelian philosophical anthropology or folk anthropology of capacities, with its notion of a common human species-wellbeing, eudaimonia, sought together as an ultimate yet indefinite end by collective individuals, is defensible. This doctrine requires seeing humans as possessing and developing a set of hierarchically ordered capacities of natural individual persons, characterized by the description: a teleological, interactionism of capacities. It employs the notion of a teleological structure of mutually dependent human capacities, directed by a self with intellect and will, operating its flexible sensory and mobility animal capacities, and enabled by its inflexible physical capacities like digestion or circulation. Cooperative action between persons is also required for satisfaction of the human needs of shared capacities. Presupposition 2: Analogy of attribution, according to the Neo-Aristotelian doctrine, allows the extrapolation from causal relations between capacities within natural persons to causal and authority relations between role incumbents in artificial persons or organizations as effects. It also allows the use of the language of organizational existence, goodness, causes, communication, and rule (or authority) to describe organizational relations. The analogues of the six “personal” features of natural persons’ ethical acts are contained in the organizational ethics acronym GREAOS, which should function as an ethics analogue of the POLC acronym (for planning, organizing, leading, and controlling) used in general management. Presupposition 3: A conception of justice as conceived in NAVE is applied. QPM provides, via the same analogy of attribution doctrine, a justification for making a conceptual and logical connection between justice (in a virtue ethics approach to personal ethics) and the ascription of political justice to cities and states. Organizations and states are just if they pursue the common good, and the idea of justice (through specific forms of equality, freedom, desert, need-satisfaction), in the context of collective groups of organized agents. The domain-relative feature of organizations, such as the market and the corporation in the case of business, is rendered more intelligible by reference to the goal of the organization (i.e., the G in

920

D. Ardagh

GRAEOS) and the other screens provided under outcomes (O) for stakeholders and others and by society as represented in the state (S). Hence, casuistry in the service of the goods making up wellbeing is the heart of organizational ethics just as much as it is the heart of personal ethics. Presupposition 4: A revised stakeholder model based on QPM is required for identifying types of agency and vulnerability as well as degrees of organizational and role incumbent responsibility on the basis of degrees of architectonic causal and authorized activity. It suggests a need for the voices of both operator (manager and worker) and enabler (investor and supplier) in governance and is set out below. Let us now discuss and defend these four presuppositions in turn.

Presupposition 1: A Neo-Aristotelian Application of Aristotle’s Philosophical Anthropology of Wellbeing The following sketch is loosely based on Aristotle’s De Anima and on Aquinas’s sources for his systematic reconstruction and development of it, in Summa Theologica Part 1, Questions 75–89, and Pars Prima Secundae, Questions 1–22, 50–81, and 90–100. A fuller case for their interactionism is set out in Chaps. 2–6 of The Natural Law Tradition and Belief (Ardagh 2019). Neo-Aristotelian philosophical anthropology gives a pre-scientific, folk anthropology or intuitive account of human persons’ nature and wellbeing in terms of the set of human capacities, their characteristic optimal objects and perfecting ends, and their enhancing dispositions/ virtues as being at three levels, in an interactive hierarchy of powers. This sketch is not offered by Neo-Aristotelians as an explanation but as a description of the human phenomenon, the human explanandum, for social and natural science. One might say it is an intuitive folk anthropology to be explained. Aristotle’s teleological interactionism in philosophical anthropology presupposes the idea of an architectonic structure or relation, which is intuitive but hard to describe. It exists allegedly between listed human capacities, each with characteristic, ideal, and specifying objects and goods. In architectonic relations (which also obtain between practices), one directing entity (x) is the final cause (telos) or goal of another (y) in some respect (R) in some order of consideration (O). For example, sailing by a boat operator is the final cause of the practice of rudder building with respect to its purpose and of the choice of materials in respect of boat speed or steering, in the order of efficient causality. In the order of material causality, the material of helms and rudders is a respect in which boat helms and rudders are architectonic to steering and sailing in that order of consideration. Aristotle cites navigators and helmsmen, architects, and builders to illustrate the architectonic relation. Examples from other contexts have been suggested in Polanyi’s The Study of Man (1959) and The Tacit Dimension (1968) and in Smart’s Philosophers and Religious Truth (1958). The architectonic paradigm is present in the relation of sound physics to phonetics; phonetics to grammar; grammar to semantics; and semantics to human purposes, such as successful assertions of meaningful truth or, ultimately, the filling of human cognitive needs. In each case, the first-named entity

51

Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility. . .

921

is “for the sake of” the second, as its formal and final cause; and the second is architectonic to the first in most respects, but it is also a necessary material enabler of the form and end of the first architectonic entity in that material respect. NAVE uses this finality relation, exemplified in answering children’s relentless why questions, to offer a description of (1) the directing cognitive/affective capacities of intellect and will, memory, and imagination; (2) the operating perceptual, sensory, and limb-using, mobile capacities; and (3) the enabling capacities of the vegetative/autonomic system, like respiration and digestion, each with different levels of flexibility at will and characteristic needs and need-satisfiers. For example, for intellect/cognition, intelligibility is the necessary object, curiosity is the inclination, and truth is the optimal need-satisfier, with wisdom/knowledge as its virtue/ perfection, and its key norm is that of noncontradiction: namely, it is impossible that a proposition and its denial to be true at the same time and in the same respect, provided the propositional content terms are determinate. Privileging intellect/will and their perfecting ends of truth and good as “higher” architectonic powers thus over other capacities in the formal, final, and efficient causal spheres, Aristotle and Aquinas were, in modern terms, cognitivists and epistemological realists. In medieval times, the ancient skeptical enquiry, then largely based on Zeno’s critiques of granular concepts of motion, which Aristotle largely sidestepped via his act/potency/disposition doctrine, was revived and renewed on a different basis. In the medieval period, a debate took place between Al Gazali, Nicholas of Autrecourt, and Peter Damian on one side and Avicenna, Maimonides, and Aquinas on the other, on whether truth, intelligibility, and knowledge “ruled” imagination. In other words, the controversy was on whether anything imaginable is possible (the maxim of admissibility) and if limits to the imaginable (logically possible) could be set by the intellect via the principle of noncontradiction. Neo-Aristotelian said, and still say, that truth ultimately rules conceivability and “imagine-ability.” Some imaginable things can be shown to be nonexistent and unreal by combining logic and natural science. Convergent with the above Neo-Aristotelian account, Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and later Einstein establish mathematical physics as a basically realist position in science – namely, that some theoretic constructs successfully predict and explain physical phenomena. Modern speech act theory (Searle 1983) accepts this realism, accepts intentional causality, but treats the principle of noncontradiction as more of an ideal or established pragmatic notion of true determinate assertions than a metaphysical truth. It tones down the idea that the assertive theoretical intellect has the last word over imagination in truth matters, but still views the principles of noncontradiction, causality, and mathematical-physical laws as truths, shown by their successfully meeting our collective social needs and interests in science. It drops the extreme realist view that they are directly “read off the world” by metaphysical insight, but still sees mind as capable of judging the truth regarding the success of speech acts by reference to their intentional causality and their “fit” to the world in various directions (word to world; world to word). Concept formation, sentence construction, memory, and imagination are constitutive intellectual capacities, applied in community, with complex interactions with

922

D. Ardagh

human operational and autonomic powers. Language and community are social constructs, seen as inseparable, as modern communitarians like Macintyre (1999) and Taylor (1989) claim. Through them we know the truth (intellect) and desire the good (will), e.g., that such things as exercise, mobility and food perfect the body’s autonomic system. In summary, at the top of a hierarchy of capacities, intellect, and will, through a community’s language, direct other human capacities and are the most flexible. Since their scope is being, or the conceivable, for intellect; and the conceivably desirable, for will, they can range over a near-infinity of objects in space and time. The principle of noncontradiction sets limits to the realizable, limiting even the imaginable. Second-level animal operational powers of perception, sensation, and movement are also quasi-infinite but less flexible in that, for humans, such things as “the visible” and “the audible” are more limited in scope than the intelligible/ desirable/imaginable, and mobility develops and declines with age. The enabling autonomic, vegetative powers of digestion, respiration, or circulation are either only slightly flexible or inflexible. This repertoire of capacities embodies an architectonic (hierarchical) teleological relation within a specific capacity set. Let us call this hierarchical directing, operating, and enabling structure of human capacities, exercisable in a normative context, the human DOE structure. This architectonic status granted to intellect/truth, will/goodness, and “the true good” has implications for ethics. Consider the truth about the common good and wellbeing studied in ethics. Truth about wellbeing is an ultimate end, not for the sake of the words, sounds, and meanings of the words expressing it; rather, words are for the sake of truth about human need-satisfaction and wellbeing attainment. As the studies of the enabling physical and syntactic substrate of language are ruled by those of the semantic, psychological, practical, and contextual domains, the sub-disciplines of grammar and syntax cannot fully or independently comprehend a “higher” directing and operational capacity or be its sovereign. However, without material sounds and words, and syntax, thought is unexpressed, and speech and reading are impossible. So, in a way, although human acts and ends are for the sake of the master-end of wellbeing, eudaimonia, they must be embodied in concrete ethical actions as material causes of wellbeing. Words without deeds are often inadequate in ethics. This is an example of architectonic structures present in voluntary human acts. According to interactionism of the Neo-Aristotelian type, the enabling body is operated by the directing intellectual soul or self. Interactionism is expounded and defended in Chisholm (1991), Swinburne (1993), Yandell (1993), Gocke (2012), Goetz and Taliaferro (2011), Haldane (2010), and Ardagh (2019). Aristotle describes, and Aquinas codifies formally, the immanent quasiarchitectonic relations between capacities, wishes, and desires; practical reasoning and deliberation about means; and resulting choice and executed action. These are set out by Thomist followers like Haldane (2010), Stump (1998), and Porter (1995). The essay Being and Goodness by Kretzmann and Stump, in MacDonald (1991), is an accessible introductory account of this teleological metaethics. Contributors to Gocke (2012) also largely support this basic conception. As the human capacities are architectonically related in this top-down but still interdependent way, at the above

51

Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility. . .

923

three levels (directive, operational, and enabling), so a similar three-level structure can be found or designed into organizations and used in extrapolating from natural persons to artificial quasi-persons and organizational structures. In Neo-Aristotelian philosophical anthropology and ethics, general ethics is concerned with identifying practices that facilitate a good human life (wellbeing) for any and all persons, as well as the rationale for engaging in these practices. In NAVE, the constitutive or formal goal of the will as a human capacity is human wellbeing (eudaimonia). This is an indefinite but significant constitutive goal of humans as natural persons with differential natural human capacities – a master goal, which I will label “Ha.” It is the universal human object of (at least) idle wish, unless interference occurs. The sense of this eudaimonia or happiness “in the common notion” is a state of indefinite wellbeing, a sufficient good of one’s nature excluding evil as far as possible. Taken with the list of capacities, it implies some of the ingredient ends or goals of happiness or wellbeing in sense Ha. A good of this kind meets the following criteria: (i) Engages the “higher” rational, intellectual/voluntary capacities (ii) Engages those capacities assimilating the highest or best goods (iii) Is an intrinsic or ultimate good/end, wanted for its own sake, not merely as instrumental to other goods (iv) Is perfect or complete; promotes cumulative immanent or inner self-development/enhancement/perfection (v) Lasts for a while or as long as practicable (vi) Preserves self-sufficiency and independence (vii) Is enjoyed at leisure (viii) Promotes freedom from evils of pain, harm, ignorance, and malice We are indebted for these marks of wellbeing to Aristotle and for their collection and for their referencing from across the whole Aristotelian corpus to Aquinas (ST Ia-IIae, Questions 1–5; and especially Part II–IIae, Question 180 ff). We might also include inner peace or serenity. Let us label this set of marks (from i to viii) as Hm. These marks are the metaethical heart of the whole system and all versions of NAVE, theist and secular. Their reference or denotation varies partly with the ontology and metaphysics of the user. Using these criteria in Hm in the analysis of indefinite wellbeing (Ha), goods attainable by capacities with perfecting dispositions (virtues) can be put on a list as specific ingredient ends of wellbeing, and the result is the specification of the analysis, which can be labeled Hs (Austin 1967; Williams 1962). Goods meeting these criteria, Hm, go onto the human goods “ingredients” list or specification. Any particular ends, or goods Hi, can then be canvassed and contingently chosen as a practical reasonable means to Ha, if they appear on the Hs list and do not violate other ethical principles or precepts. If G is a particular end or goal meeting Hi, it is abstractly prima facie morally permissible but further appended types of circumstance may show it falls under a moral precept, and so the claim of G to permissible moral status may be defeated.

924

D. Ardagh

Presupposition 2: Analogy of Attribution, Natural Persons’ Moral Action, and Organizational Analogues Space constraints prevent setting out the Aristotelian analogy of attribution doctrine in full. However, a sketch for the purposes of applying analogy of attribution to natural persons and artificial organizations follows. Basically, the idea is that a property like “health” can be attributed primarily to an object or state and also to its causes, effects, symptoms, and signs – in different but analogous senses. Health is primarily a bodily state. Healthy medicine, complexion, urine, and exercise are “healthy” in different, but related, ways. They are not themselves in good health or in a healthy state. Yet the healthy medicine inherently has causally effective health-making properties, and it is not healthy just metaphorically. (This is set out in his Metaphysics 1003a33-1004b10.) One can also apply a term like “exists/being” or “good,” primarily attributed to an individualized prime substance like Socrates, who can act independently with an internal principle of motion, by analogy, to any aspect of Socrates, any one picked out in the Categories (listed at 1b 24-2a10) including relations, actions, passions, quantities, and qualities of Socrates as a prime substance (Nicomachean Ethics 1096a, 15–30). These actions, qualities, and relations too exist and can be good or bad, but not as independent substances which can bring about change. The two passages combined show that, in the case of an individualized quality like the state of “health” of Socrates’ body, “healthy” can be said of effects, causes, signs, and symptoms of health, in an analogous sense, not entailing presence of primary existence of health in the paradigm case in the analogue itself. Being or existence is equivocal by reference to the paradigm case of substance, and the doctrine of analogy of attribution applies to other being(s). This means that individual first substances, like humans, which have self-movement and instantiate types or kinds, are treated as paradigm cases of an existent, and organizations and states are not existents in this same technical sense. But they, and most other things, still exist, have relations, and act well or badly. Human actions, qualities, and relations of substances and their causes do exist in the analogical sense. There is a continuum of other “existents,” at the low end of which are imaginary and fictional entities, anything we can talk about, and at the other any entities admitted into the paradigm class of observable “first substance,” like Socrates, and necessary beings if any. In between are numbers, thoughts, and statements; vaguely conceived objects; and organizations. The contemporary debates between physicalists and dualists, methodological individualists and collectivists, or atheists and theists turn out to be largely about what exists or how we should use the term “existence,” given its equivocal connotation. This realization of the extent to which linguistic stipulation and conventional decision about the criteria/meaning of existence determine our “reality” and “truth” should take the heat out of these three polarizations, with space opened for the rationality of discourse, e.g., about in what sense or way nanoparticles exist, but not as first substances; how organizations exist and act well or badly, but not wholly independent of their role incumbents; or how

51

Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility. . .

925

the supernatural exists as an exploration of the limits of the natural, not as a warrant for its derisive dismissal as belonging with discourse about witches. Even fictional archetypes and characters have identities/existence, some enduring for centuries – think of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But they fail the test for substances and for full “determinability” of their identity with respect to whether an attribution of any property not mentioned in Shakespeare’s text has truth value. Historical persons and whole numbers have such means of determination, but numbers are not felt or observed, do not act, or change, another type of existence. Theological entities have identities which permit arguments for or against their being substances, but are not observable. Analogy of attribution allows a rational discussion of what can be attributed to a natural entity as a cause from its effects and to a supernatural entity from its natural effects if it is allowed as a cause. Analogy permits one to recognize that there are modes of existence other than prime substances, like that of organizations. Churches and states can act, well or badly, and be assessed in ethics and law. The concept of human wellbeing and what is good for humans is the univocal paradigm from which quasi-personal, or analogical, uses of wellbeing and good, including its application to organizations as effects or signs of persons, are derived. This doctrine is used here to claim that organizations, as effects of persons, really exist and have properties which are analogues of a natural person’s qualities, in particular the six qualities, acts, and relations highlighted in the proposed acronym GREAOS, and so organizations are personal in these six specified ways/senses. In short, organizations can exist and be good, but in different ways than natural persons exist and are good. Qualities, acts, and relations of substances can exist and be good in this notmerely-metaphorical but transferred sense. We can apply terms like exist, act, good, or healthy with paradigm application to natural persons, in analogous senses, to artificial organizational persons. Casuistry itself treats actions as entities or beings with qualities and relations, and surrounding circumstances (literally stand around, circum stare), but not as Aristotelian independent first or prime substances. The latter are defined as entities that can independently perform acts themselves. Acts are performed by, and are predicable of, substances but are not themselves substances. Corresponding to natural capacity or repertoire in individuals, considered as embodying a personal DOE capacity structure, any organizational role structure is an artifact of individual persons, acting collectively, under Board of Directors or other leadership group direction as quasi-mind and will, identifying and authorizing group incumbents in architectonic directing roles to act on behalf of the organization at “self”-directing, operational management, or enabling levels. In a similar way that in natural persons the mind/will of the self causally directs operational capacities of sensation and movement, and (indirectly) the autonomic capacities, the organizational LG, as quasi-mind/will, directs or rules by authority, not by physical control. In natural persons, NPs, “rule” of the will over the limbs, in an analogical sense, and the selves are literal; in organizations, rule is literal and “selves” are analogical. In effect, by analogy of attribution, the organization is personal in virtue of the Board or equivalent leadership group having parallel caused and authorized directing, operational, and enabling roles, without being a natural person – much as medicine

926

D. Ardagh

or exercise or complexion is healthy. There is no mystery about organizational existence, agency, or morality. Applying the acronym first to a natural individual person’s act, we obtain: G

R

E

A

O

S

In an ethical act of a real natural person (the paradigm case of persons), in the mind of the person at some level of abstraction, there will be a wish for wellbeing and a concept of an at least “possibly permissible” goal or good (G), chosen from the list of wellbeing ingredients (Hs) constructed using the marks of wellbeing (Hm), as previously explicated, and sub-goals as means to such a good. The act will be chosen in the exercise of dispositions or virtues of a capacity or repertoire (R), as means to G, in a structure “governed” by intellect/reason and will/choice, in the sense of will/choice being intentionally caused by the dispositions/virtues as directing powers of the self. The choice to act is made by intellect and will through an act of conscience after use of an evaluative procedure or ethical decision procedure/ethical deliberation (E), using general principles like act rationally, moral principles like the Golden Rule, primary and secondary moral precepts, a notion of justice, and the method of casuistry. The will of the person will issue a direction through an executed (overt) act (A) expressing the choice at E, with a result. It receives feedback from the act, to verify if it is successful, and ethical, and this whole activity can be seen as an act of conscience. The resultant act will have outcomes and overt consequence for the agent and also, in most cases, for any others impacted and will have consequences that may be foreseen or not, intended or not, and welcome or not. The act will be performed within a society, community, and state (S), and its consequences for the community and state will follow the action’s immediate result.

We finally revisit the G (end) and A (object) steps to complete the assessment of the object and end of the agent, in performing the action, and give the act the GREAOS tick. The fit of GREAOS, as a potential tool for assessing personal and organizational acts to the steps of casuistry for assessing natural persons’ moral action, is loose but significant. The constitutive or species goal of a natural person is wellbeing, G, and some of its sub-ingredients, G(i-Gn). These will be sought in actions with objects and ends of some type, with a description and implied end result like “cooking a meal for supper” (what? and why?). The R step canvasses the means to the action’s object and end (what? and why?) in terms of exercise of repertoire, thought of as a means (how?). These two early abstract steps, G and R, are then further specified, when we canvass who?, how much?, when?, where?, and with/to whom?, at casuistry step 3. Steps E and A will presuppose the crucial step of assessing the tendency of the “act-circumstance type” against the criteria of wellbeing at the third step of casuistry which was set out above. Answers to O and S will presuppose those to E

51

Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility. . .

927

and A, and the last step 4 of casuistry concerning the agent’s actual intention in acting returns us to G and R again for an ultimate judgment. The third-party judgment can be either on the intended or ex post on the executed act. Following this analogical strategy, these criteria for moral natural person acts, applied to organizations, yield the following result. The organizational artificial person can be said to have a quasi-mind and will, memory (history and records), and imagination (vision): more specifically, a conscience (ethics committee) and commitment in mission and goals to be a good quasi-citizen. Corresponding to bodily “feedback,” operators and enablers, as internal and external stakeholders (like workers and, respectively, investors), should have a “voice” in organizational decisions, as they do in coops like Mondragon. As a natural person has natural and developed capacities/virtues, and causes analogues of such virtues in artificial persons such as organizations, the latter (though not persons) are quasi-persons and personal. They can have defining or constitutive goals and sub-goals; a role repertoire embodied in incumbents; evaluate using ethical procedures; act; canvass outcomes and impact on others; and observe community and state norms. Using GREAOS as a checklist of morally relevant features, one can pass moral judgment on organizations. The nub of the argument is that collective entities like corporations are artificial quasi-persons with six (or more) personal features in common with natural persons – as summarized in the acronym “GREAOS.” The acronym can be applied to cases such as the Exxon Valdez disaster, for example (see Ardagh 2011), which will be revisited below. It is also claimed but not argued here that the acronym can be applied to public sector organizations and even to states. The QPM model leads to the possibility of an acronym for organizational ethics in any sector. In the procedure of ethics reasoning and assessment, GREAOS corresponds with POLC in the prudential sphere. GREAOS suggests canvassing the six reasoning and assessment steps with associated questions about an organization’s ethics: G: What are the identifying/constitutive goals and sub-goals of the organizational entity quasi-person or “self,” the artificial person, in general and in this case? Do they tend to advance human wellbeing? Are they prima facie morally permissible? Nothing corresponds to the inescapable but indefinite wish for wellbeing in natural persons in the organizational analogue itself. Constitutive organizational goals are much more specific, but the leadership can pose the question and adopt ingredients of natural persons’ wellbeing that meet Hm criteria and form intentions, choose, and issue authorizing “self-commands” as natural persons can. Contingent sub-goals will nominate types of action that are assessable in terms of their tendency to organizational as well as human wellbeing. An artificial person’s wellbeing will be narrower than that of a natural person. R: What is the organization’s repertoire expressed in the authorized role structure designed by the leadership group as quasi-intellect, and what is its will for attaining the goal G through direction/decision/authority? Is it effectively and responsibly constructed? Does it respect the reality that voluntary responsive action and recognition of lines of authority in artificial persons replaces what Aristotle calls the

928

D. Ardagh

despotic causal linkage between naturally developed capacities in natural persons. Roles correspond to repertoire of capacities, but there is no direct flexing of capacities in organizations. We can still ask: Are incumbents acting in accord welldesigned roles, and are they acting ethically? E: What evaluative procedure or ethical decision methods with respect to justice are employed by the leadership group in forming its intent and planning? Is there prior assessment of possible post-execution fallout? Group casuistry is not much different from individual casuistry. It will require use of the same questioning steps of casuistry as exemplified in the first section of this chapter for individual and an analysis of justice in terms of reciprocity, freedom, equality, desert, and need-satisfaction of the sort set out in the Introduction to this chapter, as well as in Ardagh (2012).The foreseeable results and possible consequences for agents in category O and in society at large, represented in part by the state, (S) must be comprehended in forming the organizational intention at step E. A: What organizational act was, or should have been, performed, by or with whom, to or on whom? Does the verification of successful completion include identifying the internal stakeholders and reporting of what the results of the act were? Step A involves checking the action decided upon to see if the quasi-self, the organization, does, in fact, really know what it has done or is doing to bring about the means to G? This intended act is the organizational act, decided upon under E, as executed in reality by different incumbents, in the DOE structure. In the stakeholder model set out in Fig. 1 below, these incumbents are the internal stakeholders. There are infinitely many ways of getting this cooperative ethical act wrong and fewer options for getting it right. The goal in the circumstances has to be achieved using practical reasoning by agents at all three levels in the DOE structure, following Board direction conscientiously. Minimally, no moral law is broken. The impact on external stakeholders like end users (customers, clients, patients) may be swift enough to be included here as the result of act A – but may not show up immediately. O: Step O involves checking for outcome or impact on other parties in the context or practice, especially external stakeholders on whom immediate results are falling. What is the impact on external stakeholders including end users, competitors, co-professionals (or co-providing government agencies), and local communities? Were the interests of end-users the main motive of the organizational act? All these parties are partly passive to the organizational act, yet end users are crucially relevant to the ethics of forming the organizational intention in a plan of action. Their good and their needs architectonically set the standard for quality of product or service. If their needs are not met, the organization and its act at A fail essentially. These external stakeholders figure as end users with their own ends in the description of the corporate end in intention, but they are not agents of the organization. Hence, in assessing the ethics of the organizational act, they figure only in the questions: On(to) whom does the act result impact, and how? And with whom does the organization interface? Are they satisfied with artificial persons’ service or product? This step can only be partly anticipated, but it can be taken after the

51

Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility. . .

929

4 State Government and wider society, community of the state 4. Remote

3 Other organizations and agents 2. Immediate

2 Endusers: Customers; Clients; Consumers

1

The Organizational Artificial

Quasi-Person, (a) Directors: b) Operational Managers/Staff c) Enabling suppliers /investors.

1. Internal

Fig. 1 Stakeholder model associated with GREAOS

occurrence of A. It will require recognition of domain or sector differences and correlative norms (if this has not yet emerged at Steps E and A). S: With what results and consequences for relations with the wider society, community, or state was step A taken? The main difference here is the wider scope of the action that can be taken, compared to the personal case. Step S canvasses the relation of the action of the organization to the wider society (community) and the state. The good of the state, qua guardian of the society or community and the common good, should in part set the legal standards against which to measure the ethics of the overt organizational act, including those of state organizational agencies. The main elements to check here are the concept of social and political justice and the law governing the domain and sector. Governments’ concern should be need-satisfaction and retributive, commercial, and distributive justice. They have authority to grant concessions to, and supervise, other parties. In the public sector organization, the defining organizational goal (at step G) is nearly always a public good, such as health, welfare, education, or security. But a government bureaucracy still has to comply with state law, respect separation of powers, facilitate democratic representation, and avoid corruption (e.g., by minimizing conflicts of interest). It may be tempted, for example, to use immoral means of torture to further security. Practitioners in different sectors should have differentiating concessions and privileges (e.g., a right to arrest, bear arms, confidentiality privileges, and/or bodily examination) but in no case contradicting moral precepts.

930

D. Ardagh

The return to G and A in the final step of casuistry to check the intent and motive of the incumbents in acting on the act type in the circumstances described at step A earlier completes the ethical assessment of the organizational action. A natural orientation to wellbeing cannot be located in the artificial person itself, but only in its leadership group, staff, and enablers; an artificial person’s constitutive goal is narrower than that of a natural person. Natural but developed capacities are now replaced with developed roles. In the case of a natural person, A is to O as result is to consequence or outcome: results are what must have taken place for the act to have occurred, and consequences are the contingent outcome. In the act of opening the window, the result is that the window is open, and the consequence may be that the room is cooled. Organizational acts like issuing driving licenses have the result that the end user has a license and legally can drive, but issuing the license does not entail the outcome of driving. There is a different and greater time gap between act and outcome here than for natural persons. These differences are not sufficient to warrant denial of organizational existence, agency, or morality. The claim is still defensible that a present, past, or envisaged organizational policy enactment for the constitutive and subordinate purpose of G can be considered at steps E, A, and O and assessed as an ethical personal or organizational act, qua the acts of its leadership group (as quasi intellect and will having goal G) and/or of their subordinates. The act A of agents within the authority structure R; its immediate result; its outcomes and consequences for others in the practice O; and the outcomes and consequences for wider society, communities, and the state S can and should be ethically vetted. The sector or domain of the practice will be disclosed at the first step (G), then at step E (under the questions what, why, and where), and finally at step O. Such acts can be considered as moral intentions before or during activity or after execution.

Presupposition 3: Assessing Justice Through Casuistry in Personal, Political, and Organizational Contexts The main outcome of the quasi-person model (QPM) is the capacity to shuttle between individual self and its “commands” to itself and the organizational “self” and its commands; between personal and group justice claims and their description; and between attribution of capacity of directing intellect/will and attribution of capacity for directing role incumbents in the leadership group, as quasi-intellect or will, via analogy of attribution. We can apply moral terms to persons, states, and organizations: the acronym GREAOS indicates how this application should be carried out. Natural persons have desires for goods as need-satisfiers, some of which arise from the bodily autonomic system’s needs for shelter, food/nutrition, rest, and exercise. Many social and personal activities are aimed at nurturing the body’s autonomic system, which is enabling of and necessary for the higher powers function in terms of material causality but subservient to them in efficient and final causality. We must eat to live but, for the body to persist, intellect distinguishes poison and nutritious food and will must, using voluntary ‘agent causality’, order

51

Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility. . .

931

and execute the eating. But, once met to a healthy threshold level of operation, the needs of the two higher levels on the natural person’s DOE structure generate their own additional social and personal needs, which (as we saw at G above) motivate ethical restraint and reciprocity. Natural persons’ ethical actions with respect to justice can be assessed using the acronym GREAOS, with slight and arguably insignificant shifts in the denotation of all six levels or terms from the organizational analogue. In natural persons, the nature and direction of causality is such that the intellect and will direct the other capacities of the self with intentional agent causality. In this context, rather than having only an “event-to-event” type of causality, the self, as “governing” or directing agent, also produces an event. Organizations have no desires of their own, but they can have needs relative to means to their goals as set by leadership groups – and the latter can issue collective imperatives, after having gone through a procedure of deliberate evaluation and ethical choice. General ethics governs the identification, choice, achievement, and right (and just) proportioning of physical, social, and personal goods (or need-satisfiers) of human capacities (Hn) at the three DOE levels noted above. In artificial persons, the same “self”-related criteria of respect for reciprocity, freedom, equality, desert, and need-satisfaction can be applied to organizational governance. Justice is, for Neo-Aristotelians, a personal virtue of the will. In his doctrine of moral virtue as a “mean,” Aristotle claims that justice is a mean between the vice of graspingness and being taken advantage of. This is not a mean between passion and action, and in that respect it may be a little forced in that the mean is now between action and being acted upon externally. However, this concept of justice captures the essence of personal morality, successfully navigating cases where the individual self’s wellbeing is not the same as the common wellbeing. We can agree with Aristotle that justice can be a personal virtue and that, as reflected analogically in institutions of the state as effects of persons, it can also have collective retributive, distributive, and exchange applications where reciprocity and “right proportion” play key parts. Justice governs interpersonal as well as personal relations, and it serves the common good of the polis, even if we must recognize that the tiny polis or city-state of Athens, on which Aristotle bases his account, is no more. By modern standards, the Golden Rule of reciprocity “Do as you would be done by”) is surprisingly understated in Aristotle: still, its acceptance, however implicit, is nowhere discarded. Consequently, where moral rules of reciprocity and justice are at hand, they will be presumptively valid, even if outweighed and not always able to reach down to particular idiosyncratic level, and there are no governing rules when, ex hypothesi, we descend to unique idiosyncratic particulars in casuistry. Contemporary deontological (Kantian) and utilitarian theories of ethics, even in their “rule” versions, notoriously struggle to address this sort of choice, where values conflict in a particular case, within their different but often metaphysically agnostic Humean or Kantian frameworks. Their controversial philosophical anthropologies are yoked to their omnibus principles like “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” or the categorical imperative in its multiple non-convergent variants of universalizability. The highly contestable moral metrics, moral psychologies, and

932

D. Ardagh

anthropologies of their authors, such as Bentham (Pushpin is as good as poetry), Hume (There is no self), Kant (Knowledge is of appearance only) or J.S. Mill (The desirable is what the majority desires), is often unknown to, or selectively rejected by, contemporary textbook editors advocating use of these two omnibus principles, and there is little discussion of the way they are supposed to be applied in difficult cases or to global problems of violence or poverty. Complex case studies are dumped on students with no further direction on how to assess ethical theory or refer to the method of casuistry. There is also a potential problem of duty overload for universal moralities like Singer’s preference utilitarianism (Perry 2014), where, without a list of ingredient human goods elicited by applying Hm and supporting philosophical anthropology, (1) qualitative evaluations of alternative actions to foster human development (e.g., by promoting self-sufficiency via Hm) cannot be developed; (2) morality is not situated in a family, community, or polis context; and (3) global, universal commitment to the welfare capitalist system, without reference to these domains and practices, is just assumed or fails to be theorized properly in political economy (see Perry 2014 and Wisor 2011). By contrast, within a NAVE anthropology and politics, justice can be more easily canvassed in applying GREAOS with an updated concept of justice – as we shall now indicate in a brief application of GREAOS, concentrating on the justice aspects of ethical assessment and not on the whole moral spectrum. Steps G: Check the justice of the identifying organizational and sociopolitical goals, G, in the given context. At the G-level of ethical assessment, the key question was: what is the organizational entity and its domain or context, and what is the defining or constitutive goal of the entity? In the analogue of natural persons, the artificial person, there is no inescapable natural wish for wellbeing as a master goal. The organization’s G will either be a constitutive organizational goal or a sub-goal and has some level of abstraction or specification that can be increased, like zooming within a Google map. Symbolically, if entity X wills that S is P, then the propositional content “Let it be that: S is P” is X’s goal. The evaluation of G from a justice standpoint will sometimes be clear from its description and enable the rejection of some types or goals in some types of circumstances. But it often cannot be morally conclusive until we add more circumstances. Compare: The organization is selling oil (by discovering, extracting, transporting, marketing, etc.), which is ethically passable with a more specific third person description of this end, but adding circumstances like “The organization is altering the natural environment or causing climate change via pollution.” Or in the case of selling drugs, compare selling medicinal drugs with selling psychoactive or recreational drugs. Or, for “smuggling people,” compare smuggling illegal immigrants with smuggling asylum seekers. Or, for computer hacking, compare performing computer hacks on other businesses with testing business or national security systems. The organizational artificial person is responsible for knowing what it intends and does, not for third-party judgments. But it should be aware of and respect such judgments on its more specific sub-goals if they are true.

51

Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility. . .

933

Some indefinite goals might be suspect from a justice standpoint at least prima facie, e.g., making cigarettes, making nuclear/chemical warheads, or making child abuse pornography. Usually, however, G will be a legally permitted prima facie good, abstractly described (especially in public sector health, education, and welfare organizations) but too indefinite to read off a value judgment until more circumstances are supplied, as required by step E below. Like its natural person’s counterpart, an organizational G will progress through different levels of abstraction, from an indefinite goal to forming a specific plan, and then to exercising a choice to adopt a policy or to verifying the execution of a particular act. The organizational goals of an ethical organization, as an artifact of architectonic intelligence, need to be on the list of ingredients of human wellbeing for natural persons (Hs). Corresponding to wellbeing as the indefinite master good of natural persons, the artificial goal/good of an organizational entity as artifact will usually be a more specific constitutive, institutional, and contingent goal focused on organizing means, or sub-means, to one or more of the Hs ingredient ends. This goal is ideally architectonic for AP and can be pursued in domestic, market, civic or public, work, political, or natural environment arenas. Its directing leadership group will seek to develop a role structure (R) relative to the domains (e.g., family, market, other organizations, environment, state, etc.) with which the organization is interfacing as a means to such a good and to attain this goal using practical reasoning. The goals will vary in abstractness or specificity, with constitutive goals more abstract than contingent goals, but ought ethically to be either be on, or derived from, the same list (Hs) as for natural persons and subject to the same (now joint) casuistic assessment as natural agents’ actions in certain types or sets of circumstances. Step R: Check for justice in the roles/repertoire in the organizational design and justice. G directs the design at step R and settles more exactly who or what is the agent or organizational agency that holds the G above. Besides the agency identity question, it asks: What is the organization’s repertoire of capacities and/or role incumbents in the DOE authority line? How do they propose to attain G? and Are they focused properly on the just goal? There may be multiple agents with whom, to whom, and for whom the leadership group of artificial persons can act. Is the directing, operating, G-enabling DOE structure actually functioning properly in this case? As group artifacts, organizations have no literal self or brain/nervous system with an orexis or autonomic desires or needs, or immanent intentions. But LGs can act toward collectively satisfying organizational quasi-needs and needs of natural persons that are implicit in the organizational G, as well as the higher emergent needs of higher human powers (e.g., education), as parts of the common good. The same rationale from natural person ethics, as described under G above, is available to the leadership group. It is critical that G be enacted ethically and justly by incumbents in R, through choice of ethical means to G, at whatever level of variable specificity the matter is being considered. A far-sighted leadership group will take into account in their structural designing plans both internal and external stakeholders, as well as the entity’s domain-relative norms of the relevant practice or sector (e.g., caveat emptor, limited liability, global supply chains, or concessional status of the business corporation in the business domain).

934

D. Ardagh

Steps E and A: At step E, check for evaluation of justice concerns using the method of ethical decision-making in deliberation and choice. In A, check the ethically just execution of the chosen action. First, individual incumbents in roles of leaders or Boards, as quasi-minds/wills of organizations, should locate the abstract type of action and end/object type to be assessed: e.g., firing a weapon; running hotels; extracting, refining, and selling oil; administering state welfare; providing education; making and selling artifacts; and defense of the realm at the appropriate level of specification. The G step will supply the first step from the organization’s constitutive goal to sub-goals. Unless the organization is criminal, this step is unlikely to be morally decisive. But after supply of the type of action and types of circumstance, and in particular the intention/motive of the agent(s) involved in the particular act, it will usually be possible, by step 3, to give a definitive moral assessment of the more specific goal by means of the casuist process referred to in the Introduction. Neo-Aristotelian teleology’s casuist procedure at step E contrasts with the metaethics of Kantian formalism, both by featuring agent or organizational wellbeing and by using its wellbeing-oriented casuist version of decision-making. The process of casuistry regarding organizational justice ends at step 4 with a judgment about a particular personal or group act, and a particular intent/motive, in particular circumstances, without reference to conformity with an imagined, possible, willable, “universalizable” maxim. Neo-Aristotelianism is more realistic than, and preferable to, formalism for practical reasoning and ethics. It allows reference to collective purposes and exceptions to common moral maxims, e.g., to maxims always prohibiting lies allowing these in particular cases, without the Kantian requirement of willing that everyone must thereby will a whole class of exceptions to the “No Lies” rule if they exercise discretion. For example, on a teleological account, one can lie to a particular drunk or drug-affected intending murderer asking you to disclose the whereabouts of his wife, in order to save his intended victim whom you are hiding in your house. And you can do so without generalizing the judgment, i.e., without having to say that lies are not in general wrong or without willing that all “telling lies to perceived killers to save their intended victims” should become a universal moral law. The A-Step for the organization is simply to verify that the decision at E was executed in fact and correctly by those responsible in the DOE structure. Steps O and S: At O, check the circumstances in which the steps in organizational casuistry assessing justice of Outcomes of A for external end users, other practitioners, and communities and states at S are just when carried out, and their consequences are not unethical. At S, check that the laws of the state regarding public health and safety, tax, and standards are obeyed. These two steps should be focused on in the stakeholder model outlined above in Figure 1. They govern consequences which appear in the domains in Fig. 1 circles marked as 2–4 and apply especially the following questions: What was performed which was relevant to end users, other players in the practice, and the state in doing A above? How was it done? How much? To whom? and In which domain or circle of stakeholders was it done?

51

Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility. . .

935

Finally, we close with giving or withholding the GREAOS tick, revisiting sub-goal G and asking: What was the intent and motive of the organization agent in the R incumbency role in performing A here and now? What were its justice credentials? And regarding O and S, what were the foreseeable or actual outcomes on other players and the state? The organization is not identical with the whole network of stakeholders, but only with internal stakeholders. End users must be considered within the organizational intention formed and then in these two steps. The end users are the finality of the organization, despite being passive with respect to A qua recipients of its product or service and not being organizational actors. If framed ethically, G will include a statement of the best outcome for end users in the mission and goals statement.

Presupposition 4: A Revised Stakeholder Model for QPM In the QPM model, a stakeholder is an entity having a claim on the organization as an artificial person, based in justice. This stakeholder claim arises in two ways. First, because the stakeholder is an internal director, operator, or enabler. Here the stakeholder is an active contributing party in the architectonic action structure of the artificial person, deserving positive freedom and equality of treatment by the artificial person, based on some variant of the moral responsiveness principle (such as reciprocity), applied to or in virtue of their directing, doing the work of, or enabling the artificial person and so in virtue of their contributory role/position inside the firm. They cooperatively execute organizational acts. The second way is: as a member of a group entity, outside the firm, caused a harm or benefit by the artificial person. Here the stakeholder benefit or harm is intended, unintended, foreseeable, etc. and impinges on the agent’s freedom or equality or need-satisfaction rights through commutative or exchange justice. External stakeholder status is not based on structured contribution to the artificial person. In Fig. 1, above, under Presupposition 2, circle 1 shows three types of internal stakeholders who do the work; circle 2 represents end users like customers or clients as external but intermediate stakeholders; circle 3 represents players in the domain or practice that are different from conscious voluntary enablers with contracts like suppliers and investors (circle 3 actors could be researchers, strategic developers, competitors, trade associations, peak bodies, and industry self-regulators; and, in circle 4, the state represents the wider society and communities as external stakeholders who are more or less remote from the voluntary organizational actions of the artificial organizational person and who interact with it. We should ask at step O whether the outcome, the immediate results at step A, and the longer-term consequences of A for the external stakeholders were reported and verified as good and whether there were any adverse impacts on other parties, such as the external stakeholders in circles 2–4 (end users in circle 2; other players in the practice in circle 3; and other external social and governmental stakeholders in circle 4). Under S, we are asking what the impact on the wider society, community, or the state was and whether the relevant state or community laws were respected.

936

D. Ardagh

Although end users of the organization’s activities in circle 2 engage in little or no internal organizational ethical activity of their own, the quality of the artificial person’s service to them, or its provision of a product of some specific type, is the main immediate, external, and “objective” ethical standard against which to measure A, the ethics of the organization’s behavior. Organizational end user needs are usually more specific than those of natural persons, but they are drawn from the same list of human goods as those of natural persons. If the designated end user is another organization, the same list of goods is relevant. Meeting end-user specific needs, passively described, is then the ethical rationale for G and the existence of the organization. End users, as the first of the external stakeholders, are the main finality or that for the sake of which the internal stakeholders of the organization exist and act well. They are not usually organizational agents of the artificial person, and they are not morally responsible for its acts. But they have a measure of finality with respect to the organization’s ethics, in that their good use of the product or service or benefit from it is the part of the G of the organization, despite the fact that they are external stakeholders and not themselves organizational actors of the artificial person or its moral agents. The model has three other important features. Firstly, in circle 1 it allows for the intuitive notion of (and degrees of) organizational responsibility, based on architectonic status of causal activity and authority level: Boards and their incumbents, or other leadership groups, and CEOs are shown as primary and ultimate organizational moral agents, whether there is only one Board or there are multiple boards (e.g., as in the case of a large European cooperative like Mondragon). Operatives and enablers also have some specified and significant organizational ethical responsibility but decreasingly so. Secondly, the model locates the DOE role incumbents as the joint actors performing the basic organizational action and also as the internal stakeholders having a right to a voice in governance (or at least to some consultative relation with the Board, through its CEO). Thirdly, the needs of end users in circle 2 as external stakeholders are, or should be, for the Board, the focus of ethical concern, as the constitutive goal targets of the organizational operation – a main part of its final goal. They set the standard for the normative conduct of internal stakeholders in ethical judgment, but they do not perform an organizational action, and in that sense it can be said that as final causes they “do” nothing organizationally. But the ethics of the organizational act will be judged on the basis of the achievement of constitutive and subordinate goals, G, and the DOE performance of R – the role structure incumbents. At steps A and O, the identification of the product or service G must take the good of end users into account. Although ethical action by end users is not involved in the actions of the artificial person in supply of the good, customers or clients’ demands and uses are, normally, what make the artificial person’s goals G to come about. End users will judge the result and act, in their responses to the artificial person’s act, by using this product or service (which is the outcome, O), possibly at a later time. This will be the artificial person’s definitive ethical test. The ethical casuistry procedure will have basically the same goods in view as natural persons do, and its four steps can be collectively performed with the addition

51

Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility. . .

937

of collective consensus or voting procedures. There are no absolute corporate or organizational rights or duties which are not derived from general ethics, and whatever concessions are given by the state to professionals or other sectoral exemptions, these cannot directly contradict moral precepts; cannot frustrate the interests, need-satisfiers, and goods of natural persons; and cannot breach the moral principles designed to preserve them, since the idea of human wellbeing is the architectonic good from which all ethics is derived, including the ethics and politics of the state. However, as Dine (2000) argues, professionals may be formally allowed to give preference to one social good over another, under stipulated types of act and circumstance, for moral reasons based on the common good, in a legally recognized concession.

Concluding Applications Let us consider as an example the famous case of the March 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster depicted in the 2008 CBC documentary Black Wave: the Legacy of Exxon Valdez, where a 10-million gallon oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, caused by an untrained officer while the captain was in a drunken sleep, affected 1300 miles of coastline. The constitutive goal, G, of extracting, shipping, and selling oil, abstractly considered, passes the ethics test, and these abstract types of action, if undertaken, will pass at step G. But at higher magnification or specification of the means, the particular way the sub-goal of “moving the oil to its destination,” G, was enacted in the circumstances by officers, reviewed objectively at casuistry level 4 under the E and A steps, will not pass the test. At step R, the Board enforcement of the chain of role responsibility is spectacularly broken: by Hazelwood, the captain, being absent due to sleeping off drunkenness; by the HR department’s failure to adequately staff the vessel and remedy his behavior despite prior incidents; and by the incompetent act of the first mate in grounding the vessel and thus causing the oil spill. The crew were overworked and under-resourced. Elements of the radar had been broken for some time. The ship was not informed that the Coast Guard tracking was inactive. The ethics of the act (or rather accident, in these circumstances), considered at steps E and A, when judged by casuistry with regard to the circumstances of G we have explored under R, was immoral. As to O, considering the damage to 11,000 square miles of ocean and to wildlife, fishing, and local towns, Exxon was rightly deemed to be legally negligent and arguably immoral. The cleanup after the spill was widely judged as under-resourced and too late. The consequential impact on the end users might include shareholder and purchaser losses and serious losses of other relevant parties and players. The spill severely impacted on local mayors, townsfolk (two suicides), and local fishermen. Step S would reveal how the state of Alaska’s lax environmental provisions were known to, but connived at by, the state attorney general and key Board members of the Board of Exxon (the leadership group in this case). The revisiting of Board intention and motive in their role of monitoring the performance of the agents’ actions or

938

D. Ardagh

omissions in the case only confirms deliberate immoral evasions of responsibility and delays in recompense to victims. The GREAOS tick cannot be given. If, as Dine (2000) and others have argued, we accept a concessional view of business, setting out the nature and purposes of the social practice of business; its structures and institutions, such as limited liability and caveat emptor; its morally distinctive practices; and its external stakeholders, such as competitors and state tax departments, business is seen as granted a warrant by the state and a social concession to operate, whereby the state benefits from the activities of the business and in return provides to the business an enforceable legal framework. The end of business is not (or need not be) financial profit alone but profit more widely, in the sense of benefit or wellbeing. Business organizations can, and sometimes do, provide needsatisfiers for human capacities: training and meaningful work; wages for workers; loyalty to suppliers and investors as internal stakeholders; quality goods and services for end users as external stakeholders; development of innovative, quality products which endure; and excellent services that make life easier. These need-satisfiers enable leisure, entertainment, and self-sufficiency and meet the other marks of wellbeing mentioned in Presupposition 1 – i.e., ultimate finality, immanence, and cumulative perfection of capacity. End-user outcomes must be considered in the organizational intention formed and then executed at the acronym step O, as they are the finality of the organization, even though they are passive with respect to A qua recipients of its product or service and even though they are not organizational actors. GREAOS can also apply to organizations in other practices, domains, and sectors. In the public sector organizations, the constitutive goals are usually morally worthwhile, qua parts of the common good like health, education, work, and welfare. The path to the leadership group may be election. However, role structures can be faulty, evaluation procedures improperly conducted and execution sloppy and unverified. A government bureaucracy still has to serve its citizen end users, respect private providers, and comply with state law. Other ideal organizational actions are to respect separation of powers, facilitate democratic representation, and avoid corruption (e.g., by minimizing conflicts of interest). A government organization may be tempted, for example, to use immoral means of jail or torture to further national security. Organized practitioners in different sectors should have differentiating concessions and privileges (e.g., a right to arrest, bear arms, confidentiality privileges for lawyers and priests, and/or doctor rights to bodily examination) but in no case contradicting moral precepts explicitly. The GREAOS test can also be applied to professional and nonprofit sectors. The path to leadership group roles and organizational design in professional sectors is ideally exam-demonstrated expertise, built through apprenticeship within quasimonopolies and enforced by professional ethics. However, as Dine (2000) argues, professionals may be formally allowed to give preference to one social good over another, under stipulated types of act and circumstance, for moral reasons based on the common good, in a legally recognized concession. In both the public bureaucratic and the professional sectors, the G, E and A elements will more easily pass the ethical test qua the goal being publicly legislated,

51

Using Aristotle’s Metaethics to Assess the Moral Responsibility. . .

939

of long standing, and aimed at coping with quality of life social problems. Professionals aim at achievement of community need-satisfaction, through hospitals, schools and universities, police, courts, and welfare or employment agencies. In those sectors and domains, money and financial profit is not the ultimate goal or measure of success. The incumbency of the leadership group in the DOE role structure will usually be based on demonstrated competence or democratic election and representation. Operations will usually be routine and bureaucratic, and the decision-makers will use line and staff role structures. Financial enablement will usually be by taxation, not by sales. Public sector external stakeholders and end users are citizens and not customers. However, the GREAOS procedure can still work for a state agency or government department, with a constitutive G of implementing the state’s policy. This kind of organization is just going to appear both as an artificial person with internal stakeholders, and its leadership group will still have to address the sector’s external stakeholders (as per Fig. 1, circles 2–4). This still means caring about end users, other public sector agents, and the state-instituted organizations and laws.

Cross-References ▶ How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business ▶ The Social Role of the Virtue of Integrity ▶ Wisdom Within the Firm: An Aristotelian-Hayekian Approach to the Managerial Process of Division and Coordination of Labor

References Ardagh D (1999) Wellbeing, rules, and conscience. The use of casuistry by professionals. Prof Ethics 7(3/4):137–154 Ardagh D (2011) A quasi-personal alternative to some Anglo-American pluralist models of organizations: towards an analysis of corporate self-governance for virtuous organizations. Philos Manage 10(3):41–58 Ardagh D (2012) Presuppositions of collective moral agency: analogy, architectonics, justice, and casuistry. Philos Manage 11(2):5–28 Ardagh D (2013) A critique of some Anglo-American models of collective agency in business. Philos Manage 12(3):5–26 Ardagh D (2017) Towards an acronym for organizational ethics: locating responsible agents in collective groups. Philos Manage 16(2):137–160 Ardagh D (2019) The natural law tradition and belief. Nova Science Publishers, New York Austin JL (1967) Agathon and Eudaimonia in the ethics of Aristotle. In: Moravscik JEM (ed) Aristotle: a collection of critical essays. Doubleday, New York Bakan J (2003) The corporation big picture media. University of British Columbia, Vancouver Black wave: legacy of the Exxon Valdez (2008) Director R. Cornellier, Mocamba Productions, distributed by Bullfrog Films, Oley, PA Chisholm R (1968) Supererogation and offence. In: Dworkin G, Thompson J (eds) Ethics. Harper and Row, New York Chisholm R (1991) On the simplicity of the soul. In: Philosophical perspectives 5, Philosophy of religion. Ridgeview, Atascadero, pp 167–181

940

D. Ardagh

Danley J (1999) Corporate moral agency. In: Frederick R (ed) A companion to business ethics. Wiley Blackwell, Oxford De George R (1996) Business ethics. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs Dine C (2000) The governance of corporate groups. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/New York Donaldson T (1982) Corporations and morality. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs Donaldson T, Werhane P (eds) (2007) Ethical issues in business, 7th edn. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs Friedman M (1962) Capitalism and freedom. University of Chicago Press, Chicago French P (1979) The corporation as a moral person. Am Philos Q 18:207–215 French P (1992) Corporate ethics. Oxford University Press, Oxford Gilbert M (2000) Sociality and responsibility. Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham Gocke B (ed) (2012) After physicalism. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame Goetz S, Taliaferro C (2011) A brief history of the soul. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford Goodpaster K, Matthews J (1982) Can a corporation have a conscience? January issue of Harvard Business Review 60:132–141 Haldane J (2010) Reasonable faith. Routledge, London Hare R (1958) The language of morals. Oxford University Press, Oxford Jensen A, Toulmin S (1988) The abuse of casuistry. University of California Press, Berkeley Korten D (1995) When corporations rule the world. Kumarian Press, Boulder Kretzmann N (with Stump E) (1991) Being and goodness. In: MacDonald S (ed) (1991) Being and goodness. Cornell University Press, Ithaca Ladd J (1983) Morality and the ideal of rationality in organizations. In: Donaldson T, Werhane P (eds) Ethical issues in business, 7th edn. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs MacDonald S (ed) (1991) Being and goodness. Cornell University Press, Ithaca MacIntyre A (1999) Dependent rational animals. Open Court, Chicago May L (1987) The morality of groups. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame Miller S (2002) Against collective agency. In: Meggle G (ed) Social facts and collective intentionality. Dr Hansel-Hohenhassen, Frankfurt, pp 273–298 Nussbaum M (1988) Non-relative virtues: an Aristotelian approach. Midwest Stud Philos 13:32–52 O’Connor T (ed) (1995) Agents, causes, and events: the problem of freewill. Oxford University Press, New York Perry J (2014) God, the good, and utilitarianism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Polanyi M (1959) The study of man. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Polanyi M (1968) The tacit dimension. Doubleday, New York Porter J (1995) Moral action and Christian ethics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Searle J (1983) Intentionality. Cambridge University Press, London Smart N (1958) Philosophers and religious truth. SCM Press, London Swinburne R (1993) The evolution of the soul. Oxford University Press, Oxford Taylor C (1989) Sources of the self. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Urmson J (1968) Saints and heroes. In: Melden A (ed) Essays in moral philosophy. University of Washington Press, Seattle Velasquez M (1983) Why corporations are not responsible for anything they do. Bus Prof Ethics J 2:1–18 Vollmer E (1999) Agent causality. Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht Williams BOA (1962) Aristotle on the good: a formal sketch. Philos Q 12(49):289–296 Wisor S (2011) Against shallow ponds; an argument against Singer’s approach to global poverty. J Glob Ethics 7(1):19–32 Yandell K (1993) Hume’s inexplicable mystery. Temple University Press, Philadelphia

Part VI Philosophy in Management Practice and Education

Philosophy in Management Practice and Education: An Introduction

52

Steven Segal

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Situating Heidegger in the Context of Research Practices in Organizational Theory . . . . . . . . . Examples of Lived Experience of Research Questioning from Within the Context of Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Using an Exemplar to Illustrate the Heideggerian Process of Practice in the Context of Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introducing the Chapters of This Section . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

944 944 947 948 952 956 956

Abstract

The Philosophy in Management Practice and Education section focuses on philosophical processes for reflective and reflexive practice. The introduction is written from a Heideggerian practice perspective, as Heidegger allows us to engage, reflect, and be reflexive in relation to the particular professional world that we inhabit. His thinking provides an overarching framework that brings out the way in which a range of philosophies can be articulated as philosophical processes for being reflective and reflexive. The chapters of this section develop frameworks for being reflective and reflexive in different contexts, using the works of a range of philosophers. Keywords

Philosophical processes · Reflection · Reflexive · Heidegger · Disruption

S. Segal (*) Metavision Institute, Bowral, NSW, Australia Formerly Graduate School of Management, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_68

943

944

S. Segal

Introduction The intention underpinning this section is to develop an appreciation of philosophy as a series of processes and methodologies for examining the lived experience of the world of practice. While the study of philosophers has become part of the mainstream in management theorizing, the methodologies used to examine experiential and empirical have tended to be drawn from the larger social sciences. Philosophy tends to be used as a theoretical base in terms of which to do empirical research work using tried and tested social science methods. This section of the handbook asks and responds to the following question: are there philosophical processes for exploring the world of organizational and management practice? The notion of practice is viewed broadly here. It refers to research practice but also includes consulting, coaching, and teaching practices. Where do we find consultants using philosophical processes for examining organizations? What does a philosophically based coaching approach look like? The same questions relate to pedagogies of teaching: is there a philosophical kind of pedagogy? The particular approach taken in this introduction, which includes excerpts from Segal (2015), is the use of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy to provide a methodological process for reflecting on the existential dimensions of professional practice. While there are a range of organizational studies articles on the notion of destruction, there is very little writing on the use of Heidegger to develop disruption as a methodological approach to research, consulting, managing, and professional development. This introduction will sketch a Heideggerian approach to PhD research practice. This chapter concludes by suggesting a range of philosophical ways for examining different kinds of practice. As we will see, the philosophy of Hegel has been used to think about organizational practices. We will also see Hume’s Fork being used to examine managerialism. A Heideggerian approach to consulting is developed as one of the chapters. A Foucauldian process is used to develop a philosophical practice for reflecting on Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME), and a Kantian based discourse on morality serves as a framework for creating space to reflect on the practices of managing, leading, and being employed. This introductory chapter starts by situating Heidegger in the context of research practices in organizational theory, and proceeds with discussing examples of lived experience of research questioning from within the context of practice. It then uses an exemplar to illustrate the Heideggerian process of practice in the context of research and, finally, introduces each of the other chapters in the context of their contribution to an integrated picture of the role of philosophy in management practice and education.

Situating Heidegger in the Context of Research Practices in Organizational Theory Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) argue that management research is at a crossroads in which researchers need to develop a novel approach to generating research questions. They argue that research inquiry needs to move from what they call an

52

Philosophy in Management Practice and Education: An Introduction

945

approach of “gap spotting” (p. 247) to an approach of “problematization” (p. 247) for generating research questions. Their argument is based on the idea that the traditional approach to research is based on spotting gaps or extending the literature in the area or extending empirical research. The virtue of a gap-spotting approach to research is, they claim, that it allows for rigor in the practice of research, but it tends to foreclose opportunities for novelty or the generation of interesting research. The difference, they argue, between gap spotting and problematization as bases for generating research questions is that the former is focused on spotting research gaps or other shortcomings in the existing literature and aims to fill the gaps that are spotted. This is the traditional expectation in research at institutions of higher education. The problematization approach, on the other hand, is concerned with questioning the assumptions of a tradition or way of doing research so as to arrive at novelty or new ways of seeing phenomena (Alvesson and Sandberg 2011). This is a very interesting but unacknowledged turn in management research. For the idea of examining and questioning taken-for-granted assumptions is the very definition of philosophy that Plato gives in his Republic where he calls philosophy an act of destroying assumptions until the philosopher comes up with first principles (1968). Furthermore, one of the forms of problematization that they refer to is questioning the assumptions of a paradigm. Thomas Kuhn (1970) claims that the questioning of the assumptions of a paradigm is a philosophical activity. His claim is that in times of normal science, scientists have no time for philosophy, but when they are met with persistent anomalies, they are, if they embrace the anomalies, challenged to question their assumptions. This point is reinforced by the sociologist Ernst Gellner (1964) who says that questioning of assumptions “happens to be the principle origin of philosophy” (p. 51). Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) are moving towards an existential understanding of the professional practice of scholarly research. In an existential framework, research questions arise out of the researcher being existentially in question. Existential forms of research inquiry allow the professional practitioner to question the assumptions of their own way of being as a professional practitioner from with the experience of being a professional practitioner. I shall develop the movement from Alvesson and Sandberg’s use of problematization to an existential notion research questioning through the work of Alvesson and Sandberg. The process for problematizing and thus for generating a kind of questioning that allows for a deeper exploration of taken-for-granted assumptions, Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) call a “dialectical process” in which we not only compare and contrast paradigms with each other, but we actually learn to see our own assumptions through the paradigm of the other and create the space for allowing the paradigm of the other to be seen through our assumptions. It is in the dialectical interplay between seeing our own perspective in terms of the perspective of the other and creating the space for the other to see themselves in terms of our perspective that questioning and novelty occurs in the research process. Describing this process, Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) say: “a key task in generating research questions through problematization is to enter a dialectical interrogation between one’s own and other

946

S. Segal

metatheoretical stances so as to identify, articulate, and challenge central assumptions underlying existing literature in a way that opens up new areas of inquiry” (p. 256). In order to engage in such dialectical problematization as the basis of research and metatheorizing, Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) claim that a domain of literature needs to be identified, the assumptions supporting this domain need to be identified and evaluated. They also argue that developing alternative assumptions and considering them in relation to their audience are central parts of the dialectical process of problematization (p. 256). However, from the existential perspective, there is a more fundamental question that the authors do not address. From a Heideggerian perspective, we cannot take our way of being as researchers for granted. Indeed, research occurs only under certain existential conditions. In our everyday modes of practical coping, we are absorbed in the world. We get on with the activities of everyday doing. Research is just not significant. Existential research questioning arises when our taken-for-granted way of making sense of the world tends to be fragmented. We question because our way of being is in question. Alvesson and Sandberg (2011), however, do not account for the conditions under which research questioning arises. They assume that we are already within the world of research. They simply assume that we want to engage with sets of literature such that we will create a dialectical interchange between them. They do not address the question as to why we should begin to read the literature in the first place: what makes anyone want to inquire? It is not a question that Heidegger omits. Rather than assuming that we just turn up as researchers, Heidegger (1948) is very particular about the conditions under which inquiry comes about: “Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder. Only on the ground of wonder – the revelation of the nothing – does the ‘why?’ loom before us. Only because the ‘why’ is possible as such can we in a definite way inquire into grounds and ground them. Only because we can inquire and ground is the destiny of our existence placed in the hands of the researcher” (p. 52). This very fundamental existential question is the key, from a Heideggerian perspective, to the purpose and passion for doing research. We do research because our way of being is in question, and even if we do not know the questions that we want to be addressed, there is a passion that drives us into research. There is, as Heidegger maintains, a wonder of why which is generated by being in question in our way of being in the world. Within this context, research arises out of interruptions within everyday living. From the existential perspective, research does not begin by investigating the literature or in the way we approach the literature. The latter occurs when we have already emerged in the practice of research. Transitioning from everyday practical coping to research needs to be accounted for and occurs, as has been said and as will be shown in more detail in this chapter, when our everyday practical coping is distracted. It is when we are in question that we begin to ask questions. And one of the ways of responding to the questions that we are asking is through research.

52

Philosophy in Management Practice and Education: An Introduction

947

Our own paradigms become explicit when they are existentially challenged. In a sociological context, this point is expressed by Bourdieu (1988) who asserts: “The sociologist who chooses to study his own world in its nearest and most familiar aspects should not as the ethnologist would domesticate the exotic but [. . .] exotiscise the domestic [. . .] through a break with his initial relation of intimacy with modes of life and thought which remain opaque to him because they are too familiar” (p. xi). In contrast to the tradition that has dominated Western thought between Descartes and positivism, Heidegger does not take the phenomenon of questioning for granted. Rather, he makes it a matter for inquiry in its own right. He questions what it means to question: to inquire, observe, and conduct research. In this respect, he maintains that questioning is not primarily or only a cognitive, intellectual, or detached rational activity but is a fully embodied activity conducted in a mood of mattering. Questioning is a way of being concerned for and within our being in the world. In this way, it occurs within a circular rather than a linear relationship to practice.

Examples of Lived Experience of Research Questioning from Within the Context of Practice In what follows, I will look at a series of examples of breakdowns in a felt sense in order to bring out the existential basis of questioning and to address the existential conditions under which inquiry as the basis of research begins. In a book entitled What Do I Do for a Living? Steve Johnson (2007) describes how it was a sense of being existentially struck by the question of leadership that led him into the exploration of leadership: “Have you ever stopped to ask yourself the question ‘What do I do for a living?’ It is such a simple, innocuous - even clichéd - kind of question, don’t you think? But while it may seem wholly unremarkable at first, it’s not a question to be underestimated; in fact, it’s a slippery little sucker and one that in all my fortythree years I had never really stopped to contemplate - that is, until now. This question popped into my head, completely uninvited, one sunny morning while I was taking a shower - and it wouldn’t pop back out again. I even remember the date 14 April 1999 - because it marked my first day of employment as managing director of a business organisation” (2007, p. 23). Note that he says that in all his 43 years, he had not asked this question. In Heideggerian terms, he was absorbed in his practice. Note also that he did not simply choose in a rational and deliberative way to ask the question. As he says, it “popped” into his head and would not leave him alone – or to put it in Heideggerian terms (1985) his being was “called” to question his practice. He did not want this question, but he was overwhelmed by a sense of the strangeness and, in the language of Heidegger’s Being and Time, the “uncanniness” of his own work. He simply wanted to go back to work, but he was overwhelmed by what he called “a niggling doubt” in which his work lost all sense and meaning for him. Johnson (2007) speaks about not understanding what he himself is doing: “Here I was, on the threshold of what might

948

S. Segal

be the most exciting day of my career, and I intuitively knew that, just when I needed it most, I simply had no real insight into what I did for a living.” He goes on to confirm that this is not a question of his competence or ability. Indeed, he feels quite comfortable in the fact that he has proved that he is a “can do” person. Rather, Johnson (2007, p. 7) describes how he has lost all sense of the purpose and meaning of his action: “I just felt in my gut that achieving financial results and co-ordinating tasks, no matter how complex, was not what my personal purpose was all about. Moreover, I was mighty annoyed that, after a 20-year career of doing all sorts of ‘important stuff,’ much of which I knew like the back of my hand, I couldn’t come up with six lousy words of my own about what I did for a living!.” This sense of estrangement from his practice did not lead Johnson (2007, p. 9) into a state of despair, but to a sense of wonder, which became the basis for reflexive research into leadership as a practice: “Were their other organisational leaders like me [. . .] but lacking that burning insight into exactly what purpose they served – what they really did for a living?” And so he began research into and wrote a book called What Do Leaders Really Do for a Living? Note that the existential conditions under which he became a researcher were a disruption in his everyday practice; not a disruption in equipment ready-to-hand but in a rupture in the felt sense of what it means to be a leader. He did not simply choose in a rational way to become a theorist or researcher.

Using an Exemplar to Illustrate the Heideggerian Process of Practice in the Context of Research Let me begin with what Thomas Kuhn (1970) calls an exemplar, a person whose practice embodies this mode of inquiry. I will start with a former PhD student of mine named Brad. Before beginning his PhD, Brad had been – and still is – a highly successful and sought-after project manager, recognized in the industry for his project management performance. However, approximately 7 years ago, Brad became quite frustrated with project management. His initial frustration was not so much with project management as such but with himself as a project manager. Although he was recognized as highly successful, he realized that he failed on numerous occasions to complete within the given conceptual framework of project management, that is, complete the project on time, budget, and cost. Initially, he believed that he was not trained well enough in project management and so he took further courses in project management. But this did not have the impact of significantly improving completion on time, on budget, and to specification. In the name of continuous improvement, Brad undertook to enhance his understanding of project management by immersing himself in the literature of project management. However, even a refinement of his theoretical knowledge of the literature on project management did not enhance his excellence in practice.

52

Philosophy in Management Practice and Education: An Introduction

949

At this point, Brad turned to do an MBA at the Macquarie Graduate School of Management. One of the units offered in this program was called “The Foundations of Management Thought,” which turned out to be an abridged version of a journey through the history of Western philosophy. In this unit, Brad came to recognize that philosophy was and is an activity of questioning the assumptions that ground a discipline, practice, or program such as project management. As a teacher of this unit, Brad turned to me to read for the degree of PhD in the area of project management. I must confess that I knew very little about project management; Brad knew that I knew little about it but wanted to work with the philosophical practice of questioning the assumptions in which project management had historically been grounded. And so we agreed to work together. Initially, neither Brad nor I knew what the structure of the thesis would look like. We did not know the precise nature of the question/s that he would be asking. We did not have a sense of the literature that he would work with in examining the assumptions of project management. And we did not have a sense of the methodology that he would be working with. All he had was his frustration with existing practices of project management. And all I had was the practice of what I will call existential philosophical questioning – a kind of questioning of assumptions in the context of moods such as frustration, uncertainty, anxiety, and disruption in general. And so Brad and I agreed that we would set up a conversation between us in which we would examine what Eugene Gendlin (see Todres 2007) calls the felt sense behind his disruption. Gendlin describes the experience of felt sense in a number of ways. One of them is the idea that a person has an experience of something being or feeling not quite right but actually cannot yet put into language that sense. It is like the word is on the tip of one’s tongue but, try as one might, the language just does not come to one. It is a feeling that things are not quite right, but that which is not quite right cannot be pinpointed. Existential philosophical questioning is a practice for working with giving language to a felt sense, so that it begins to open up a world or field of inquiry in which a person can immerse themselves. Heidegger claims that language is the house of being. Part of what he means by this is that language discloses a world. Our world comes into being through language. What we were therefore searching for was a language in which Brad’s frustration would be the basis for disclosing a world. We agreed to explore Brad’s felt sense of frustration around project management. Central to the practice of working with felt sense is to look at what resonates (see Todres 2007) with the felt sense. So we began to explore the resonance between Brad’s felt sense of frustration with project management. We did not want to start off with a conceptual understanding of project manager but with what it felt like to be a project manager and what was frustrating within this lived experience of being a project manager. In the course of the conversation, we covered many themes: the range of projects that Brad had worked on, the paradox of failure as success in his practice as project manager, meanderings around other project managers’ experience of the relationship between the espoused ideal of project management and the practices of project management. Without intending to, we looked at Brad’s

950

S. Segal

experience of his parents’ careers, conversations that he had had with friends and other members of his family. And so, our conversation went forward and backward, turning and returning to the same feelings and themes. A theme that we kept returning to, something that resonated very deeply for Brad, was a felt sense of being unable to say in a commonsense way what project management was/is. This inability to describe the phenomenon or practice of project management in a commonsense way popped up in different terms: in one context, he compared himself with his parents, who, as teachers, had long and stable careers through their identities and their place in the community was defined. However, Brad was a project hopper who did not stay in any project for longer than 6–8 months at a time. And so he had no stable community through which to form his identity. If he was anything, it was more like a nomad, moving between places. Actually, he had recently read Zygmunt Bauman (1990) on liquid modernity and saw himself both as constructed by and constructing the liquidity of modernity – the fact that there were no stable conventions or ways of doing things in modernity. Initially, Brad responded to this with an experience of despair. There was no-thing, no convention upon which he could ground or hold himself. However, rather than concluding with this experience of despair, we explored his felt sense around the despair. In these conversations, he came to embrace the despair. And ironically and paradoxically, the acceptance of the despair allowed him to catch sight of another way of seeing his way of being as a project manager. Instead of seeing the “nomad” image in a negative light, he came to see it in a positive light. It began to disclose a new way of seeing project management. He began to see project management as a practice or phenomenon that was nomad-like in that it involved the activity of moving between and coordinating people of different functions, departments, silos, or language games within an organization. As a project manager, he needed to be able to listen to and talk to people of different functional and disciplinary languages in a language that each of them understood. Furthermore, he had to bring them together in a shared language. The felt sense now began to formulate itself in language for Brad. He began to see project management or a part of project management as an activity of coordinating projects through the activities of translating and redescribing projects for the range of stakeholders involved in the project. These stakeholders, because of their functional or disciplinary backgrounds, had different sets of assumptions, different ways of speaking to each other, different perceptual blindnesses and ways of framing situations. The essential challenge of project management, as he began to see it, was to be the translator or re-describer that brought all of these qualitatively different stakeholders together. Through these conversations, Brad developed a sense of excitement and energy; a world had opened up for him. Brad’s experience of being able to name his phenomenon disclosed a world to him. However, at this point, Brad’s revelation could not be counted as a thesis. It was nothing more than a personal or private disclosure. The question became: how could we assess whether this was nothing more than a personal experience arising out of Brad’s own already existing taken-for-granted

52

Philosophy in Management Practice and Education: An Introduction

951

understanding of the world? How could we assess whether it had public relevance such that it could be generalized beyond Brad to the community of practitioners known as project managers? It was in response to this series of questions that we could begin building the thesis. But we still did not have a preordered process for proceeding. We did not immediately know what literature we would turn to, whether we would do empirical study, what methodology we would use, and so on. In other words, we were going without knowing exactly where we were going – we were exploring. In the process of exploration Brad started off by playing seriously with the writings of three philosophers: Richard Rorty, Alistair McIntyre, and Charles Taylor. He studied their original works and wrote papers on each of the author’s but, through an evaluative process, we set aside Taylor and McIntyre, and came to agree that Richard Rorty would be the central author of his work, as Rortian ideas would provide the most effective foundation for its logical coherence. In retrospect, it was easy to see why: Rorty had articulated the notion of philosophy as a process of redescription (Rorty, 1980) and Brad was redescribing project management as a practice of redescription. Furthermore, Richard Rorty provided Brad with the language to critique project management from within, demonstrating how the theory and practice of project management are in contradiction with one another. It is this contradiction which forms the basis for the redescription in Rorty’s terms and in Brad’s thesis. Now Brad had a logic for critiquing project management and a basis for redescribing it as the practice of redescription. Once again, this logic did not occur in advance, but it was only by working through Rorty, the literature in and on project management and the relationship to Rorty that this logic became clear. While finding it was an agonizing process, having found it was an ecstatic process. It was Kant who claimed that the experience of the sublime is an experience of simultaneous joy and pain. In this sense, a thesis that is not outlined in advance in a formula is an ecstatic and sublime experience. However, the agony and ecstasy of Brad’s thesis was not about to stop. Brad’s aim has never been only to make a theoretical contribution to the literature on project management but to inscribe the redescription of project management into the practice of project management. In this sense, Brad still wanted to do two things: check his newfound understanding of project managers in the context of experienced project managers and test his understanding in his own practice as a project manager. In terms of the former, he undertook a series of interviews with experienced project managers to test his own understanding, and he observed himself in the process of transforming his own practice as a project manager. However, his observations were not simply passive, for it was not only his new way of seeing his practice that transformed his practice, but his practice involved a process of transforming his way of seeing his practice. There was thus a circular experience occurring in which practice and theory were transforming each other from within. Together all of these pieces became part of his thesis: the existential dimensions of raising the question of project management, the imminent critique of project management in Rortian terms, a description of Rorty’s notion of redescription, an

952

S. Segal

inscribing of Rorty’s notion of redescription in the context of redescribing project management as a practice of redescription, challenging of his own preconceptions of project management through interviewing others, and a practice of reflexively being attuned to the transformation in his practice through seeing project management in a new light as well as transforming this new light in the context of his practice of project management. As already mentioned, this structure was not predefined. It emerged only through the experience of doing the thesis. I am repeating it a number of times for two reasons: it contradicts much of the espoused wisdom about project-managing a thesis, that is, that first you begin with the question, then you go on to the literature review, outline the methodology, analyze the data, discuss, and conclude. It is only once Brad developed a handle on doing a thesis, that he could develop a sense of the structure and timing involved. But even then, the structure and timing were subject to continuous reiteration. The second point is directly related to the first: instead of seeing a thesis as a linear sequential process, it is, in fact, circular in a hermeneutic sense: it involves a continuous forward and backward movement until the parts and whole begin to fit together. While a thesis may have the appearance of being written in a linear way, both the actual sense-making of a thesis and the writing of a thesis occur in the form of a hermeneutic circle – in a constant turning and returning until the parts form a whole and the whole allows the parts to be situated in relationship to each other. Brad has now completed his thesis.

Introducing the Chapters of This Section In each chapter, the authors reflect on different practices from different philosophical perspectives. In ▶ Chap. 53, “Weeding the Management Garden: Hume’s Fork and Action Nominalism at Work,” Robert Spillane uses Hume’s Fork to identify the nonsense that is so much a part of managerial speak. Hume’s Fork is a process for distinguishing nonsensical statements from statements that can be assessed for their truth value. As an example, he uses a sentence from the CEO of Cornerstone, Rob Stone: “As brands build out a world footprint, they look for the no-holds-barred global POV [poverty overview] that’s always been part of our wheelhouse.” This sentence is nonsensical, because it does not refer directly to any object or subject matter. It does not refer to anything and yet it is said and taken in a serious way. According to Spillane, it is not only managerial speak that is condemned to being nonsense, but management education is also full of texts where the language used does not refer to anything. Even the social sciences and humanities are full of nonsensical words. This leads Spillane to say: “One of the most salient features of our time [. . .] is the proliferation of bullshit” (see also Christensen et al. 2019). Spillane proceeds to spell out the logic of his justification for making these claims about managerial speak. He turns to the role of language and its relationship to a world of objects. It is, according to Spillane, the misuse of language that leads to nonsensical terms. In various ways, he makes the point that the way in which we use

52

Philosophy in Management Practice and Education: An Introduction

953

language creates the problem of nonsense. Spillane makes the point that all abstract nouns have no reference point. When, for example, we speak about “management” or “organisations,” there is nothing that corresponds to which we are talking about and so these words are nonsensical. When these words are formulated as verbs rather than nouns, they do refer to activities and as such are meaningful. It is more fruitful to speak about “managing” and “organising.” Spillane goes on to critique a range of management theories in terms of their misuse of language. Words like “personality,” the notion of “needs” in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the notion of “motivation.” Spillane concludes the chapter by outlining Hume’s Fork as a tool through which to analyze language such that we are enabled to tell the difference between nonsensical talk and truth-value-laden language. This is a very helpful tool through which to identify and justify the nonsensical language which is so much a part of managerialist discourse. In ▶ Chap. 54, “The Organization of Philosophy and a Philosophy of Organizations,” Deranty challenges philosophers to focus on and question the notion of organizations. He starts by noting the absence of studies on organizations in the discipline of philosophy and points out the dangers of failing to attend to organizations in philosophy. Part of the danger of this failure is that the lives of professional philosophers occur in the context of organizations, so to ignore organizations is to ignore the socio-ontological context in which professional philosophy takes place. In explaining the failure of philosophy to take seriously the social and organizational context of its own practice, he focuses on the role that the individual plays in philosophy. He maintains that, for the most part, philosophy takes the individual and not the social whole to be the unit of analysis. After having challenged philosophy to rethink itself in the light of organizations, Deranty uses the work of Hegel to outline what a particular philosopher can contribute to organizational studies frameworks for thinking through organizations. One of the points that he makes here is that the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity as occurring in the work of Hegel can unify the individual and the social dimensions of organizations. He implies that organizational theorists’ views of organizations tend to break the individual and the organizational apart into two discrete phenomena. In contrast, they are part of the same dialectical whole in a Hegelian sense. Deranty phrases it in the following way: “it is the combination of the phenomenological insight, focusing on the actual experience of work, with the social theory insight, which is sensitive to the dialectic between the apparently opposed poles of the individual and the collective, the functional and the normative, that can unveil the full complexity of life in work organisations.” What can Heidegger and consulting have to do with each other? Heidegger is difficult to read, while business requires fast and efficient consulting practice. Heidegger’s question is at a deep level of abstraction, while business requires concrete and technical skills. In ▶ Chap. 55, “What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian Philosopher,” authors Spinosa, Hancocks, and Glennon show, from a Heideggerian perspective, that thinking occurs in the most concrete form of everyday relationships. Generally, Heidegger maintains that it is in moods of disruption of the

954

S. Segal

concrete everyday world that thinking occurs. The particular mood that Spinosa et al. (in this Handbook) focus on is the mood of wonder. Wonder takes out of the everyday ways of being in the world and calls us to see, ponder, and allow new possibilities to disclose the taken-for-granted world in which we live. The more we can follow the mood of wonder, the more the focal point for wonder expresses or manifests itself. The more the focal point manifests, the more transformative does our way of being in the world become. There is more opportunity to transform the everyday by thinking through it in moods of wonder. This creates a form of thinking based on Heidegger’s philosophy, as mood refines the focal point of our wonder. In their chapter, Spinosa et al. demonstrate the power of wonder in the everyday world of business, encouraging and enabling business transformations through the question: “What calls for thinking” and in particular “what calls for thinking” in business. Being able to highlight and work with the mood of the questions is the basis for innovation and entrepreneurship in the business. The next chapter by Tweedie is called ▶ “Why Work? What Does Philosophy (Not) Tell Us About Worker Motivation?” (Chap. 56). Tweedie begins his argument by pointing out the limitations of a social science-based account of motivation. At best, the social science-based explanation treats questions of motivation as a means to an end but is not focused on the ends that humans pursue. The ends are assumed to be the ends of the organization. Human flourishing is not considered as an end worth discussing. Because it explores questions of ends, philosophy allows for an understanding of these ends. The role of work in human flourishing becomes central to the organization of work and to the work of organizations. In contrast to critical organizational theory, the author argues that philosophy is not only a critique of work but enables an appreciation of both sides of work: “work as a burden we would rather not bear,” and work as something that lures us and allows for self-expression. Tweedie then proceeds to demonstrate how the discipline of philosophy enables asking questions that look not only at the means but the ends as well. He does this in the context of three philosophers: Aristotle, Arendt, and Honneth. Through a rereading of Aristotle, he shows how work is part of human flourishing, which, for Aristotle, is the end to which the human being aspires. For Aristotle, the author claims, flourishing is achieved when we exercise “capacities that serve our natural purpose.” Flourishing expresses what we do rather than what we have. Flourishing occurs in the context of realizing our potential. The greater the realization of our potential, the greater the flourishing. In regards to Arendt, the author points out the alienating nature of work under capitalism, and so work is not seen as an expression of self. If anything, work is a form of repression. He goes on to say that Arendt makes a distinction between work and labor. It seems that whereas labor is alienating, work is an expression of freedom and creativity. Arendt comes to refine her view of the relationship between work and labor. Labor, she claims, does offer the opportunity for the expression of joy. Because, through labor, the human being operates on material reality, it offers a properly human form of satisfaction.

52

Philosophy in Management Practice and Education: An Introduction

955

In contrast to Aristotle and Arendt, Honneth offers the opportunity for identifying the social dimension of work. The social dimension of work is expressed through recognition. Recognition is required for the full expression of our human subjectivity. Recognition lies in the sense of esteem that is experienced in the activity of work. Such esteem and recognition is the basis of a stable and independent self. The author concludes by showing how Human Resource Management definitions of work are limited to the notion of motivation which serves the interests of the organization. In contrast, a philosophical understanding of work understands work as a good for the human being. Philosophers allow for an understanding of the dual face of work as a burden but also as a condition of human flourishing. Philosophy allows for an understanding of work that is crucial to social formations. The chapter by Caspersz and Leung, entitled ▶ “Informing Educational Approaches to PRME Using Foucault” (Chap. 57), uses two dimensions of Foucault’s philosophy to highlight different ways of relating to the United Nations’ Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME). In the first part of the chapter, the authors demonstrate how ways of implementing PRME underpin the values that PRME stands for. They do this by showing how many ways of using PRME imprison the subject or, to put it in Foucault’s terms, individuals become subjectivities governed by PRME. Being governed by PRME means making sure the practices and routines of education conform to the norms of PRME. We conduct our ways in the ways prescribed by PRME, monitoring and policing our own way of living to ensure that we live up to the principles of PRME. In order to transform from being governed by PRME to a free relation to PRME and to the use of PRME as a reflective practice, the authors suggest that universities should focus on a second dimension of Foucault’s philosophy. This is the notion of caring for the self. Through caring for the self, students are enabled to make sense of the way in which PRME is governing their subjectivity. By understanding what is governing their subjectivity, they reclaim the authorship of their subjectivity. They are also able to open up a different way of relating to PRME. The central form of taking care of the self is a return to the Socratic notion of “know thyself.” It is through a range of Foucauldian practices of ethics that subjects can transform their subjectivity. Foucault’s ethics of practice are outlined as techniques for developing the opportunity to take care of the self. These techniques of ethics are all forms of transforming the self by the exercising of the self on itself. The authors conclude that by developing a care of the self through caring for others, they will have a free relationship to PRME instead of being dominated by it. The final chapter of this section, authored by Jarvis and Nikolova, is entitled ▶ “Educating Business Students About Kant and Dignity for a Theory of Businessin-Society” (Chap. 58). This chapter outlines Kant’s moral philosophy as a basis for business ethics. It explains how Kantian concepts of judgment and his practices of developing judgment enable moral maturity, or what the essay calls an “enlarged mentality.” “Enlarged mentalities” are those that allow for the development of a “dignity threshold.” A “dignity threshold” is one in which “people are treated as ends rather than means.” The authors point out that this line of reasoning is the basis for Kant’s categorical imperative. Accordingly, Kant claimed that being able to imagine

956

S. Segal

seeing one’s own morality from the perspective of others is the basis for developing a dignity threshold and thus a view of others as ends in themselves. Reflection on one’s own views from the imagined perspective of others is a crucial part of developing an enlarged mentality. Such thinking requires the subject to think for themselves. Having elaborated on Kant’s theoretical concepts, the authors turn to apply Kant’s views in practice. They have developed a role-play activity that allows participants to experience themselves as managers and employees. Most relevant for this handbook is that the role play creates the space in which those playing the role of managers come to see that they tend to treat employees as means and the employees tend to experience themselves as means. Furthermore, this experience of themselves as means rather than ends has a strong emotional tone to it. The managers in the role play tend to feel stressed as they become aware of treating others as means. The employees tend to feel angry at being treated as means rather than ends. The more each is able to reflect on themselves through the gaze of the other, the more moral development occurs. The felt sense of the lived experience of playing respective roles creates a framework through which students find themselves in a reflective space in which to appreciate the significance of ethics, and thus come to reflect on ethics in an emotionally alive way. Their own assumptions about ethics start to pop out. Finally, the authors claim that they have developed access to Kant as a thinker about morality that emphasizes a reading of the subjective being of morality. They bring out the way in which Kant’s work can be used as a philosophical process for reflecting on action. By drawing all these chapters together, the Philosophy in Management Practice and Education section illustrates how a range of philosophies can be used to reflect and be reflexive in the context of a range of different professional and everyday life contexts.

Cross-References ▶ Educating Business Students about Kant and Dignity for a Theory of Business-inSociety ▶ Informing Educational Approaches to PRME Using Foucault ▶ The Organization of Philosophy and a Philosophy of Organizations ▶ Weeding the Management Garden: Hume’s Fork and Action Nominalism at Work ▶ What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian Philosopher ▶ Why Work? What Does Philosophy (Not) Tell Us About Worker Motivation?

References Alvesson M, Sandberg J (2011) Generating research questions through problematization. Academy of Management Review, 36(2):247–271 Bauman Z (1990) Modernity and ambivalence. In: Featherstone M (ed) Global culture: nationalism, globalization and modernity. Sage, London

52

Philosophy in Management Practice and Education: An Introduction

957

Bourdieu P (1988) Homo academicus. Stanford University Press, Redwood City CA Christensen LT, Kärreman D, Rasche A (2019) Bullshit and organization studies. Organ Stud 40: 1587–1600 Gellner E (1964) Thought and change. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London Heidegger M (1948) What is metaphysics. In: Brock W (ed) Existence and being. Regnery/ Gateway, Indianapolis Johnson S (2007) What do you do for a living? A bold new vision for leaders. Hardie Grant, Richmond Kuhn TS (1970) The structure of scientific revolutions (2nd edition). Chicago, University of Chicago Press Plato (1968) The republic. Penguin Books, London Rorty R (1980) Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, UK Segal S (2015) Management practice and creative destruction: existential skills for inquiring managers, researchers and educators. Gower Publishing, Farnham Todres L (2007) Embodied enquiry: Phenomenological touchstones for research, psychotherapy and spirituality. Springer, Cham

Weeding the Management Garden: Hume’s Fork and Action Nominalism at Work

53

Robert Spillane

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Management and Authority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language and Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Philosophical Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nominalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hume’s Fork . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Weeding the Management Garden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

960 962 965 966 966 973 977 978 979 979

Abstract

In this chapter, it is argued that management is a relationship based on rational authority – or reasoned elaboration – and its main vehicle is argumentation. Authoritarian management, on the other hand, is based on a rejection of argumentation in favor of base rhetoric in the form of management jargon. If managers aspire to authoritative status by criticizing the obfuscating jargon and pretentious nonsense that characterizes much management discourse, the study of philosophy is especially indicated. Philosophers can provide the tools by which hundreds of pages of meaningless jargon can be reduced to a few pages of truth-bearing propositions. Two important tools in this endeavor are nominalism and Hume’s Fork. “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein) R. Spillane (*) Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_3

959

960

R. Spillane

Keywords

Management jargon · Authority · Authoritarianism · Action nominalism · Hume’s Fork

Introduction “As brands build out a world footprint, they look for the no-holds-barred global POV [poverty overview] that’s always been part of our wheelhouse” (Rob Stone, co-CEO, Cornerstone). “In the wholesale channel, Burberry exited doors not aligned with brand status and invested in presentation through both enhanced assortments and dedicated, customised real estate in key doors” (Angela Ahrendts). “We’ll wake the world up and move the planet a little closer to the future” (John Chambers, CEO, Cisco). These examples of management jargon come from Lucy Kellaway (2017) who has studied the way managers cavalierly mix cliché, metaphor, platitudes, and tortured syntax to say nothing. And Chambers, she claims, used plain words and simple syntax to produce a most egregious piece of bullshit. One can only agree with her, “going forward.” Variously described as “bureaucratese,” “guff,” “rot,” “wank words,” “weasel words,” “twaddle,” and “tosh,” management jargon has been compared with George Orwell’s “newspeak” as the language of authoritarian manipulation. As such, it “makes the bad seem good, the negative appear positive, and the unpleasant appear attractive or at least tolerable” (Lutz 1989: 1). It is a hybrid language of euphemisms, jargon, platitudes, and abstractions that are meaningless, pretentious, and pompous (Watson 2006). Similar accusations have been leveled at sociological, psychological, and philosophical jargon. In Social Sciences as Sorcery (1974), Andreski asks why social scientists, whose work is supposed to explain ourselves to ourselves, write in such inexplicable, inextricable prose? His thesis is that lack of originality, if expressed in pretentious and pompous terms, is treated as evidence of the writer’s profundity. What is particularly dismaying is that not only does the flood of publications reveal an abundance of pompous bluff and a paucity of new ideas, but even the old and valuable insights which we have inherited from our illustrious ancestors are being drowned in a torrent of meaningless and useless technicalities. Pretentious and nebulous verbosity, interminable repetition of platitudes and disguised propaganda are the order of the day. (Andreski 1974: 11)

Andreski’s targets were mainly American sociologists, but his criticisms apply also to the jargon of psychology, known as psychobabble.

53

Weeding the Management Garden: Hume’s Fork and Action Nominalism at Work

961

Psychobabble is an idiom in which it is increasingly difficult to indicate either satisfaction or dissatisfaction; it resembles the tranquilizing political rhetoric or campaign promises more closely than it does the medium of honest exchange it purports to be. It is a mode of confession that confesses nothing with a price on its head; it is, to use the phrase of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, le mot vide – empty words. (Rosen 1977: 206)

One of the most salient features of our time, according to Harry Frankfurt, is the proliferation of bullshit. And it seems that most people agree with him since his short philosophical essay, On Bullshit, appeared on the best-seller list of the New York Times for 27 weeks. Frankfurt argues that the contemporary proliferation of bullshit developed out of the various forms of skepticism, which deny reality, facts, and truth. Bullshitters disdain argument and debate since they reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. By ignoring truth, they differ from liars because it is impossible for people to lie unless they think they know the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose. (Frankfurt 2005: 56)

It is common knowledge that business and government workplaces are infected with what Watson (2004) calls “weasel words, contemporary clichés, cant and obfuscating jargon.” It is clear from these examples that there is something seriously wrong with the language of management. Clearly, there is some powerful force at work disposing managers and those around them to inflict significant damage on the English language. This force is so undiscriminating that it has taken seriously the tortured syntax, pleonasms, tautologies, metaphors, oxymora, and nonsensical propositions of innumerable management writers (Micklethwait and Wooldridge 1996). When we read typical passages from the management literature, and listen to managers themselves, it is clear that something has gone fearfully wrong with their thinking. But what exactly is it that is wrong with management rhetoric? In The Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle (2004) insisted that to be effective rhetoric must be combined with dialectic – valid reasoning. And here managers confront a perennial problem: how to supplement their rhetoric with valid reasoning? This is a demanding task since history tells us that human reasoning is obviously flawed: it has a fatal tendency to believe – or believe in – myths, gods, spirits, devils, witches, ghosts, prophets and on, and on. For any kind of nonsense believers can be found. The main way to get to the heart of the problem would seem to be to educate people to use stricter criteria for what they are prepared to believe.

962

R. Spillane

That something is seriously wrong with philosophical thinking specifically, and human thinking generally, is the basic proposition of logical positivism. Logical positivists acknowledged three ways in which thinking can go wrong: contingent falsity, self-contradiction, and meaninglessness, of which more below. Although this school of philosophy is now regarded as passé and condemned by postmodernists, the logical positivists to their credit at least tried to provide linguistic criteria for clear thinking. They provided a collection of rules and criteria for evaluating the kind of statements about the world that deserve the name of knowledge and norms that make it possible to distinguish between what questions may reasonably be asked (Kolakowski 1972). Managers raised on a diet of Machiavelli would no doubt ponder why they should concern themselves with truth or reason. Is not their authority based on power so that they are obliged to use language in the service of power? This is a valid question since any discussion of management rhetoric presupposes a set of values by which it is judged. According to the ancient Greeks, rhetoric should be judged according to its “nobility.” The characterization of rhetoric as noble or base depends on whether the speaker or writer is judged to influence others toward what is good or what is bad, a judgement that will differ according to the values of those who render it. Weaver (1985) identifies noble rhetoricians as those who use language to encourage individuals to speak clearly, think for themselves, and reason validly. Base rhetoricians, on the other hand, use jargon to confuse and intimidate people in order to increase their own power and produce uncritical disciples. The persuasive element in management relationships is what qualifies managers’ actions as fundamentally rhetorical. Managers use rhetoric to signal their intentions clearly or ambiguously, describe their situation truthfully or falsely, argue validly or invalidly, offer technical advice or issue commands. If we accept Weaver’s distinction between noble and base rhetoric, then efficient signaling, true describing, valid arguing, and authoritative (as opposed to authoritarian) communicating is the mark of noble rhetoric. Furthermore, if Weaver is correct management is grounded on rational authority.

Management and Authority “Management” is an abstract noun and lacks the kind of physical referent we associate with concrete nouns. In this strict sense, there is no such “thing” as management. It is understandable (but incorrect) that many people consider management to be what managers do. This view is almost universal in management education where teachers attend to the qualities of managers and offer prescriptions for success in the practice of managing (influencing, motivating, controlling, manipulating) others. Management, however, is a relational word and refers to an irreducible element in the interaction of managers and the people they manage: the anchor points between which the concept has its meaning. There is no way in which the relationship

53

Weeding the Management Garden: Hume’s Fork and Action Nominalism at Work

963

between managers and their colleagues can be analyzed in terms of component relationships. Management is not the sum of managers’ actions, let alone their putative personalities. While management overlaps with other relationships between parties, such as influence, persuasion, conformity, and obedience, these may be present and management absent. While these relational concepts demand attention, and have been studied extensively by social psychologists, management is a relationship based on rational authority. By rational authority I mean what Friedrich (1972) calls “reasoned elaboration” whose vehicle is argumentation. Unlike power, which is connected with the ability to make things happen, rational authority is connected with rights and duties. The authority of managers involves the right to direct power for productive purposes, and this involves them in the search for people who possess reliable knowledge. When managers use knowledge for the benefit of others we are justified in calling their actions rational. And when colleagues grant them the right to use such knowledge, their assent is likewise rational. The assent is rational because it replaces the ineffective applications of knowledge with effective ones. As managers cannot grant authority to themselves, their power is therefore dependent on their abilities to mobilize the activities of others and this is dependent on the extent to which authority is conceded to them. The power attributed to managers is conditional on this concession and is defined and circumscribed by such concessions. Following Aristotle, the Romans thought of authority as a “double power” of introducing important matters and bringing them to a conclusion through argumentation. Auctor and auctoritas referred to producing, inventing, and causing things to happen in the sphere of public opinion or organizational leadership. Authority thus supplements an act of will by adding reasons to it. Authority is, therefore, more than advice, yet less than command. It is advice which cannot reasonably be disregarded, such as the expert gives to the layperson. In the authority relationship, the communication requesting support is recognized as being supported by reasons why the action is a desirable one. When there are good reasons for doing or believing something, such action or thinking becomes “authoritative.” In fact, it is this field of rhetoric which constitutes the ‘field’ of authority. Whenever logical proof cannot be offered – the usual situation in [management] – reasoning must rely upon authority. It is, I believe, the reason for Aristotle’s concern with rhetoric that in a democratic or constitutional order (polity) people must be convinced of the right course of action by reasoning, and since logical proof cannot be offered, it becomes vital to understand and practice the art of authoritative reasoning. . .. (Friedrich 1972: 48)

Although much institutionalized power is maintained without managers offering reasons to support their directions, authority is a source of power rather than a form of power. Authoritative managers offer valid reasons for a proposed course of action. However, as Friedrich points out, the true nature of authority is obscured by the pejorative term “authoritarian” which does not refer to someone possessing

964

R. Spillane

authority, but to someone pretending to do so. It is important, therefore, to be clear about the difference between authoritative management based on rational authority and authoritarian management based on irrational authority or power. Martin and Ray (1974) show that agreement with anti-rational authority statements is positively related to measures of emotional instability and negatively related to socioeconomic status, level of education, and measured intelligence. Now it is well known that authoritarianism is negatively related to intelligence, education, and socioeconomic class and positively related to ethnic prejudice and political conservatism (Spillane and Martin 2005). What is of prime importance is whether the authority to which one defers has or has not clams to rational support. Rejecting the rational kind and accepting the irrational kind of authority are, according to Martin and Ray, equally indicative of personal inadequacy. In this connection, the relationship with intelligence is interesting. Agreement with irrational authority and rejection of rational authority are both negatively related to intelligence, which means that people of low intelligence are likely to accept irrational authority and reject rational authority, so that they fail to discriminate between what is rational and what is not. It follows that people who reject all forms of rationality fail to distinguish authoritarian from authoritative statements. Accordingly, they are bound to reject all authority figures, or at least regard them with suspicion. Historically, this attitude was laughed off as merely an adolescent affectation, as indeed it is. Friedrich argues, rightly, that without rationality – thinking according to reason – civilization is impossible. We might add that management without reasoning is authoritarianism by another name, since it relies on power rather than authority (in Friedrich’s sense). The effectiveness of authority, then, depends on its acceptance and the minimum conditions for this are that reasons can be weighed by the persons to whom the code is to apply. This implies some form of open discussion that these persons can follow; open discussion requires, at a minimum, two parties. Hence, the political convention which gives a government party and at least one opposition party the right to debate laws of the land rests on a reasonable appreciation of the minimum conditions for development of authority, both in its legitimized and internalized aspects. As an aside, it is what renders “political correctness” an oxymoron in a democracy where opposition to government pronouncements is mandatory. Stalin was the perfect exemplar of “political correctness.” The contempt for reasoned elaboration and for what people think about the rules is the recognized mark of the martinet and the dictator. Lying behind these authoritarian characteristics psychologists have detected a powerful psychological resistance to change, as if the powers of adaptation were rejected on principle (Spillane and Martin 2005). In such a condition, managers are dangerous, both to themselves and others, because they will use power to enforce “authority,” and this will surely lead to its decay as a source of psychological control and a greater dependence on the only possible substitute, coercion. It is significant that authoritarians are characterized by patterns of symptoms sufficiently stereotyped to suggest that the power of adaptation is more limited than is normal, and it is an integral feature of this syndrome that they can rarely be induced to change through reasoning. This is supported by the many studies which

53

Weeding the Management Garden: Hume’s Fork and Action Nominalism at Work

965

have shown a significant negative correlation between authoritarianism and intelligence. Closely related to intelligence is the capacity to acquire skills – that is adaptability. We have, therefore, reasonable grounds to hypothesize that the more intelligent managers will be capable of reasoned elaboration. Whether they choose to manage authoritatively by reasoned elaboration is, of course, another matter. Reasoning means the ability to argue validly about relevant matters. Obviously, authoritative communications will not always be accepted by everyone who is party to them since arguments do not necessarily convince, irrespective of their validity. Nonetheless, authoritative communications are judged capable of reasoned elaboration and what counts as reasonable elaboration is dependent on the beliefs, values, and intelligence of those to whom the arguments are directed. Managers who have “lost their authority” have lost power since the authority of their communications has disintegrated either because they have ceased to engage in reasoned elaboration or because the values of the institution have changed. Those managers who engage in reasoned elaboration can be said, therefore, to continue the tradition of Western rationalism. In short, managers’ values are betrayed by their language.

Language and Values Extending the work of his teacher Karl Bühler, Popper (1972) proposed the doctrine of the four functions of language: the expressive function which consists of an outward expression of an inner state; the signal function which aims to elicit a reaction from others; the descriptive function which involves statements that are true or false; and the argumentative function which is the giving of reasons for holding a particular view. Popper arranged these four functions in a hierarchy because signaling entails expression, describing entails expression and signaling, and arguing is about descriptions. An argument serves as an expression since it is an outward symptom of an internal state of a person. It is also a signal (or communication) since it may provoke a response in another. Insofar as it is about something or someone it is descriptive. Popper showed that these functions of language correspond to human values: self-expression is revealing or concealing, signaling is efficient or inefficient, descriptions are true or false, arguments are valid or invalid. It is through arguments that managers can become aware of opportunities to choose, challenge experts and those who attempt to coerce them. Argument enables managers to weigh and choose among the many behavioral and linguistic alternatives available to them in their interactions with others. Popper argued that if people are to develop psychologically and intellectually, they have to pass from a dogmatic to a critical phase of thinking. This involves them in trial and error learning based on risk-taking (trials) and the willingness to modify thinking and behavior when they are found to be inappropriate (error elimination). For Popper, heteronomy is synonymous with dogmatism, autonomy with critical thinking. Insofar as managers seek to engage in relationships that are free of coercion, they find that

966

R. Spillane

argument acts as a bulwark against heteronomy. Arguing and questioning make it more difficult for managers to ground their relationships on domination and submission since they can reject theories and hypotheses rather than the people who propose them. Clearly, managers can argue for ignoble reasons: to obfuscate and confuse colleagues. Indeed, it may appear to be nothing more than a vehicle for managers to demonstrate their verbal skills. However, if the purpose of argument is to free managers from coercion then the argumentative function of language is the basis for the reasoned elaboration which underpins managerial authority. Popper is rightly critical of those people who ignore the higher functions of language in their explanations of human behavior, preferring to describe problems in human relations as “problems of communication.” This seems to be due to the fact that the two lower functions are always present when the higher ones are present, so that it is always possible to “explain” every human problem in terms of the lower functions, as an “expression” or a “communication.” Managers who encourage and reinforce the expressive and signaling functions of language are susceptible to Popper’s criticism. By viewing language merely as an expression of feelings and communication they devalue descriptions and argument. Popper believes that this tactic is disastrous. For if all linguistic behavior is seen merely as an expression and communication, one neglects the fact that through language we make true and false statements and produce valid and invalid arguments. Management, then, is a relationship between authoritative individuals who are willing and able to engage in valid reasoning and critical debate. If managers want to criticize and eliminate obfuscating jargon and pretentious nonsense, the study of philosophy is especially indicated. It is a curious historical fact that philosophy has not been regarded as a suitable candidate for inclusion in MBA degrees. While psychology, under different names, is widely accepted as a bona fide MBA subject, philosophy has been set aside. This is curious since psychology, and all the academic disciplines, are parasitical upon philosophy. If what is important in any explanatory framework is not what it explains, but what it assumes, it is to philosophy that we turn for arguments about first principles, foundational assumptions, and the validity of reasoning therefrom. Philosophers can provide the tools and knowledge by which hundreds of pages of meaningless jargon can be reduced to a few pages of truth-bearing propositions. Two tools by which this can be achieved are nominalism and Hume’s Fork.

Philosophical Background Nominalism Diogenes Laertius (1965) tells us that when Plato invited Diogenes the Cynic to his home for dinner, argument was the main course. As Plato was conversing about his timeless, spaceless, eternal Forms and using such abstractions as tablehood and

53

Weeding the Management Garden: Hume’s Fork and Action Nominalism at Work

967

cuphood, Diogenes replied that while he could see table and cup he could not see tablehood and cuphood. Unfazed, Plato told him that while he had the eyes to see the visible table and cup, he lacked the understanding by which ideal tablehood and cuphood are discerned. Here is an early version of the debate between idealists and nominalists. For the next 900 years such debates continued until Justinian closed the Greek schools in 529 AD. For another 1000 years philosophy made no significant advance. However, interest in natural science led, in the thirteenth century, to attempts at interpreting it philosophically. Roger Bacon advocated controlled experimentation as a condition of knowledge and thereby contributed to the growing tendency to eliminate Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics from the study of nature. These tendencies led to widespread skepticism which contributed to the disintegration, in the fourteenth century, of medieval philosophy. One consequence of the growing skepticism of the era was the doctrine of nominalism. Nominalism is the view which states that we may not assume that any insight formulated in general terms can have any real referents other than individual concrete objects. Consequently, nominalists reject Plato’s theory of the forms and all abstract objects. Nominalists are adamant that we have the right to acknowledge the existence of things only when experience obliges us to do so. The sciences are methods of abridging the recording of experiences and give us no extra knowledge: all the famous abstract scientific creations are fictions because they illegitimately ascribe existence to things that do not exist, except as names. Nominalism became popular in the fourteenth century and was vigorously promoted by William of Ockham (1957), whose fame is due to his razor with which he cut through philosophical verbiage. Ockham’s razor says that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. Experience is our guide and descriptions of our world should coincide with our perceptions of it. Consequently, his doctrine ruled out natural theology which attempted rationally to confirm religious truths without revelation. He concluded that religious truths are derived from faith alone and defended the separation of secular knowledge from religious beliefs. The gap between faith and reason was, in the next centuries, to widen even further. Ockham’s main targets were Plato’s and Aristotle’s use of misleading and metaphorical language and his Scholastic contemporaries who believed that universals are the essence of things. According to Ockham, universals, like Justice and Courage, do not exist apart from human language. Knowledge is of particulars and cannot go beyond our perception of concrete things. We are cut off from metaphysical truths because there is no necessary correspondence between things and the words we use to describe them. Universals (e.g., Courage) are not real entities; they are merely names representing nothing that exists apart from the words themselves. There are humans who share certain qualities (i.e., act courageously) but there is no such thing as Courage. Along with universals, nominalists ruled out all spiritual entities as objects of rational knowledge and consigned them to the realm of faith. However, their philosophy also ruled out “matter” and so led to a revival of the ancient philosophy of sensationalism, which rejected both matter and soul in favor of sensations and ideas about sensations.

968

R. Spillane

Sensationalism, under the name of phenomenalism, was to become the foundational rule for empirical and positivistic philosophers in the eighteenth century to the present. Phenomenalism is a theory of perception and the rule of phenomenalism states that there are no real differences between “essence” and “phenomenon.” As we can study only that which appears to us we are entitled to record only that which is manifested in experience. Accordingly, statements about physical objects ultimately mean the same as statements about perceptions or experiences and can therefore be translated by them without loss of meaning. Assumptions about occult qualities which may or may not lie behind (above, below, beyond) phenomena are rejected, and statements about such qualities are considered to be not false, but meaningless. When we disagree over questions that go beyond human experience (the existence of god, soul, or self, for example), we engage in purely verbal disputes. Ockham insisted that it is impossible to proceed from perceptions of the facts of the natural world to any necessary spiritual conclusions. The best that we can aspire to is knowledge based on perception of the world and tautological statements. There are no facts to support the existence of invisible entities, occult substances, first causes, and the like. We perceive a world of individual things and relationships between them. In this way, we learn about reality. But there is more to knowledge than mere sensation since we possess intellectual knowledge as well. Sensation tells us that a thing exists; the intellect allows us to recognize it and all perception requires both factors. Reason is a powerful tool so long as it confines itself to the data of human experience, but Ockham rejected the idea that the human mind knows things by rationally grasping their underlying form, or through some interior illumination. In this way, nominalists joined forces with empiricists to challenge ancient and medieval rationalism. The marriage of faith and reason, successfully consummated long ago, was facing divorce. Believing that the world of inner experience is directly perceived and better known than the objects of the natural world, Ockham moved in the direction of skepticism. Referring to Augustine in the fourth century, and anticipating Descartes in the seventeenth, he argued that while anyone can doubt the objects of external perception, no one can doubt his own existence – Si fallor, sum, “If I am deceived, I exist.” Since he could doubt the existence of matter, he concluded that his spiritual soul must be the foundation of his existence. But this compromised his nominalism and left the door open to spiritualism. Although he had in his hands a powerful tool for weeding the medieval garden, he was insufficiently radical with it. Whether for cynical or sincere reasons, Ockham professed belief in soul, ideas, and thoughts when his nominalism should have rejected them as empty abstractions. Nonetheless, the consequences of fourteenth-century nominalism were far-reaching. Natural theology became less important as religious beliefs were left to faith rather than rational demonstration. Another important nominalist was Thomas Hobbes who, in Leviathan, warned readers of the dangers of the misuse of language.

53

Weeding the Management Garden: Hume’s Fork and Action Nominalism at Work

969

For words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other Doctor whatsoever, if but a man. (Hobbes 1996: 28–29)

As an empiricist Hobbes maintained that all knowledge is acquired through sense-experience. As a materialist he was committed to the view that everything that exists is composed of matter, and humans can have no idea of the immaterial. Such concepts as “soul,” “eternal,” and “spirit” are gibberish. As a nominalist he rejected universals, Platonic Forms, and other abstractions. The word “universal” is never the name of anything in nature, but always a mere word or name; when, say, a stone is said to be universal, it is not to be understood that any stone ever was or can be universal, but only that the word “stone” is a universal name, i.e., a name common to many stones. Nouns, such as “man,” “mind,” “belief,” “value,” “thought,” and “feeling” are not concrete; they are abstractions and do not refer to things. Hobbes insisted that words which do not refer to anything beyond themselves are absurd, insignificant, and nonsensical. Hobbes believed that, compared with animals, we engage in the privilege of absurdity in the ways we use and abuse language. Nature cannot err; but between true science and the erroneous doctrines of religionists and philosophers we find ignorance on a grand scale. It is language that we use to make fools of ourselves because with language we can become wise, foolish, or mad. As reason is a function of language, so is unreason. Mad people are, therefore, not people who have “lost” their reason but people who reason invalidly. For Hobbes, the abuse of language is a form of madness. Idiots are not mad since they are ill-educated, but many educated people who abuse words are mad or seek to render others mad. Citing examples from Plato’s dialogues and the Scholastics’ books, Hobbes wondered why men write volumes of such stuff if not to send others into states of bewilderment. Unsurprisingly, he concluded that scientific facts are no panacea for psychological problems and given the widespread misuse of nonscientific language, it is difficult to maintain that sanity is the norm. The philosophes of the eighteenth century exempted from Hobbes’s verdict the ancient Greek mathematicians and natural science after Copernicus since this was the ground on which the Enlightenment (and later logical positivism) took its stand. But both Greek mathematics and modern science are, in the overall historical scene, mere points of light in a boundless and impenetrable darkness. Most of even the highest human thought is what David Hume said religion is: ‘sick men’s dreams.’ By contrast, rational thought – what Hume called the ‘calm sunshine of the mind’ – is historically rare, local and ephemeral. (Stove 1991: 184)

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nominalism was embraced by positivists and their progeny. Some nominalists deny the existence of Platonic universals only, while others deny the existence of abstract objects generally but accept the existence of abstract terms and predicates. Another form of nominalism, which is defended here, is the linguistic thesis I call action nominalism: that is, sentences about minds or mental events can be translated,

970

R. Spillane

without loss of meaning, into sentences about human action. Instead of saying, “I used my mind to lower my blood pressure,” an action nominalist says, “I acted in a way that lowered my blood pressure.” Action nominalists insist that abstract nouns should not be reified and thereby treated as if they are concrete nouns. Indeed, they prefer to deal as little as possible with nouns, favoring verbs and adverbs. So, for example, they reject the notion of a thing called a mind while affirming the existence of human minding. We mind steps, shops, and babies, but we do not possess a thing called a mind. Therefore, action nominalists can say without contradiction that the “mind” is nothing over and above action: we are minded but we have no minds. Support for this view comes from the historical fact that before the sixteenth century “mind” was used only as a verb (Szasz 1996). People had souls: they did not have minds. Today, “mind” is used as a verb and an abstract noun, even though it is generally treated as if it is a concrete noun. Mind (from the Latin mens) means intention or conscious will which implies agency, thus reflecting its status as a verb. Minding is possible only if we can attend and adapt to our surroundings by using language to talk to others and to ourselves. Since there is no observable entity called mind, “it” cannot be in the brain or any other part of the body. To be able to mind is to be able to think – to talk to oneself. As Socrates, Montaigne, Vico, Mauthner, and many other philosophers have emphasized, thinking is a form of discourse: statements pronounced not aloud but silently to oneself. Mind is the dialogue within. Action nominalists use “mind” and “mental” to denote such capacities as attending, adapting, perceiving, and intending. But they can also be used to refer to states of consciousness – being awake and alert. As a rule, we use the word “consciousness” as a synonym for being awake and aware of our surroundings, in contrast to being asleep. Insofar as we equate mind with consciousness, Freud’s concept of unconscious mind is a metaphor squared and an oxymoron, because the mind alone is a metaphor which is conventionally defined as consciousness (Szasz 1996). If “mind” is a metaphor, it follows logically that illnesses of the mind – mental illnesses – are metaphorical illnesses. If they are metaphorical illnesses, they are not real illnesses, and so they are fake illnesses. It follows that minds can be “sick” only in the way that jokes are “sick.” Action nominalists maintain that mental illness is not something people have, but is something they do or say. When they assert that mental illness is metaphorical illness, they are not denying the facts of personal unhappiness and socially deviant behavior. Rather, they are saying that we incorrectly categorize them as real illnesses. And when psychiatrists claim that mental illnesses are in fact brain illnesses, they need a shave with Ockham’s razor. Logically, it makes no sense to have two categories – brain illness and mental illness – if one is reducible to the other. If mental illnesses are fake illnesses, mental illness is a myth. A myth is not merely a fairy-story, however, but the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idiom appropriate to another. To explode a myth is not to deny the facts but to reallocate them. In (1949) Gilbert Ryle attempted to do this with respect to “mind” in

53

Weeding the Management Garden: Hume’s Fork and Action Nominalism at Work

971

his justly famous book The Concept of Mind and in (1961) Thomas Szasz attempted the same thing on the related topic of mental illness in The Myth of Mental Illness.

A Nominalist Approach to the Language of Management Managers not only reify “mind,” they also treat thoughts, feelings, values, motives, and ideas as concrete nouns. And when managerial psychologists insist that there are thoughts, feelings, values, motives, and ideas “in the mind,” they are talking nonsense. As action is represented by verbs, action nominalists challenge managers to replace abstract nouns, like “change” and “management,” with the verbs “to (ex) change” and to “manage.” Instead of talking about “change management” (an abstraction squared), managers would do well to use action language and thus talk about changing x for y. It is obvious that one cannot change: one exchanges x for y. Until one knows the x and the y, discussions of “change management” are meaningless and usually rely on pretentious and obfuscating jargon, supported by boxes and arrows, in the belief that something tangible is being offered. As managers are supposed to be concerned about objective performance, action nominalism has important implications for performance appraisal since it encourages them to reject such abstractions as personality, psychological needs, attitudes, beliefs, values, feelings, and other imaginary internal forces. For example, the word “personality” was originally an adjective. In law whoever counted as a person had a personality as a property. Today people claim to be a personality which implies that there is something which is their personality. This has led to the further assumption that personality can be measured. Many managers act on the assumption that people can be understood by reducing their personalities to specific traits and measuring them. This popular policy, called reductionism, has encouraged managers to use personality tests to understand their colleagues’ actions. Yet decades of research studies have shown that personality test scores do not predict managerial performance (Spillane 2017). Action nominalists will have nothing to do with this dubious logic. Personality assessment is based on tests that derive their status from the statistical analysis of “inner powers” or “theoretical constructs.” How the theoretical constructs get their power is never explained. Rather, we are told that a manager works hard because of “ambition,” enters into illegal activities because of “greed,” or motivates colleagues because of “leadership qualities.” However, there is no reason to believe that managers have “ambition” in the way they have indigestion. All that is available by way of evidence is the behavior attributed to the trait. Psychological motives and personality traits are inferences based on observable behavior which are then magically granted causative power. To assume, for example, that introverted behavior is caused by a trait called “introversion” is as invalid as claiming that people act intelligently because of their high IQ. Such explanations are viciously circular. The same illogic applies to the psychological needs popularized by Maslow (1954). In ordinary language, a need is something that is necessary for a specifiable end. We rarely bother to nominate the end, leaving it to be understood.

972

R. Spillane

Thus we say: “I need fluid,” leaving it to be understood that the alternative is to die. The full sense is: “I need fluid if I am to go on living.” It is clear, therefore, that in ordinary speech having a need is also to have an end in view, whose accomplishment is contingent on the fulfillment of the expressed need. Thus, one cannot have a need for its own sake. Needs neither exist in vacuo, nor for that matter, in viscera. When we talk about needs in this way, we understand that certain needs are more persistent than others, so that we think food is more important than a car. This hints at an order of necessity such that one could rank everything that people ever need from the things that are necessary to those less important. But this will not do. Things are necessary to the accomplishment of ends strictly in relation to the situation in which people find themselves. Food is essential for the maintenance of life, but in some situations an antibiotic drug is more vital still, and we can easily imagine a situation where life or death turns on something which is at other times trivial, like the material used for a tourniquet. Consequently, no fixed hierarchy can be applied to necessity independent of the ends in view. It has to be admitted that psychologists have signally failed to solve the problem of human motivation. The term is widely used in academic, managerial, and popular psychology, where it carries different meanings. In the first two cases, it refers to a motive force as in physics, while in the third case it is used as a synonym for ambition of greed. Its function as a motive force in managerial psychology cannot be counted as a success since it turns out to be either circular or a metaphor for purpose. Ethically, the idea of motive-as-cause has been useful in allowing people to deny their power of choice and thus their personal responsibility. If, as Drucker (1977) argued, the ultimate test of management is performance – the achievement of actual results – we might expect that management discourse would be dominated by action words – verbs. Moreover, verbs are “purposive” words and point to specific goals. For instance, we use the verb “chase” rather than “run” if we can observe a person running for a particular purpose, in this case to catch a thief. Of course, action nominalists do not infer that there are purposes, or inner powers, over and above the actual physical movements. Instead of talking about inner powers, they talk about activities by means of verbs. Management experience is about activity and change and thus is verb-like. Accordingly, verbs and adverbs are more important in describing management experience than are nouns. And since managers are concerned with qualities, adjectives serve them far better than abstract nouns. It is a constant challenge to convince managers that they should not treat abstract nouns as if they are concrete nouns. Yet we hear managers say that their organization “expects” them to do such and such, or the management team “believes” so and so. Arguably, reification of this type has caused more confusion in management than any other misuse of language. Moreover, managers delight in talking and writing in half sentences. So we hear them say that they believe in excellence, but they do not tell us with respect to what. We are told that their organization believes in commitment, but they give us no clue as to what “it” is committed to. Clearly, organizations cannot believe in anything. HR managers are confronted with employees who say they are depressed but do not

53

Weeding the Management Garden: Hume’s Fork and Action Nominalism at Work

973

say what they are depressed about. Others will tell their managers that they are anxious and even claim to have “free-floating anxiety.” But one does not have anxiety: one is anxious about something or someone and it is the “aboutness” that enables managers or counsellors to help employees confront their practical and psychological problems. To paraphrase Wittgenstein (1998), there are many ways in which language goes on holidays and managers, their consultants and teachers are often their tour guides. In managerial deliberations, the issue of truth is particularly problematic. This is due, in large part, to the metaphorical nature of human language. For example, when managers describe their organization as “sick,” they become embroiled in a linguistic game in which a problem is described in an unusual idiom. It is unlikely that they would literalize the metaphor and consider treating the organization with medicine, unless “medicine” is itself a metaphor. The problem with metaphorical statements is that they are not literally true and so they are false. In the world of management where metaphors abound, discussions can quickly become confused and meaningless. When managers are characterized as coaches, team captains, motivators, mentors, father figures, friends, therapists, counsellors – metaphors all – one wonders what a simple definition of “manager” might amount to. Descriptive language, then, offers managers with many challenges: to free it of oxymora, pleonasms, and tautologies; limit the use of metaphors; emphasize verbs rather than nouns; refrain from reifying abstract nouns; and insist that colleagues talk and write in full sentences. Inevitably, disagreements emerge as managers exchange descriptions. This is the crucial point in managerial relationships because a manager’s personal hierarchy of values will influence decisively the future managerial relationships. Disagreements about descriptions can be resolved by argument or avoided by descending to expressive language – the language of feelings. And one cannot argue about personal feelings since expressive statements can be neither true nor false. In sum, action nominalism requires that descriptions of phenomena be made in terms that exclusively point to tangible events or entities. Nominalist accounts exclude calls on unobservable causes, personality traits, psychological motives, visions, minds, ideas, thoughts, values, and creativity. Instead, they rely on descriptions of such actions as wanting, minding, idealizing, thinking, valuing, and creating. Tangible terms like assets, persons, instructions, results, products, documents, and job descriptions are preferable to abstractions like personality, potential, motivation, and appropriate attitudes. Given the widespread use of abstract language in the management literature, one wonders what would be left of management studies if the rule of nominalism was applied radically.

Hume’s Fork One of the bright spots in the dark night of philosophical obfuscation is the work of eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, David Hume, an empiricist who attempted to develop rules and evaluative criteria for human knowledge.

974

R. Spillane

The impressive history of empirical philosophy, from the ancient Greeks to Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, had shown Hume that there is an important distinction to be made between “relations of ideas” (words) and “matters of fact” (perceptions) represented as analytic and synthetic propositions, respectively. Hume’s Fork, as it is known today, is a tool for identifying and eradicating nonsense from written and spoken communications. Arguably, there is no field more in need of this tool than management. The analytic-synthetic distinction is applied to statements to identify necessarily true and contingently true propositions and separate them from nonsensical propositions, which are neither true nor false. Analytic propositions are those whose negation leads to self-contradiction, which are independent of observation and experiment, which are true by definition, and which are therefore necessarily true. “Leaders influence people” is an analytic proposition, true by definition, and so necessarily, but trivially, true. Its negation, “Some leaders do not influence people” is self-contradictory. Clearly, “Leaders are tall” is not true by definition and its negation is not self-contradictory since the statement can be, and indeed is, false: if true, it is not necessarily true but contingently true. Now the problem with analytic propositions is that they are merely redundant, verbal truths and provide no information about the material world of facts; they provide only information about the meaning of words. “Charismatics have special personal qualities” is necessarily true because it is true by definition. It should be emphasized that the proposition is true even if there are no charismatics. This is also the case with propositions which contain a redundancy, such as “Managers are paid professionals.” Since “professional” entails “paid” there is an obvious redundancy in the proposition. Rather than treat the redundancy as an error or an example of illiteracy, sense can be made of it if we assume it to mean, “If managers are professionals, they are paid,” which is a necessary truth. However, the proposition is only true by virtue of the meaning of words and it is true even if managers are not, in fact, professionals. Descriptive statements which include pleonasms (a two-word phrase in which one word is redundant – “freezing cold,” “reverting back,” “ATM machine,” “four quadrants,” “kindly compassion,” “future potential,” “forward progress”) and the extended pleonasms known as tautologies are trivially true by definition. For example, “strategic management” is pleonastic since “strategic” means goal-directed, and managing is impossible without goal-direction, so the notion of “strategic” is redundant logically, although popular rhetorically. Logically, the redundancy is rendered acceptable by turning the statement into a hypothetical proposition: “If management is goal-directed, it is strategic (goal-directed)” and that is trivially true. Tautologies have only tautological consequences. In other words, it is impossible to deduce an empirical proposition from a tautological one. Yet, from the tautology “What will be, will be” many people have incorrectly concluded that personal effort is pointless. Since tautologies have only tautological consequences, it would be possible to write a book on management which included only tautologies. While

53

Weeding the Management Garden: Hume’s Fork and Action Nominalism at Work

975

every such proposition would be (trivially) true, the book would tell readers nothing about the facts of management. Examples of tautologies popular with managers and management authors are: “Improving staff morale is an on-going process”; “This organization will increase its standards, going forward”; “Managers may more effective if they have an MBA”; “Computers have future potential”; “Organizations are successful when they have competitive advantages”; “It is a unique offer and one that will never be repeated”; “An astute manager is able to make shrewd decisions”; “Effective managers may eventually become leaders”; “When large number of people are out of work, unemployment results”; “It is right to do your duty”; “Peter Drucker was born at an early age and died in 2005”; “She invented a new product”; “He kept it from his friends that he was a secret drinker”; “He emigrated to another country”; “Only organizations that are adapted to their environment survive”; “Managers who understand their natural tendencies have an opportunity to capitalize on the positive aspects of their tendencies”; “The loss of high-quality employees produces negative cumulative effects on performance”; “Managers behave as they are rewarded”; “If managers study philosophy long enough, they will understand it.” Synthetic propositions are “matters of fact” whose negation does not lead to self-contradiction, which are based on experience (i.e., data based on one of more of the five senses), which are not true by definition, and which when true are not necessarily true since they can, under different circumstances, be false. “All leaders are blond” is a synthetic proposition since it is either true or false. Synthetic propositions can correctly describe the material world and experience is their guarantee of truth and falsity. Examples of synthetic propositions are: “If managers study philosophy for 10 years, they will understand it”; “Psychologist, Abraham Maslow, taught psychology”; “Most managers are aggressive”; “Alfred Sloan was Chairman of General Motors between 1920 and 1960”; “Peter Drucker claimed that there is no such thing as business ethics.” Nonsensical propositions are those which are neither analytic nor synthetic. Propositions of value, such as, “Managers should be leaders” are nonsensical since they merely express personal feelings about a particular topic. Hume made a clear distinction between statements of fact (what is the case) and statements of value (what ought to be the case). He argued that in every system of morality that he had encountered authors move easily but incorrectly from statements about human nature to moral judgements – from “is” to “ought.” Hume wondered why he should accept an “ought” when it cannot be deduced from an “is.” For example, if we take the proposition, “The mind exists” and apply Hume’s Fork, we can see that it is not analytic since its negation is not self-contradictory – some psychologists do not believe in the existence of the mind. So it is possible that the mind does not exist even if this is denied by other psychologists. Yet there is no sense datum or objective evidence to which the concept of “mind” can be traced. Nor can we confirm the existence of the mind by introspection since we only encounter a collection

976

R. Spillane

of different feelings – such as pain or pleasure – which rapidly succeed each other and are in perpetual movement. The proposition that the mind exists is, therefore, nonsensical and thus meaningless. Similarly, the notion of the “self” is a victim of Hume’s Fork. The grammatical function of the word “self” is as an indicator of reflexivity. It is employed to indicate the person referred to at one point in a sentence is the same as the person referred to earlier in the sentence. For example, if we wish to amplify “She smacked her” to indicate that the “she” and “her” are one and the same, we indicate this by adding “self” to “her” – “herself.” The same is true of hyphenated compounds – “self-esteem,” “self-consciousness,” or “self-talk.” However, in everyday speech the word “self” is assumed to have a denotation of its own, as when we talk of my “better self” as if it were compatible with “my better car.” Once this assumption is accepted uncritically, reification has occurred and we are then faced with the impossible task of explaining the self. As there is no empirical evidence to support the notion of “self,” and since the negation of the proposition “The self exists” is not self-contradictory, the concept is a vacuous idea, i.e., nonsense. If someone argued that the “self” exists necessarily because it is part of the definition of a human being, Hume would respond by saying that if the sentence “The self exists” is analytical, it is tautological and tells us nothing about reality. When we use Hume’s method we ask of such a proposition as “Every effect has a cause”: is it analytic? As we have seen, this question can be answered by negating the proposition – “Some effects do not have causes,” which is plainly self-contradictory since cause and effect are relative words and are defined in terms of each other: one cannot exist without the other. The proposition is, therefore, a necessary truth. However, “Every event has a cause” is not analytic since its negation is not self-contradictory and so it is either true or false. If the proposition is neither analytic nor synthetic it is nonsensical. “Three is a lucky number” is not necessarily true and since it is not testable by empirical means, it is a nonsensical proposition. In short, Hume argued that propositions that are neither logical statements (relation of ideas) nor empirical statements (matters of fact) should be treated skeptically because they are not truth-bearing statements. While non-truth-bearing statements may appeal on rhetorical grounds, since they contain value judgements and other statements of an emotional kind, they are neither logically nor empirically grounded and so should be analyzed carefully if they are being put to unscrupulous use in management discussions. Examples of nonsensical propositions in management are: “Managers need to take the temperature of their organization”; “Effective managers have outstanding flashes of vision”; “She has many ideas in her mind”; “My manager has higher moral standards than I”; “Alfred Sloan was the best CEO General Motors had”; “Everything is subjective”; “This organization believes in excellence”; “Competitive advantages exist as tangible entities”; “Managers must take control”; “Managers should project charisma in times of uncertainty.”

53

Weeding the Management Garden: Hume’s Fork and Action Nominalism at Work

977

Weeding the Management Garden Joullié and Spillane (2015) provide several examples from the management literature of pretentious management rhetoric. For example, in his successful book Good to Great Jim Collins (2001: 5) writes: “We believe that almost any organisation can substantially improve its stature and performance, perhaps even become great, if it conscientiously applies the framework of ideas we’ve uncovered.” The various qualifiers (“almost,” “perhaps,” “conscientiously”) make the sentence analytic: if an organization does not improve its performance (let alone become great) even though it takes Collins’ advice seriously, it must be because it did not apply the book’s ideas conscientiously enough or because it was one of the few unfortunate exceptions to start with. In either case, managers be warned: the book is not at fault because the statement is tautological, which also means that it conveys no useful information about what organizations should, or should not, do. Collins is not alone among management writers in resorting, knowingly or not, to analytic statements. In Reframing Organisations, Bolman and Deal announce with a degree of grandiloquence: If an organization is overmanaged but underled, it eventually loses any sense of spirit or purpose. A poorly managed organization with a strong, charismatic leader may soar briefly only to crash shortly thereafter. Malpractice can be as damaging and unethical for managers and leaders as for physicians. Myopic managers or overzealous leaders usually harm more than just themselves. (Bolman and Deal 2003: xvi)

Well, yes; anything can happen eventually (if it has not happened yet, one only has to wait another millennium), malpractice is damaging by definition, and any organization may (or may not) soar, crash, or turn itself into a flying saucepan. Any sentence with the verbal auxiliary “may” is, by definition, necessarily true since it also implies the opposite of what it states. The liberal use of that word has become the bane of the management literature, even of that proposed by the most serious management journals. When Bolman and Deal combine it with oxymoronic expressions like “objective perspective” or “organized confusion,” catch-all phrases like “positive attitude” or empirically unverifiable value judgements and expressions of feelings, one can but sigh. Again, there are reasons for this sorry state of affairs, and Hume’s taxonomy makes it painfully obvious what they are. In an unpublished analysis of the language used by authors in articles published in 2015 in five of the most prestigious management journals, Joullié (2017) discovered an almost obsessive use of the verb “to suggest” (or one of its derivatives). It appears in nearly 22% of the propositions extracted from the articles and is found in such sentences as “Our results suggest that. . .” Given the dictionary definition of “suggest,” its use by authors concerning their research insinuates that subjectivity is involved in the collection and interpretation of data. This leaves open the possibility that someone else, reviewing the same results, could interpret them

978

R. Spillane

differently. As such, this amounts to a strategy adopted to immunize authors from criticism. Joullié also found that the use of analytic propositions abound, the most frequent making liberal use of the modals “may” or “might,” as in “Results show that rewarding helping may be beneficial when an organization is young.” More than 38% of all statements analyzed offer advice to managers using wording which conforms to this pattern. Use of the modal “can” (“could,” “enable,” “help,” “allow”) as in “Staffing can buffer turnover” or “Employees who realize their aspirations can experience a sense of fit” are also trivially true and represent nearly a quarter of statements analyzed. Other useless formulations include “There are potential benefits to electronic communication during nonwork time,” or “Performance of agentic behaviors is likely to help women overcome gender bias.” Any management practice has a “potential advantage” or “will ultimately positively affect,” since “potential” and “ultimate” refer to an unspecified point in the future. Any strategy is “likely to facilitate,” for adverbs such as “likely” can be interpreted in ways that do not expose their author to empirical verification. If managers could be persuaded to use Hume’s Fork to weed the management garden of nonsensical propositions, management books would be decidedly slimmer. They would do well to meditate upon David Hume’s memorable concluding sentences in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748): When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hands any volume; of divinity of school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. (Hume 1975: 165)

Conclusion If managers accept that thinking is talking to oneself (and others), reasoning is defective in proportion as one’s internal dialogue is muddled by linguistic confusion. To communicate effectively, management educators, trainers, and managers themselves need to be sensitive to language. Philosophy is the discipline of choice to develop this sensitivity since attending to the meaning of the words one uses is the first demand and thus the first learning outcome of philosophy. What is taught in management schools and seminars finds its roots in ancient and modern philosophical arguments. The study of management concepts, then, reaches back to the intellectual substrata which produced them. Investigating the philosophical foundations of management perspectives is, therefore, especially indicated. What remains certain is that the study and the practice of management are impossible in the absence of philosophical references, in the darkness of an imprecise language or in the senseless profile of a world without intellectual perspective. Learning management concepts or theories without insights into the worldviews upon which they rest and the consequences

53

Weeding the Management Garden: Hume’s Fork and Action Nominalism at Work

979

they lead to can only result in superficial, narrow and short-lived learning or, worse, to see managers as morally neutral technicians at the service of the powers that be. (Joullié and Spillane 2015: 320)

As for the difficulty of deciding which, among the diverse philosophical perspectives, is superior, I have argued that those which adopt the rules of action nominalism do managers a service. Furthermore, Hume’s Fork offers managers a tool which, when used appropriately, can return management to the somewhat heroic language of objective performance and away from the subjective language of personality, potential and motivation. The management philosophy of Drucker (1977) is a case in point since his examples and case studies assume that the ultimate test of management is performance – an ancient heroic ideal. Management, then, is philosophy in action.

Cross-References ▶ How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business

References Andreski S (1974) Social science as sorcery. Penguin, Harmondsworth Aristotle (2004) The art of rhetoric (trans: Lawson-Tancred H). Penguin, London Bolman L, Deal T (2003) Reframing organisations: artistry, choice and leadership, 3rd edn. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco Collins J (2001) Good to great. Harper & Collins, New York Diogenes Laertius (1965) Lives of eminent philosophers, vol 2 (trans: Hicks RD). William Heinemann, London Drucker P (1977) Management. Pan Books, London Frankfurt H (2005) On bullshit. Princeton University Press, Princeton Friedrich CJ (1972) Tradition and authority. Pall Mall Press, London Hobbes T (1996) [1651] Leviathan. In: Tuck R (ed) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Hume D (1975) [1748] Enquiries concerning human understanding and concerning the principles of morals. In: Selby-Bigge LA (ed) Clarendon Press, Oxford Joullié JE (2017) Aligning the language and objectives of management research. Unpublished paper Joullié J-E, Spillane R (2015) The philosophical foundations of management thought. Lexington Books, Maryland Kellaway L (2017) The exponential rise of guff in business shows no sign of abating. Financial Times, 16 July Kolakowski L (1972) Positivist philosophy: from Hume to the Vienna Circle. Pelican, Harmondsworth Lutz W (1989) How government, business, advertisers, and others use language to deceive you. Harper & Row, New York Martin J, Ray J (1974) Anti-authoritarianism: an indicator of pathology. In: Ray J (ed) Conservatism as heresy. Australia & New Zealand Book Company, Sydney Maslow A (1954) Motivation and personality. Harper, New York Micklethwait J, Wooldridge A (1996) The witch doctors. Random House, New York Ockham (1957) Philosophical writings of William of Ockham (trans: Boeher P). Nelson, Edinburgh Popper K (1972) Objective knowledge. Clarendon Press, Oxford

980

R. Spillane

Rosen R (1977) Psychobabble: fast talk and quick cure in the age of feeling. Wildwood House, London Ryle G (1983) [1949] The concept of mind. Penguin, Harmondsworth Spillane R (2017) Psychomanagement: an Australian affair. GOKO Publishing, Sydney Spillane R, Martin J (2005) Personality and performance: foundations for managerial psychology. UNSW Press, Sydney Stove D (1991) The Plato cult and other philosophical follies. Basil Blackwell, Oxford Szasz T (1996) The meaning of mind: language, morality and neuroscience. Praeger, Westport Szasz T (2010) [1961] The myth of mental illness: foundations of a theory of personal conduct. Harper Perennial, New York Watson D (2004) Weasel words: contemporary clichés, cant and management jargon. Knopf, Sydney Watson R (2006) On the language of bureaucracy: postmodernism, plain English, and Wittgenstein. In: Lynch T, Cruise P (eds) Handbook of organization theory and management: the philosophical approach, 2nd edn. Taylor & Francis, Boca Raton Weaver R (1985) [1953] The ethics of rhetoric. Regnery, Chicago Wittgenstein L (1998) [1953] Philosophical investigations. Blackwell, Oxford

The Organization of Philosophy and a Philosophy of Organizations

54

Jean-Philippe Deranty

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 982 The Absence of Organizations in the Organization of Academic Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 982 Is the Lack of Interest in Organizations a Problem for Academic Philosophy? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 987 A Philosophy of Organizations in Modern Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 989 Philosophy of Life in Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 997 Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1000 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1000

Abstract

The chapter begins by establishing the absence of organizations in the organization of philosophy as a specialist academic discipline. The second section highlights the reasons why this gap is detrimental to philosophical inquiries. The third section seeks to clarify how philosophy, as a type of theoretical inquiry, can contribute to the study of organizations. Three basic features are proposed as underpinning the philosophical method. Hegel’s social theory is then put forward as an exemplary model of what a philosophical account of organizations might achieve. The fourth and final section shifts the perspective to focus on the life of individuals in organizations. Following a recent book combining post-Hegelian critical theory and Christophe Dejours’ psychodynamic approach, the paper highlights important aspects of individual and collective work that lead to a cooperative conception of management. Keywords

Philosophy · Philosophical method · Organizations · Organization studies · Hegel · Christophe Dejours · Cooperative management J.-P. Deranty (*) Philosophy Department, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_32

981

982

J.-P. Deranty

Introduction The discipline of academic philosophy has shown little interest so far in organizations. Given that modern life can arguably be described as “life in organizations,” or “organized life,” this state of affair is problematic. However, this lapse in the current organization of professional philosophy doesn’t mean that philosophy itself, as a mode of inquiry, is not able to contribute to the study of organizations. This chapter seeks to clarify how philosophy as a practice can contribute to the study of organizations and to encourage the professional philosophers to turn themselves more decisively toward this study. The chapter has two parts, each with two sections. In the first part, I critically highlight the near absence of organizations in the organization of contemporary academic philosophy. The first section establishes this absence, by applying a selfreflexive lens to the discipline like the one used by a current theorist of organizations within his own discipline (Parker 2000). In section “Is the Lack of Interest in Organisations a Problem for Academic Philosophy,” I consider some reasons why this absence might be problematic, namely, not just because organizations are an intrinsic part of modern society so that they ought to be taken seriously as a worthy topic but more fundamentally because many of the objects that philosophers elect as their privileged objects of study are significantly shaped by the fact that they are embedded in organizations. In the second part, I shift the focus to try and show how a philosophical perspective can contribute usefully to the study of organizations. Using Hegel as a primary reference, I argue that a philosophical outlook can be characterized by several theoretical features that can be particularly useful for the study of organizations. These are analytical depth, synthetic breadth, and the focus on the link between normative and ontological dimensions. After defining these three specific features of a philosophical outlook, in section “A Philosophy of Organisations in Modern Society,” I focus on the big picture, using Hegel’s social and political theory as a model of philosophical account of modern organizations. In section “Philosophy of Life in Organisations,” drawing on a recent book I wrote recently with two other colleagues also influenced by Hegel, and a leading theorist of work, I focus on life within work organizations to show again, this time in relation to more specific issues of management, how philosophy can contribute to the study of organizations.

The Absence of Organizations in the Organization of Academic Philosophy If we observe the current makeup of the specialized academic discipline of philosophy, it is fair to say that in it organizations feature as a topic of interest only at the margins. Some philosophers make direct contributions to organization studies (for instance, Herzog 2019), and as we will see, some subfields of academic philosophy overlap with organization studies, but organizations are not considered

54

The Organization of Philosophy and a Philosophy of Organizations

983

topics of choice in the profession. One might consider that there is nothing problematic with this. After all, a reasonable approach to the different disciplines would to be that they are defined by the specific objects they study. Organization studies are the inquiry that takes organizations as their central object. Other disciplines, such as psychology or sociology, can also study organizations from their own point of view, but this doesn’t mean that all other human sciences ought to. One might well argue that division of labor is a condition of efficiency, in academic research as elsewhere. Such cordoning off, however, is problematic for philosophy, for several reasons. First, philosophy as a practice is not defined by its objects, but rather by its mode of inquiry. There is a philosophical way of studying any kind of issue or reality. As the great philosopher of biology and medicine, Georges Canguilhem wrote at the outset of his most famous book (1991, 3): “Philosophy is a reflection for which all alien material is good, and (. . .) for which all good material must be alien.” As a result, there is nothing in the philosophical mode of inquiry that should prevent philosophers from studying organizations; and as a matter of fact, many organization theorists employ philosophical references and philosophical modes of thinking. Indeed, the different problems attached to organizations do not just constitute a specialized topic, an object of interest among others. Organizations are at the heart of modern society; modern society is an organizational society (Presthus 1962). This means that organizations ought to be an object of primary concern. Further than that, it also means that many of the objects studied by philosophers in their respective areas of specialization are directly impacted by these objects being embedded in organizational structures. Before reflecting on how philosophy, as a mode of inquiry, can contribute to the study of organizations, it is important to establish more precisely the near absence of organizations in the current organization of the discipline. Roughly speaking, mainstream academic philosophy is organized along a major axis separating theoretical and practical philosophy. Theoretical philosophy includes philosophy of mind (philosophical psychology, cognitive science), epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science. Practical philosophy includes ethics and political philosophy. In relation to theoretical philosophy, we can observe that the minds that develop beliefs about the world belong to persons who have been trained in educational systems, work in economic organizations, participate in formal and informal public spheres, and are influenced by their use of the outputs produced by, and indeed by their participation in, media organizations. As for practical philosophy, the desires, beliefs, and actions of individuals are framed by their taking place in organizationally structured social spaces. Such framings are bound to impact on the normative content of those actions, beliefs, and desires. Similarly, in political philosophy, the rights and responsibilities of citizens and the state in relation to each other surely are determined to a significant extent by the internal organization of the different social spheres to which individuals belong. However, mainstream academic philosophy is not well placed to take into account organizations and the organizational framings of the objects it studies.

984

J.-P. Deranty

In both theoretical and practical philosophy, mainstream assumptions and the most prevalent methods prevent them from doing so. In theoretical philosophy, the core assumptions of the most popular approaches in the discipline are either formal or naturalistic. In neither kind of approach does the organizational aspect of the objects studied come into view. In the case of formal approaches, the analyses aim to establish definitions of key concepts by specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for their correct employment, through arguments that can withstand logical objections, notably those that arise from exceptions, counter-factual arguments, and thought experiments. The default assumption in those epistemological inquiries is individualistic: questions of cognition are questions about the ontological elements and conceptual features involved in an agent knowing something and what it means for those beliefs to be true or false. The questions are asked in highly formal, general terms. The agents under discussion seem to float in an undetermined, a-social space. The content of their beliefs appears equally unaffected by the social contexts in which the latter were produced. The background image in these inquiries that form the core of the discipline today is of subjects viewed as independent cognitive machines facing natural objects whose embeddedness in social environments has no impact on the latter’s ontological features and meaning. In the case of naturalistic approaches, the unit of analysis is the single brain or the individual mind, viewed from the perspective of its emergence from natural evolution. The brain uses the structural capacities that phylogenetic development has bequeathed it and that enable it to develop beliefs about the world, some of which, as justified and true, can count as knowledge. The individual mind or brain can combine such elements of knowledge through its symbolic capacities, the “language of thought” (Fodor 1988), or, on another view, through mechanisms that activate different units and parts of the neuronal network (Churchland 1989). Timeless philosophical questions asking how humans can know anything about the world, what human language refers to, and in what sense propositions can be true or false are answered here through a combination of empirical claims about the makeup of the human brain, with a particular focus on its complex networks and connectivity, with logical arguments about the ways to formalize empirical information and the conceptual conclusions to draw from it. In these two kinds of approaches, no attention is given to the fact that human cognition occurs within specific social spaces that are governed by domain-specific rules and are structured by interpersonal relations involving power and authority, in which the aims and interests of the agents are shaped by the overall logic of those spaces, in other words, everything that makes modern life an organized form of life, a form of life structured in its very depth by a number of different organizations. There is a social branch of epistemology that does focus on the fact that knowledge is for a large part produced and shared by others, within and indeed by institutions (notably by scientific and media organizations), and is acquired by individuals in their relations to other individuals and within social groups (Goldman 1999). But the models used in mainstream social epistemology are again highly formal. They differ from classical models of epistemology by introducing “social”

54

The Organization of Philosophy and a Philosophy of Organizations

985

sources of knowledge (other individuals and groups), but they ask the same questions and seek to answer them in similar ways as traditional formal epistemology. The introduction of the “social” element does not translate into a focus on the “thick,” organized aspects of the collective and how the latter might impact on the production and transmission of knowledge. In practical philosophy, the mainstream approaches are also centered on the individual. In moral philosophy, the central concern are the rights and responsibilities of individuals, what is owed to individuals, and what individuals owe to others. These questions are tackled either at a general level, in general theories of duties and rights, or in terms of specific social relations, for instance, the family, or the relations between an individual and the state. In the case of general moral philosophy, the normative valence of individual actions is considered in relation to general principles, such as autonomy, justice, or welfare. These principles are defined and justified in general, independently of any particular social space. Applied moral inquiry asks about the morality of choices and actions in specific social relations: a doctor to a patient, a parent to a child, a human person in relation to an animal, and so on. In these cases, some consideration is given to some of the features of the social context that make the relations specific. But in most of these cases, taking into account the specific nature of the situation and the identity of the agents does not impact on the theory itself. For example, deontological theories are developed and then applied to, say, responsibilities toward animals (Korsgaard 2012). Or a general virtue ethic is developed and then applied to, say, the medical context (Pellegrino and Thomasma 1993). The moral conclusions are drawn by applying one of the main ethical theories to the case at hand, but the case itself does not impact on the theory. There is one area of ethics within the organized discipline of philosophy that deals directly with organizations, namely, business and professional ethics. This is the area of mainstream philosophy that is closest to organization studies; indeed there are substantial overlaps in terms of audience and interest in the journals catering for the two disciplines. The term “business ethics,” however, is ambivalent, depending on where the emphasis falls methodologically between business and ethics. Speaking in general terms, we might say that journals of business ethics publish two different types of studies. One type is made up of studies that draw theoretical (conceptual and/or normative) conclusions about aspects of business activity on the basis of empirical analyses, using qualitative and quantitative methods. In this kind of publications, ethical theory is usually mobilized to interpret the data; sometimes the data is used to criticize or vindicate a particular ethical theory, but the central problem remains the first-order moral problem at hand. In these types of articles, concrete elements of private and public and formal and informal organizations are directly considered. Another type of articles focuses more on the “ethics” side, in a manner that is characteristic of disciplinary academic philosophy. Here “ethics” is central not just as a first-order moral problem but also just as significantly and sometimes predominantly at the second-order level of the correct philosophical approach to moral questions. In articles of this kind, the philosophical theory is just as much the focus of the inquiry as the actual moral

986

J.-P. Deranty

problem. In articles of this kind, which correspond to the standards internal to the discipline of philosophy, the organizational elements are much more sparse. Often these kinds of analyses are wholly disconnected from the actual aspects of business activity considered, and the ethical reflection relies instead on ideal constructs, such as the perfect market or an ideal theory of the firm. In professional ethics, a similar divide can be noticed. Professional ethics studies the culture and ethos of a profession and how they intersect with abstract moral principles (Bayles 1989). Here as well, the studies that abide more closely by the methods and standards of academic disciplinary philosophy tend to overlook the thick reality of what constitutes a profession as a particular kind of organization and focus instead on more abstract, theoretical, and second-order issues. In mainstream political philosophy, the same detachment from the organized aspects of social life can be observed. The most prevalent and valued of work in political philosophy seeks to establish general conceptions of justice that can be applied to particular issues, in relation to particular social contexts. The paradigmatic relationship is that between state and individual, the central question being what a just state owes to each individual. This question is preceded by a more fundamental one, regarding the appropriate definition of justice itself, a question that is answered in reference to other core norms, such as freedom or equality or welfare. Another type of question relates to how justice might be implemented. This intersects with a third type of question, of a methodological, reflexive kind: how philosophers should construct definitions and theories of justice in the first place, through social contract thought experiments, or by drawing on historical traditions, or through rational choice calculations, and so on. None of these three kinds of questions lead philosophers to take into consideration the specific features of particular social spaces. Like moral philosophy, applied political philosophy in its mainstream incarnations tends to operate by applying general normative arguments to the social spaces under consideration, from the outside so to speak. Crucially, these general arguments have been developed independently of an analysis of how these spaces to which they are applied are specifically organized. One area of mainstream political philosophy in which some organizations are discussed is the branch of political philosophy that focuses on firms, as in the recent work of Elizabeth Anderson (2017). In this case as well, however, the descriptive and conceptual aspects related to the organizational dimensions of corporations and the relations between managers and employees are minimal. The focus is squarely on the normative issues, in Anderson’s case, the domination and the encroachments to the principle of equality that are entailed in the wage relation. Only those aspects of the capitalist organizations that impact on the capacity for democratic equality are relevant for her. And only private, capitalist organizations feature in the analysis. There is one specific subfield of mainstream academic philosophy that focuses on issues that would be expected to overlap with what organization studies are interested in, namely, social ontology. On the analytical side of that area of specialization, which is where the modern classics are placed, there is actually little focus on organizations themselves (see Gilbert 1999). As a kind of philosophical inquiry explicitly acknowledged in the discipline, social ontology is concerned with

54

The Organization of Philosophy and a Philosophy of Organizations

987

the most fundamental aspects of social realities, their ontological components (individual or collective intentions, for instance), conceptual structures, and the normative implications that flow from having identified those basic constituents of social reality. Most social ontology writings do not focus on particular kinds of institutions or organizations. When they do, they don’t make the distinction between institutions and organizations (typically Searle 1995). In other words, they don’t study the organizing and organized features of institutions. In any case they spend little time on these social realities. Tuomela (2002), for example, a seminal text in the field, only has six pages on organizations. Finally, there is a kind of contemporary social ontology that borrows some of its key vocabulary from analytical references but draws inspiration from the social and political philosophy of Hegel. It is in this highly specialized subfield that philosophical work is explicitly concerned with the kinds of issues that organization studies also devote themselves to (Ikäheimo and Laitinen 2011). Recently, a book has specifically sought to address issues of organization theory from a Hegelian perspective (Krijnen 2015, also 2017). As section “A Philosophy of Organisations in Modern Society” will show, there are good reasons for that: in Hegel’s ontology of modern society, one can find precise conceptual tools to do justice to the phenomenon of organizations. Before we look at this, however, a more specific account ought to be given for why the lack of interest demonstrated by professional philosophers toward organizations is detrimental to their own inquiries.

Is the Lack of Interest in Organizations a Problem for Academic Philosophy? One major reason explaining why philosophers ought to take the phenomenon of organization more seriously has already been stated in succinct form above: given that modern life is organized life, many of the objects that philosophers study are impacted by the fact that they are embedded in organizational structures. This would seem to make the consideration of the organizational moment an intrinsic part of giving an account of those objects. As a matter of fact, if we look at two examples of key debates in mainstream disciplinary philosophy, they seem to show that philosophers have recognized that their objects are not floating freely outside social spaces but are impacted in their very structures by their being located in those spaces. In theoretical philosophy, the challenge mounted by extended mind and distributed cognition paradigms to classical strands of epistemology and cognitive science demonstrates a sensitivity to the fact that cognizing brains and minds function not just on the basis of their individual neuronal constitution and symbolic capabilities but also as a result of their being inserted in highly organized cultural niches (Menary 2006). The point for the authors advancing these paradigms is precisely to underline the social and embodied features of cognition specifically for the purpose of better explaining how cognitive processes function and evolve. In other words, the emphasis on the “distributed,” “embodied,” and “integrated” conditions of cognition

988

J.-P. Deranty

shows awareness that embeddedness in social organizations impacts constitutively on the object studied, in this case cognition. In political philosophy, one significant challenge to mainstream approaches, by authors who are institutionally situated at the core of the discipline, is the “realist” one (Geuss 2008). One of its main features consists precisely in arguing against normative arguments that are detached from the complex reality of the social spaces to which these arguments are supposed to apply. Instead, realist philosophers argue, and political philosophy should understand politics as involving power struggles that are specific each time to the historical and social contexts in which they unfold. Even in these cases, however, taking into account the supra-individual, social, and material contexts has not done full justice to the organizational dimensions. In paradigms of distributed, integrated cognition, the focus is on the interaction between agents and the cognitive resources stored in the external environments, typically symbolic languages that developed through cultural evolution and are maintained through cultural learning. These cognitive resources help individual agents perform cognitive tasks they would perform much less effectively if they relied solely on their individual capacities. Of course, language is central to organizations (Westwood and Linstead 2001), and so one might say that proponents of distributed cognition demonstrate a concrete focus on a key organizational dimension when they emphasize the importance of the discursive context for individual cognition. But what is at stake in whether the organizational element is taken seriously, in its full ontological and normative thickness, is not just whether some of its dimensions are used to account for a particular problem. In the case of cognition, a full focus on organizations would need to specify the different kinds of social organizations in which an integration of internal and external processes occurs. Concretely, to take a provocative example, a substantive organizational outlook would assume that the use of a symbolic language, say mathematics, differs according to the social spaces in which it is deployed, precisely because the organization impacts on that use. Taking the organizational element seriously means that one does not just focus on the symbolic language being afforded by the external social environment in general, but that one assumes that different social environments afford the symbolic language in different guises, depending on their place in the overall social organization and their own specific organization, and that these modalities in turn affect the meaning and use of the symbolic language itself. In other words, even though a high school student understands as much about the golden ratio as any adult who also knows about it, the cognitive processes might have to be described in different ways between a student learning about the ratio in a traditional school setting, a studio photographer using it intuitively to crop a wedding photo for her clients, and a museum guide pointing it out to visitors when describing a painting. In political philosophy, in a field at the margins of mainstream philosophy, the discussion has revolved precisely around these kinds of issues. One important criticism of Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition has been that the general paradigm it offers needs to be complemented, to take into account the specific rules

54

The Organization of Philosophy and a Philosophy of Organizations

989

and normative grammars at play in particular institutional realms (Renault 2011). This objection in fact took the organizational element seriously, since it argued precisely that including the social dimension of expectations and experiences of justice was not sufficiently concrete if it referred only to the social in a generic, macro sense and that one had to also consider the level of specific organizational contexts. This example provides an apt transition to the third section. As mentioned already, philosophy is characterized not so much by the objects it studies as by its methods. These methods can be aptly applied to organizations. It is ample time that professional philosophers turned their attention, from within the discipline toward a more systematic study of organizations, as an object that is intrinsically valuable and indeed as a constitutive dimension of individual and social existence. In order to take a first step toward such systematic study, in the following section, I reflect on what makes up the specificity of a philosophical outlook, the kind of intellectual endeavor that the rare philosophers who write about organizations and the philosophically trained organization theorists already practice. I then foreground one area within the discipline of philosophy that seems to me to constitute an exemplar of a philosophical perspective on organizations. I try to show that Hegel’s social and political writings display the kind of descriptive detail and normative depth that a good philosophical account of organizations should provide.

A Philosophy of Organizations in Modern Society What defines a theoretical outlook as specifically a philosophical one? The question might seem impossible to answer unequivocally since the term “philosophy” refers to many historical traditions, across a wide range of cultural contexts. There might seem to be little in common between, say, Buddhist, African, Anglo-American, and “continental” philosophy, not just in terms of the methods each uses but even regarding the very idea of philosophical inquiry. Against this impression of great disparity, however, a set of basic intellectual orientations can be identified that are common to the many different ways of doing philosophy (see on comparable lines Williamson 2018). The first of those intellectual attitudes is analytical acuity. This is the attempt to identify clearly the basic constituents of complex meanings, and indeed of complex realities, in order then to see better how these meanings and realities are constituted and how they “work.” This attitude leads to the well-established practices of seeking to craft valid definitions that cover all cases, drawing distinctions between close meanings, analyzing concepts to see what they entail, but also of distinguishing between different levels of reality, and distinguishing between different kinds of questionings, for instance, between the empirical, the conceptual, and the normative, to ensure the right kinds of answers are given to each type of question. The second attitude defining of a philosophical outlook attempts to do the opposite. We might call it synthetic scope. Philosophers are not just concerned

990

J.-P. Deranty

to “cut up each kind according to its species along its natural joints, and to try not to splinter any part, as a bad butcher might do” (Plato 1996, 265c–266a) but also “in seeing together things that are scattered about everywhere and collecting them into one kind, so that by defining each thing we can make clear the subject of any instruction we wish to give” (ibid.). This second philosophical impulse again tries to account for meanings and realities, but this time by showing the links between different elements of meaning or of reality, to highlight how these elements organize themselves in larger wholes that function or make sense, on the basis of which kinds of relations. Plato’s famous metaphors of the philosopher as a skillful butcher and weaver of concepts point to a third dimension, one that equates conceptual and ontological clarification, in both their analytical and synthetic dimensions, with a normative task. Philosophy aims to be a form of wisdom in both the theoretical, “scientific” sense, as a kind of knowledge, and in the practical sense, as enlightenment about the individual self and the collective, and how they ought to conduct themselves in the world. Classical philosophical models always contained a second-order, reflexive moment in which they showed how knowledge in the theoretical sense was connected to knowledge in the normative, practical sense. In some areas of contemporary philosophy, where the self-imposed model is the natural sciences, this normative dimension has almost disappeared. But even there, the search for knowledge is implicitly pursued for a higher good, encapsulated in the idea of truth. We might call this third dimension of philosophical inquiry the greater good dimension. A philosophical approach to organizations should prove its worth by bringing to the fore elements of understanding about organizations in those three dimensions, in terms of conceptual and ontological clarification and synthetic insight, and by identifying the normative stakes of conceptual and ontological analysis. A great number of philosophical models, many of which are encapsulated in the name of a famous thinker, can be used to study organizations philosophically. Indeed, organization theorists have made use of the entire philosophical corpus, from Socrates to Agamben. In this section, I will bring to the fore the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel, as a primary example of what a philosophical outlook can contribute to the organizational studies, notably in relation to the three core features just highlighted. Hegel is famous for his dialectical method. It is a method that combines the first two features of a philosophical approach identified above in a highly sophisticated way. A dialectical analysis consists in showing how conceptual meanings, and with them the kinds of realities that display those conceptual structures, are logically related to each other, so that one cannot exist without the other. For example, as the beginning of the Science of Logic demonstrates, in order to think the very simple category of “being,” one needs also to posit its opposite, the category of “nothing” (Hegel 2015). Such direct opposition is the most basic type of necessary logical implication. Throughout the course of his “logic,” Hegel unpacks many other types of logical relations, which, taken together, underpin the rational structure of reality in all its complexity. In highlighting such

54

The Organization of Philosophy and a Philosophy of Organizations

991

logical relations between concepts, the dialectical inquiry performs the task of analytical clarification, since it shows how concepts, meanings, and orders of reality differ from each other, but equally of synthetic scope, as it also shows the links through which meanings and realities are connected. As the survey of Hegel’s conception of organizations will hopefully demonstrate below, such dialectical approach can perform the two tasks to with a great degree of detail. This makes it a particularly useful heuristic tool. Hegel is also a useful reference in light of the third feature of philosophical approaches. This is because he is most eminently a philosopher who equated the task of theoretical clarification with the normative task of philosophy. For him, the ultimate goal of rational clarification, through the clear thinking of distinctions and connections, is tantamount to the realization of freedom itself. When we understand the rationality underpinning the structures of entities, their interconnections, and the different orders they constitute within the world, and when we accord our desires, beliefs, and actions to the world’s rationality, through the use of our own rational powers, we achieve not just understanding but also freedom. Knowledge and freedom go hand in hand, and philosophy is the meta-level inquiry that helps to realize both. This sounds like a classical, rationalist view of philosophy, one that was already at play in Greek philosophy and was still prevalent during the European Enlightenment. Where Hegel departs from his predecessors in the Western tradition is in insisting on developing what he calls a “concrete” conception of freedom, as opposed to an “abstract” one (Hegel 1991, 282). This “concrete” conception of freedom is another aspect of Hegel’s philosophical method that allows him to achieve a high level of detail in his analyses and thereby makes the latter particularly fruitful. Abstract conceptions of freedom define it simply as the power to act in whatever way one chooses, in other words, through the absence of external obstacles. Hegel shows that this account of freedom, as “freedom from,” is mistaken, since on that definition, one would be free even if one’s actions were governed by forces internal to the agent that were unmastered by her, or if the agent was free in her own volition, could fully endorse the reasons for her actions, and there were no direct obstacles to these actions, but the external world in which the action occurred was inimical to the full realization of the agent’s plans. A better, “concrete” conception of freedom conceives of it as being “free in,” not “free from,” that is, finding the support for the realization of one’s desires and volitions inside and outside oneself. Freedom is “concrete” in this case, when it is actually realized in subjective and objective features of reality. On the subjective side, the subject is “concretely free” when she has made her desires and volitions “rational,” which means, desires and volitions she can fully endorse for herself. On the objective side, freedom is realized when the external world is receptive to, and indeed helps toward, the realization of the subject’s desires and volitions. In both dimensions, rationality is the medium enabling the realization of freedom. Hegel’s theory of subjective spirit (2007) focuses on the internal processes by which a human subject can gradually gain control over her own internal life to make it something that she can self-reflexively

992

J.-P. Deranty

determine, thereby becoming in tune with herself. The theory of objective spirit describes the different conditions that have to be in place in the external world so that a rational subject can find herself “at home” in it, that is, in the physical world and in the world shared with other humans. As said, this “concrete” approach to freedom explains why Hegel’s analyses achieve a high degree of detail and complexity. This approach requires that one associates closely the subjective and the objective dimensions: how material, institutional realities frame and determine the desires, beliefs, and actions of individuals and, reciprocally, how the individuals can embody and actively materialize meta-individual norms, values, and indeed functional imperatives. And the emphasis on concrete realization also means that all aspects of individual and collective existence need to be considered, from the somatic to the economic, the cultural, and the political. It is in the theory of “objective spirit” that a Hegelian theory of organizations has its place. In that part of his system, as just said, Hegel analyzes the external, the material, and institutional conditions that need to be in place so that human beings can be “at home” in their geographical environment and their social world. In accordance with the third feature of philosophy identified previously, the analysis is equally functional and normative. Hegel speaks simultaneously in terms of the range of needs that have to be fulfilled for a (modern) human individual to function to the fullest and in terms of a maximal realization of freedom. He famously highlights three main circles of social life, with specific institutions at the heart of each circle, as key conditions of modern freedom. Each institutional realm in turn contains specific organizations. In the family, basic physical and primary emotional needs are fulfilled (Hegel 1991, para. 158–180). These allow the subject to be at home with herself in her body, mind, and soul, to be “self-sufficient” in a basic, psycho-physical sense. In the broader social sphere, subjects have their material needs fulfilled by finding their place within the division of labor and exchanging goods with others (para. 189–195). Learning a craft allows them to further develop their cognitive powers and practical skills (para. 197–198). Belonging to a trade or industry allows them to develop a social identity that is the translation in social terms of their acquired bodily and intellectual capacities and is shared by others engaged in the same craft (para. 250–255). The substantial overlap in abilities, worldviews, and identity features between all the members of that trade makes of the latter an institution akin to a “second family” (para. 255). Like the natural family, this is a social space in which the subject can feel at home, as it houses an institutional framework that offers concrete material support (material provisions in cases of injury, illness, or death of a partner) as well as psychological support through the strong cultural ties it harbors. Finally, as a member of the state, the subject can participate in collective decisions through the representation of the trade in the parliament and as a citizen through the public sphere (para. 298–312). These different social spheres, each involving particular institutions (marriage, education of children, technical division of labor, crafts, social-professional bodies, the spheres of the law applying to each of these areas), all contribute to the full realization of concrete freedom. Each social sphere and its institutions

54

The Organization of Philosophy and a Philosophy of Organizations

993

allow subjects to develop particular relationships to the external world and to others. By being included in those spheres, participating in their practices and sharing the beliefs, norms, and values prevalent in them, in the best of cases at least, the subject can see her own self and her own desires and aims realized in the outside world. On the subjective side, there occurs a process of learning, about the world and about oneself, which allows the subject to increase her capacity to determine her own ends and goals. The subject also realizes that the fulfillment of her needs and life plans is tied to her existence in the collectives and institutional frameworks that make such realization possible. As a result, the particular subject undergoes a process of “universalization,” seeing things increasingly from the perspective of the different social wholes in which she is embedded (para. 187, 260, 264). On the objective side, the “universal” aspect of the institutions, their system-like functioning, and the fact that they develop forms of collective agency and intentionality find their ultimate justification in the realization of the particular ends of individuals, in the “concrete” freedom of each individual. This layered, multidimensional picture provides a particularly useful framework for a comprehensive theory of modern organizations. The way in which Hegel characterized the spheres of social freedom anticipated the features organization theorists highlight in their study of organizations (see Krijnen 2015, 150–153, for a useful survey of the main definitions of organizations in the organizational literature). Organizations are collectives that are set up for the realization of specific individual ends. They function according to their specific rules, which derive from their specific functional utility (the particular type of ends they help to fulfill), and entail specific definitions of statuses as well as relations of authority. They operate on the basis of particular kinds of “ethos” (Sitte), that is, particular ways of defining rights and responsibilities, linked to shared representations about the nature of the group and its role in society, what might be called the “culture” of that group. Hegel called these social bodies by the generic German term of Einrichtung (para. 144) or synonymously by the Latin-based term of Institution (para. 180, rem, para. 253, para. 263, para. 268). In both cases, the etymological emphasis is on the artificiality of these human constructs, the fact that they were “instituted,” “set up” (einrichten) for the realization of particular human ends. One might debate whether it is appropriate to equate Hegel’s “institutions” with “organizations” in the contemporary sense. As Krijnen rightly emphasizes and as has been indicated in the chapter already, Hegel’s theory of institutions is part of his account of the realization of freedom, whereas organizations tend to be defined in relation to utilitarian goals. Yet, as Krijnen also shows and as has also been remarked at length here, it would be a mistake to oppose Hegelian institutions and organizations too strongly. Hegel’s Einrichtungen also entails “utilitarian” and functional element, namely, the individual needs and interests they help to fulfill and the role they play in the overall social system. One might object that the different spheres of government fulfill functional needs within the machinery of collective organization and therefore do not fall under the definition of organization as a collective that is set up with the purpose

994

J.-P. Deranty

of fulfilling individual goals. In this case, it is true that the link between the organized collective and individual goals is different from such links as they occur in the organizations within civil society. In the latter, individuals can see fairly directly how the organizations arise on the basis of their needs and interests: commodity markets organize the distribution of goods to be consumed; crafts develop, formalize, and train individuals into the technical skills required for efficient production; trades organize the lives of working subjects who share the same professional identity; tribunals apply the laws to particular cases; and so on. In the case of the organized branches of government, the immediate objects are needs of the collective as a whole: creating a regulatory framework for the different markets (what Hegel call “police”), elaborating the rules governing the life of the whole nation (legislative power), making final decisions regarding those general rules (executive power), and organizing the technical procedures to apply the general rules (civil service). And yet, as we saw, the logic behind Hegel’s social and political theory is that the “particularistic” dimensions of individual life and the “universal” dimensions of social life are interdependent: individuals rely on different collectives for the fulfillment of their individual needs, and collectives rely on the individuals for the embodiment and enactment of their rules and functions. In the end, therefore, the collective rules of government refer back to the individuals, inasmuch as the latter are destined to form an overall collective through their organization in smaller collectives (families, crafts, trades). In the case of government as well, therefore, we can say that Hegel’s “institutions” also include the features of “organizations” in the contemporary sense of the term. Hegel’s theory of institutions doesn’t just intertwine the principles of utility and of freedom but combines them also with a consideration of the internal functional dimensions of these institutions. This means that a collective “instituted” with the aim of fulfilling particular goals has to function on the basis of specific rules, not just in order to be efficient in view of these goals, and not just so it is normatively justified (in a way that individuals can “be at home” in it), but also so that it functions well as a collective, in other words as an organization. The evidence that Hegel explicitly considered this third dimension, one that is most especially a concern for organization theorists, can be found in a passage in which he describes the institutional structure of society as its “organization” (para. 255, p. 273). Beyond the detailed framework provided by Hegel’s analysis of modern society, the dialectical logic he employs in characterizing modern Einrichtungen and Institutionen delivers further useful insights for the study of organization. From a Hegelian point of view, an organization instantiates the connections between the universal and the particular at the heart of all complex realities. Taking a Hegelian perspective on the connections between the particular and the universal within the single entity that is an organization helps to see that the relations between particular and “universal” in fact apply in both directions. Starting from the particular perspective of the individuals, as already mentioned, the ultimate justification of the collective (the “universal”) is the concrete realization of particular features of individual freedom. The archetypal case is the firm, whose ultimate point is the fulfillment of individual needs. A firm specializes in delivering

54

The Organization of Philosophy and a Philosophy of Organizations

995

a particular service; that service in turn is defined through the division of labor whose ultimate ground is itself the systematic organization at the collective level of needs-fulfillment through production, distribution, and consumption. The needs in question, however, are to a large extent individual needs. Each organizational sphere is defined by the function it serves within the overall societal system. Even when a particular organization seems to have its function defined in relation to the system as a whole, for instance, the function of “police,” which aims to regulate the commodities market, or the different arms of government, ultimately the final functional ground, remains individual interests (para. 236). Hegel states explicitly that mere societal equilibrium at the collective level, at the level of the whole, is insufficient in modern society, precisely because its guiding norm is freedom for each and every one. In this sense, therefore, organizations are collectives whose ultimate ground appears to be the individuals. Crucially, however, what further defines each organizational sphere is the way in which the general, or “universal,” function it fulfills directly impacts on the subjective features of the individuals involved in it. Hegel describes this process in terms of “dispositions,” Gesinnungen. Each type of organization determines a different kind of “disposition,” that is, subjective ways of being, which include the specific ways in which individuals in a particular organization relate to each other, how the individuals relate to the collective, the kinds of subjective capacities, and modes of being that are privileged, including forms of belief and types of action. If we look at the modern bourgeois family from the point of view of its “organization,” as an institution that fulfills particular needs and functions within modern society, then the Hegelian perspective makes it clear that it calls upon its members to adopt a particular kind of “disposition”: one based on feeling as privileged cognitive and interpersonal modality that favors selflimitation, even self-sacrifice in some circumstances. In the economic sphere, each broad sector of activity determines particular kinds of organizations, the “estates,” whose specific industrial logic in turn determines the modes of cognition and action of their members. For example, the agricultural sector implies a relationship to the natural elements that the other “estates” don’t have. Within the industrial and commercial estates, the corporations are differentiated by the types of productive activities they engage in. Each type of productive activity determines the subjective nature of its members differently. Hegel’s examples of productive activity are obviously dated, but the fundamental point remains: life in professional organizations impacts on the very structure and content of a subject’s “dispositions,” including their worldview, the way in which they know things about the world and themselves, how they relate to the world, which features of the world stand out for them, and how they relate to others, inside and outside their own organizational world. The Hegelian approach emphasizes two further interesting features of organized life. The first is that organizations form a system among themselves, at the horizontal level of civil society. By system, here, I mean a complex organization of organizations, which integrates different organizations in such a way that each performs functions necessary for the others and thereby in turn benefits

996

J.-P. Deranty

from its own integration in the overall organization. This overall system might operate more or less smoothly of course; there might be frictions between organizations, which render the overall organization more or less stable. And the overall system of organizations might operate more or less to the benefit of the agents within it (which is ultimately their concrete freedom). Clearly, modern history is replete with examples of social systems that were internally dysfunctional and highly detrimental to the individuals engaged in them. But the point here is that Hegel’s analysis shows how the families, the education system that takes subjects from the world of the family to the broader social world, the division of productive activities between the different sectors and branches of industry, the legal system, the economic regulation that brings together all the economic sectors, all these institutional spheres with their own organizations impact on each other and in turn are integrated to form a giant organized whole. A second feature of organizational life is that outside the system of social organization stands the political system of government itself organized in different spheres. The individuals of the social system participate in that meta-sphere, whether as direct agents, if they belong to the “universal class” of the public servants, or through political representation. Whereas most other models operate with a generic form of citizenship premised on the mere fact of counting as responsible adult, for Hegel, even at the political level, modern individuals in fact continue to be defined by their respective organizational memberships. Hegel was at pains to avoid what he considered the fateful abstraction of modern models of political representations based on the principle of one person/one vote (para. 303). Instead, he argued that political representation should be anchored in the different “estates” and “corporations” (the trades and industries). This means that even as they learn to take the universal, collective viewpoint upon themselves, modern individuals remain influenced in their overall “disposition” by the organizations they belong to in their social existence. This rapid survey of Hegel’s social and political theory should hopefully have made clear what benefits a philosophical approach inspired by it can bring to the study of modern organizations. The first benefit lies in the way in which this approach can highlight systematically the different features of modern organizations, and most importantly how these features are connected to each other, from utilitarian, functional, and normative perspectives, that is, both in order that they fulfill their specific functions within the social system and so that they help toward the realization of concrete individual freedom. On the methodological level, that approach also seems invaluable as one of its defining concerns is to integrate theoretical perspectives on social entities, which are opposed in other models. A Hegelian approach demonstrates that methodological perspectives that might be taken to be alternatives or even to be opposed to each other can in fact be reconciled to present a more comprehensive view of organizations: the individual and the collective, the functional and the cultural, the utilitarian and the normative, and the structural and the agentic. Furthermore, the Hegelian approach shows that a modern subject belongs to a multiplicity of social spaces, all of which are organized in specific ways, and that each of those spaces impacts upon subjective ways of

54

The Organization of Philosophy and a Philosophy of Organizations

997

being, knowing, feeling, interacting, and of course working. The conclusion to draw from this is particularly significant from the point of view of organization studies. If modern society is an organized society, then there is no form of knowledge or action that is socially un-situated, and there is no generic way of knowing, feeling, or acting. Even at the collective, “universal” level of political deliberation, individuals remain determined in their approach by the social organizations they live in. This conclusion, however, is most eminently demonstrated through the dialectical, that is, the properly philosophical approach adopted by Hegel. Hegel’s social and political theory is thus particularly well suited to deliver the message of organization theory to philosophers, and, in turn, it delivers a good example of what a consistent philosophical outlook on organizations can achieve.

Philosophy of Life in Organizations Hegel’s social and political theory provides a useful framework for a conceptual account of organizations from the point of view of modern society and how modern individuals become socialized and lead their lives within the organizations of modern society. In a recent book, my colleagues and I have given an account of organizations combining Hegelian methodology with the rich insights of Christophe Dejours’ psychodynamics of work (Dejours et al. 2018). This account focuses on the inner life of organizations and more specifically on the individuals in economic organizations. From the point of view of Hegel’s encyclopedic organization of philosophy, this is the level of “subjective spirit.” As we saw above when we considered the subjective dimensions of “concrete freedom,” such a perspective looks at the processes through which a human individual gradually develops and takes charge of her own affective, cognitive, and practical capacities, until she is able to develop a comprehensive form of self-consciousness, allowing her to apply those capacities in her dealings with the different worlds she has to engage with: the interpersonal world of close others, the broad social and cultural worlds, and of course the natural and material worlds. This perspective emphasizes how much the physiological and psychological processes necessary for achieving this kind of self-appropriation are complex and uncertain. A measure of Hegel’s genius is that he foreshadowed many of the insights later developed by psychologists, notably psychoanalysts, who studied the many ways in which individuals struggle in their attempts at securing and developing sufficiently well-functioning psychosomatic identities (the literature on Hegel as a direct forerunner of Freud is extensive, but see in particular Mills 2002). This approach thus emphasizes the psychic vulnerability of individuals, the fact that the most fundamental condition for full freedom on the side of the individual is to have a sufficiently stable psychic identity. In turn this highlights the travails involved in establishing and maintaining that identity throughout the challenges of personal life, notably under the burdens of social existence. On that subjective side of organizations once more, the benefit of a philosophical approach, namely, the effort to achieve analytical acuity, synthetic scope, and sensitivity for the greater good, is evidenced by the results it brings

998

J.-P. Deranty

about. Such a philosophical approach, informed by the rich psychodynamic approach Dejours has constructed after decades of clinical studies of deficient work organizations (see Dejours 2013 for a presentation of his main theses), helps to reach a level of detail in the analysis that should be invaluable for organizational studies. The first level is that of the individual herself. In a work situation, the individual has to conform to the technical demands established by the organization, which specify most of the aspects of her activity. At the same time, however, each work situation is different, and, even in what might look like simple or well defined activities, there is a gap between organizational requirements and what the real situations demand. This gap opens up the possibility of failure, of misapplication of the rules, not meeting the targets. The subject has to deal with this gap, and since it is a subject that is intrinsically vulnerable, we can say that most work is potentially inducing of psychic suffering. Indeed, this threat of psychic suffering is true also of work that is too simple or too boring. The focus on the difficulty of leading a life within work organizations can thus point to a fundamental gap that managers need to be aware of, between the organized, prescribed dimensions of work activities and what it takes for subjects to get the job done. It is important to be aware of this gap for the reasons just discussed: technically, because no amount of prescription can predetermine what actually needs to be done to achieve the tasks successfully and, normatively, because this gap opens up the possibility of failure, alienation, loss of freedom, and control and thus can undermine the psychic identity of subjects. On the contrary, when the gap is bridged successfully, work can produce a powerful sense of achievement and fulfillment. The second level to consider is that of the work collective. Most work situations involve several workers who are brought together by the technical organization of the productive process. At that level, a key issue is the coordination of agents who each have to complete their tasks at their own individual level. This necessity to coordinate individual actions adds another layer of difficulty in achieving the tasks. Here, two ideal-typical cases can be distinguished. Cooperation between workers can work well. The condition for this is that some deliberation occurs between them, and a consensus is reached on how to make the cooperation successful. This is because each individual meets the task at hand in her own way, through her own perspective. As a result, it is not enough to have management prescribe cooperation. Just as there is a gap between prescription and actual realization at the individual level, there is a gap between prescribed and actual cooperation, and deliberation among those who are actually involved in the productive process is the only way to properly bridge that gap. In many cases, however, cooperation is dysfunctional or at least not optimally functional. There can be multiple reasons for this, starting with incompatibilities between individuals. Since cooperation is the condition for efficient productive action, it is crucial for managers to realize that underneath the ways in which they organize working groups, some room has to be given to a different kind of cooperation, one based on the actual experiences workers make of the difficulties of realizing their tasks, both individually and collectively.

54

The Organization of Philosophy and a Philosophy of Organizations

999

The focus on the vulnerable psychic identity of workers seems to shift the focus from issues of productivity, efficacy, and efficiency to normative issues of well-being and even freedom. However, if we recall the Hegelian framework in which the subjective and the objective dimensions are united, it is in fact misguided to oppose technical issues of productivity, functional issues of organizational integration, and normative issues of well-being and freedom. In fact each aspect determines the others. Because of the challenge that all work represents for subjectivities, the functionality of work organizations impacts directly on well-being and concrete freedom. Conversely, the condition for productivity and efficiency is workers’ capacity to deal with work challenges and the emergence of working forms of cooperation. In work organizations, technical and normative considerations cannot be held separately. These two insights, the difficulty of achieving the task at the individual level and the importance of cooperation at the level of the work collective, transform the view of work organizations. These two perspectives demonstrate that the entire formal structure of the organization, the official policies, rules, regulations, formal work practices, the economic objectives, and productive targets framing work tasks, is not sufficient to properly organize the activities the organization is meant to achieve. Underneath this formal structure, another structure is required that makes it possible for individuals to work, and work with others, ideally in ways that work well for them and for the organization itself. Of course, in order to make people work in the required ways, and to organize their working with others, all kinds of strategies and material instruments wielding power over the workers can be mobilized by management. Many contemporary work organizations are highly efficient and profitable by focusing solely on the enforcement of the work requirements. Many such organizations display evident features of being unjust and harmful to their workers, and their operations come at the price of major disruptions in individuals’ wellbeing. For many of those organizations, only high staff turnover makes them sustainable over the long run. A much better model is one in which the reality of individual working activity and the importance of real cooperation are taken seriously by the organization. In such a case, efficiency, productivity, and profitability are achieved but not at the price of individuals’ well-being and freedom or compromising on the values of fairness and justice that are held in broader society. This alternative conception of organization matters especially for the conception of management. The management function is indispensable in work organizations. But what makes it appropriate to its function? On the cooperative conception presented here, there is an essential dimension to add to the traditional sources justifying management’s power. Managerial authority is formally granted from outside (through the legal definition of the firm) and from above (through the delegation of power from public authorities in administrations and from the owners of the firm in the case of private businesses). In the reality of an organization’s operations, however, management’s authority is secured only if it enjoys the trust of the workers and collectives who face the reality of work challenges. It is not the place here to enumerate the different aspects of this reciprocal relationship and the alternative, cooperative conception

1000

J.-P. Deranty

of management that results from seriously taking it into consideration (see Dejours et al. 2018, Chap. 7). The key point is that a philosophical perspective on work organizations can emphasize aspects that come to light only if the different dimensions, the subjective, the collective, and the material, are held together. In other words, it is the combination of the phenomenological insight, focusing on the actual experience of work, with the social theory insight, which is sensitive to the dialectic between the apparently opposed poles of the individual and the collective, the functional, and the normative that can unveil the full complexity of life in work organizations. Beyond the use of philosophical concepts and tropes, it is the philosophical outlook itself that can bring useful insights to the study of organizations.

Cross-References ▶ What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian Philosopher

References Anderson E (2017) Private government. How employers rules our lives (and why we don’t talk about it). Princeton University Press, Princeton Bayles M (1989) Professional ethics. Wadsworth, Belmont Canguilhem G (1991) The normal and the pathological (trans: Fawcett CR, Cohen RS). Zone Books, New York Churchland P (1989) A Neurocomputational perspective: the nature of mind and the structure of science. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Dejours C (2013) Travail vivant (2 vols: vol 1 “Sexualité et travail”; vol 2 “Travail et Emancipation”). Payot, Paris Dejours C, Deranty J-P, Renault E, Smith N (2018) The return of work in critical theory: subject, society, politics. Columbia University Press, New York Fodor J (1988) Psychosemantics. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Geuss R (2008) Philosophy and real politics. Princeton University Press, Princeton Gilbert M (1999) On social facts. Princeton University Press, Princeton Goldman A (1999) Knowledge in a social world. Oxford University Press, Oxford Hegel, GWF (1991) Elements of the philosophy of right (trans: Nisbet HB). Oxford University Press, Oxford Hegel, GWF (2007) Philosophy of mind. (trans: Wallace W, Miller AV). Clarendon Press, Oxford Hegel, GWF (2015) The science of logic. (trans: di Giovanni G). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Herzog L (2019) Professional ethics in banking and the logic of ‘integrated situations’: aligning responsibilities, recognition, and incentives. J Business Ethics 156(2):531–543 Ikäheimo H, Laitinen A (eds) (2011) Recognition and social ontology. Brill, Leiden Korsgaard C (2012) Interacting with animals: a Kantian account. In: The Oxford handbook of animal ethics. Oxford University Press, Oxford Krijnen C (2015) The very idea of organisation. In: Social ontology today: Kantian and Hegelian reconsiderations. Brill, Leiden Krijnen C (2017) The very idea of organisation: towards a Hegelian exposition. Filozofija I Drutsvo 28(3):526–541 Menary R (ed) (2006) The extended mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

54

The Organization of Philosophy and a Philosophy of Organizations

1001

Mills J (2002) The unconscious abyss. Hegel’s anticipation of psychoanalysis. SUNY Press, New York Parker M (2000) The sociology of organizations and the organization of sociology: some reflections on the making of a division of labour. Sociol Rev 48(1):123–146 Pellegrino E, Thomasma D (1993) The virtues in clinical practice. Oxford University Press, New York Plato (1996) Phaedrus. (trans: Hamilton W). Penguin, London Presthus R (1962) The organisational society: an analysis and a theory. Random House, New York Renault R (2011) The theory of recognition and critique of institutions. In: Petherbridge D (ed) Axel Honneth. Critical essays. Brill, Leiden, pp 207–231 Searle J (1995) The construction of social reality. Free Press, New York Tuomela R (2002) The philosophy of social practices: a collective acceptance view. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Westwood R, Linstead S (2001) The language of organizations. Sage, London Williamson T (2018) Doing philosophy: from common sense to logical reasoning. Oxford University Press, Oxford

What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian Philosopher

55

Charles Spinosa, Matthew Hancocks, and Billy Glennon

Contents What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian Philosopher . . . . . . . . . . . Four Basic Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Makes Heideggerian Thinking Remarkable? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cultivating Wonder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heidegger on Thinking from the Lectures Comprising What Is Called Thinking? . . . . . . . . . . . Radical Difference and Identification of Bridging Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Historical Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Discovery of the Marginal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The New Thought Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Habituation or Getting Used to How the World Looks Different . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary: What Is Thinking? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Finding the Matter for Business Thinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thinking and Market Transformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CEMEX and Patrimonio Hoy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . RSA and Mid-Market Commercial Insurance in the UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion: Saving Focal Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1004 1006 1008 1010 1011 1012 1012 1013 1013 1014 1015 1015 1018 1018 1021 1023 1024 1024

Abstract

For Heidegger, thinking focuses on what is most taken for granted in any domain and in its focus transforms the domain. In business, such thinking develops cultural innovations that change the factors of competition. This chapter introduces C. Spinosa (*) · B. Glennon VISION Consulting, New York, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] M. Hancocks Strategic Thinking, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_2

1003

1004

C. Spinosa et al.

Heideggerian thinking for business transformation. We look at the concerns managers face in adopting such thinking, explain Heidegger’s two breakthroughs: the turn to practice and the uncovering of radically different understandings of being. We show how to cultivate the thinker’s mood of wonder and set out the five movements in Heideggerian thinking including bridging radically different ways of handling what is most taken for granted. We then propose that transforming mine into yours in exchange is the most taken for granted aspect of business and show how thinking about that transformation in cement (CEMEX) and commercial insurance (RSA) leads to cultural innovations that improve exchange for both buyers and sellers. We conclude by noting that such thinking tends to blend older practices like friendship with newer ones like networking. Keywords

Thinking · Heidegger · Strategy · Wonder · Listening · Focal practice

What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian Philosopher This chapter is about how to form innovative business strategies by using the philosophical thinking that comes out of the tradition of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault.1 Earlier works by Heideggerian consultants have focused on producing changes in practices that lead to huge cultural shifts in our institutions and the way we deal with people and things in the way that Gillette’s development of the disposable razor has led to us seeing everything as more or less disposable.2 The ambition here is narrower: to show how Heideggerian thinking in the domain of business reshapes the factors of competition and thus reshapes markets. To put this Heideggerian thinking in context, most strategic thinking does not change the factors of competition in markets. It finds advantageous stable or fluid positions within markets (Porter 1980; Sull 2009). Kim and Mauborgne’s account (Kim and Mauborgne 2005) of blue ocean transformation does claim to change the

For brevity’s sake, we will speak about the “Heideggerian philosopher,” leaving out Foucault’s name. Heidegger originated the form of thinking, while Foucault turned it into a full-fledged discipline, especially in the lecture courses at the end of his life (Foucault 1987, 2011). 2 The tradition of specifically Heideggerian consulting started shortly after the 1987 publication of Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores’ Understanding Computers and Cognition and the establishment of Fernando Flores’ Business Design Associates. A series of publications have followed including Disclosing New Worlds (Spinosa et al. 1997), “Taking an expanded view of customers” (Spinosa et al. 2001), “Developing productive customers in emerging markets” (Flores et al. 2003), “Promise-based management (Sull and Spinosa 2007), “Transforming crippling company politics” (Spinosa et al. 2014), and “Coping with time in organizations” (Spinosa et al. 2017). In the meantime, the field of Heideggerian Consulting has grown with VISION Consulting, Pluralistic Networks, STRATAM, Matthew Hancocks Strategic Thinking, Achieve Breakthrough, The Institute for Generative Leadership, and ReD Associates. ReD Associate’s Christian Madsbjerg has published Sensemaking (Madsbjerg 2017) and The Moment of Clarity (Madsbjerg and Rasmussen 2014). 1

55

What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian. . .

1005

factors of competition – to transform markets – and it is a remarkable achievement. But we believe that while the approach brings the practitioner close to the transformational insight, it does not go all the way. It fails because Kim and Mauborgne’s approach amounts to a logical reconstruction of genuine Heideggerian thinking. As a logical reconstruction, Kim and Mauborgne’s explains the if-then logic of Heideggerian thinking, shows its rationality, and thus explains the power of the market reconfigurations. But the logical reconstruction reasons away the truly generative and challenging insights that lead to transformations. Since Kim and Mauborgne use our case in their book, we will distinguish the Heideggerian thinking from the logical reconstruction as we go through the case (Kim and Mauborgne 2015, pp. 73–76).3 We do not wish to quibble with Kim and Mauborgne’s claim that their own cases show that their frameworks can produce market-transforming results. In the right situation, explanatory insights will come close enough to generative insights to do the work (Kim and Mauborgne 2015, pp. 87–98). However, we write to show Heideggerian thinking in its boldest, sharpest form and how it leads to market transformation. Heideggerian thinking reveals the insight that generates transformative change. It does not just bring the practitioner close. We will work through seven sections. In the section “Four Basic Questions,” we answer the basic questions we generally face when suggesting market transformation and the seemingly preposterous notion that thinking like Heidegger would enable it. Then, in the section “What Makes Heideggerian Thinking Remarkable?,” we will explain what is remarkable about Heideggerian philosophy and the discipline Heidegger asks us to undertake. In the section “Cultivating Wonder,” we will turn to the cultivation of wonder, which for us is the mood that most often enables Heideggerian thinking. In the section “ Heidegger on Thinking from the Lectures Comprising What Is Called Thinking?,” our writing turns more philosophical as we bring out the steps of thinking from the first half of Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking? We stay close to Heidegger and his use of Nietzsche as the exemplary thinker for two reasons. First, it is a basic good to follow the path of a thinker’s thinking, especially when you want to think similarly. Even more important, in identifying the steps of Nietzsche’s thinking, Heidegger shows how Nietzsche’s famous thought experiment has changed all our lives by landing us in postmodernity. Thus, we see at once how to think and how it changes the world. This section requires a smattering of knowledge of the history of the West. In the section “Finding the Matter for Business Thinking,” we will work out what is most taken for granted in commerce and what is therefore the subject or matter of Heideggerian business thinking. In the section “Thinking and Market Transformation,” we turn to two cases of Heideggerian business thinking that transformed a market, one of which Kim and Mauborgne helped make famous and one where most managers at the time thought the Heideggerian approach would not work. Last, in the section “Conclusion: Saving Focal Practices,” we discuss the nature of the particular past practices that we blend with current practices in transforming markets and thereby show the remarkable culture work that Heideggerian strategists undertake.

3

We would make a similar argument for Christensen and Bower’s disruptions (Christiansen and Bower 1995).

1006

C. Spinosa et al.

Four Basic Questions First, “Do I really need to work on transforming my market?” The obvious reply is the wise, paranoid one. Someone is out there trying to transform your market. Are your shareholders content to have you bet their money that none will succeed? The Heideggerian answer is different and begins by asking, “What makes a life in business worth living?” It is making business history by finding a new way to create value for customers and shareholders alike, in short, by transforming competition in markets. You might be positioned so that you do not need to transform your market, but, if you do not try, you will miss opportunities for your shareholders and customers, and you will miss out on the joy of a life in business. Second, “Is there some way to transform markets other than thinking like Heidegger?” Yes, there is the visionary approach to transformation. It involves inventing compelling contrary-to-fact conditions and then willfully pushing people to realize them. In creating the iPod and iTunes to transform the recording industry, Steve Jobs did this: imagine if there were a device for carrying 1,000 downloaded songs and that it was as cool as the music itself. (Remember the cool question iPod users had for each other, “What’s on your playlist?”) Then imagine that, by charging 99¢ per downloaded song, you have a more compelling offer than downloading for free and can thereby bring the contentious recording labels together in a single agreement. Even after we know that Steve Jobs did all that, it seems like a superhuman accomplishment (Isaacson 2011, pp. 378–425).4 Heideggerian thinking requires distinctive emotional and intellectual virtues; it does not require superhuman genius and will. Ask yourself the question from the Dan Fogelman’s pop Hollywood movie, Crazy, Stupid, Love: “Are you the billionaire owner of Apple Computers?” Third, “I was trained to think in economics, psychology, and management. Those disciplines make sense to me. What adjustments do I have to make to think about business from a Heideggerian perspective?” There are three basic adjustments: cultivation of wonder, listening for radical difference, and conducting research into the origins of practices instead of the origin of profit levers. Like any philosopher’s, Heidegger’s thinking requires cultivating a mood of wonder, because philosophers ask you to find what is truly odd or uncanny in our ordinary lives. Instead of the visionary imagining how things could be totally different, the philosopher looks at the way we are living and finds how it is totally different from the way we think it is. Soon, we will explore one such uncanniness: the meaning of being. It is quite mysterious that we say of things that they are in almost every other sentence we speak, but if queried what “is” means, we struggle. If you do not enter the exploration of what is in the mood of wonder, you are likely simply to get annoyed. Heideggerian thinkers push this finding of mysteries further than other philosophers. They actively cultivate the skill of listening for radical differences. We

4

We note that Steve Jobs also could transform markets as a Heideggerian thinker and did so when he saved Pixar and made its films part of our diet (Spinosa et al. 2017).

55

What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian. . .

1007

generally think that we are all pretty much alike. The disciplines of economics, psychology, and management tend to reinforce that. We are all rational agents, beings with the same neurology, or producers and consumers. When we do find differences, say, among Baby Boomers, Gen-Xers, and Millennials, we shy away from making strong value judgments. We say Millennials want the opportunity to exercise creativity at work more than Boomers did. We do not say, Millennials think that Boomers lead enormously deficient lives because they stunted their own creativity. To find opportunities worth exploring, the Heideggerian consultant has to see the difference to the point where it is radical, where people behave in radically different ways, and would, if confronted with the fact, judge the other lives deficient and even as lives challenging their own good life. When a Heideggerian consultant finds unusual differences, she clarifies them by diving into the history. Suppose a Heideggerian consultant finds her client’s customers live in client-patron relationships, she would not, for example, hesitate to read Henry James Sumner Maine’s Ancient Law. Suppose a Heideggerian consultant found her client’s customers saw their lives epitomized in their homes, the consultant might find her way to Hegel’s account of how the slave overcomes the master by realizing herself in the world. Suppose a Heideggerian consultant finds that women savers in their 40s in the UK conceive of the ideal future as being able to do what they want when they want to do it. The consultant might illuminate that seemingly narrow vision with reference to the liberation movements of the 1960s. Heideggerian consultants need have no more an encyclopedic understanding of history of practices than traditional consultants need to understand every lever of profitability in all markets. They learn as they go, but they turn to different sources for illumination. Once the Heideggerian consultant sharpens her vision by drawing on history, then the practical ways in which we cope with our deep differences stand out as wondrous and form the basis of market transforming practice. Fourth, clients ask,“What would such consulting look like? In looking for radical difference, it sounds as though Heideggerian consultants promote strife. We have enough of that in the world.” Let’s take a simple instance of how finding radical difference leads to a bridge. It comes from a Heideggerian consultant interviewing a person seeking a mortgage. The goal of the interview is to come up with a market transformation for people in this customer segment. Understanding that the interview participant liked roadside assistance to take care of emergencies, the consultant asked her if she would like a mortgage where she could miss a payment a month a year with no questions asked. “Absolutely not!” she snapped, showing that something was insulting. “You don’t take on a mortgage if you think you might miss a month,” she said. “It’s about being responsible. You always keep a little savings.” “Do you take pride in having a mortgage?” the consultant asks. Exasperation crosses her face. “Not at all,” she says, again suffering indignity. “A mortgage is a ball and chain around my neck. I hate debt. I hardly ever use credit cards. I would do anything to get out of a mortgage other than give up my home.” At this point, the Heideggerian consultant has been told that his assumptions are irritatingly wrong twice. He knows he is nearing a radical difference. “Let me see if I understand you. Suppose you have a mortgage for £400,000 at 2% interest and a

1008

C. Spinosa et al.

relative leaves you £400,000 in equities earning a 5% dividend. What would you do?” “Pay off the mortgage and celebrate,” she replies immediately. “What if the dividend was 10%?” “You don’t get it,” she says with real impatience. “I don’t really own my home until I pay off the mortgage. Of course, I’d pay off the mortgage.” The radical difference is clear. This participant lives for absolute ownership. Her home is an extension of herself. She feels debt as a form of imprisonment. (Take her words literally.) The consultant and his bank clients are, of course, wealth optimizers. They seek the highest rate of return on a diverse array of holdings. The total value matters. Leverage (a mortgage) is a tool for optimizing value. The consultant knows that if he were to reveal his view of wealth, the participant would think him morally and disgustingly deficient. She would see him as purely money-grubbing. In turn, he acknowledges that he feels some pride in his own optimization. But most of all, as a Heideggerian, he looks at the difference with wonder that they can get on as well as they do with such radically different views on wealth and life. Once the consultant sees this much, he also sees that there is a simple bridge between his and his client’s wealth-optimizing ways and the participant’s love of absolute ownership. Since she grudgingly uses wealth-optimizing tools like savings and credit card accounts, why not enable her to use them to help her pay off her mortgage faster? Her response to such an idea: “If 1% of my credit card bill went to pay off my mortgage each month, I’d use my credit card for everything.” The story is a miniature version of Heideggerian thinking. Finding radical difference shines a light on the bridge across the difference. We now work through Heideggerian thinking’s background and key elements before turning back to business.

What Makes Heideggerian Thinking Remarkable? In the last century, Martin Heidegger (1962), followed by Wittgenstein (1958), Merleau-Ponty (1962), and Bourdieu (1992), overturned 2,500 years of wisdom about how human beings made the world intelligible to themselves. Before Heidegger, most people thought that we made sense of the world by means of conceptual cognition, which was a free, mental, concept-forming activity directed only by the rules of reason and the nature of things it examined. Heidegger showed that we made things intelligible mostly through our nonconscious, skillful ways of dealing them. We do not distinguish, for instance, men from women because we have clear definitions in our heads but because we have lots of different micro-practices for dealing with different genders. For instance, we stand different distances on different occasions in different cultures from people with different. No one has ever been able to devise a system of beliefs that could prescribe the distances we stand even in one culture. Our distance standing varies according to situation, relationship, and occasion and is therefore too subtle for a system of beliefs. Nevertheless, we notice when someone is standing too near or too far. Practices like these are the root of how we make sense of ourselves, other people, things, institutions, and so forth. Hence, Heidegger initiated a practice

55

What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian. . .

1009

turn that has since spread to parts of philosophy, the humanities, and social sciences. However, Heidegger has bequeathed us another gift that follows from the practice turn. Michel Foucault has expounded it most effectively (Foucault 1979, 1985). Not only are practices foundational but also there are radical differences in practices that tend to get covered over by rational cognition. Heidegger shows us these radical differences by showing that being, a seemingly universal, ahistorical phenomenon, has a history. If being changes, then we too are not a stable kind called human beings who march through history acting as heroes or slaves in one set of circumstances and then as saints or sinners in another. Heroes and saints are radically different beings and do not mix. The hero’s willfulness is the saint’s sin. Though our mortality remains constant from epoch to epoch, it is not rich enough to account for the huge differences. As we change, so does how we see and deal with all other beings. Heidegger’s three most distinctive epochs are touchstones for illuminating radical difference. For the Homeric Greeks, things like emotions, or animals in the forest, just appeared and disappeared, whooshed up, as Richard Rorty said. Being was whooshing up. The beingest being would be the emotion channeled by the hero – Achilles’ wrath – or the emotion uncontrolled by the slave. The serious differences would be between hero and slave. With Christendom, beings were so far as they showed or failed to show the glory of God. Accordingly, people were saints or sinners. The creatures of the world were ordered as a text to show God’s order: the king as God’s representative, the lion as king of the jungle. Being was the manifestation of God’s glory, and the beingest being was the cathedral where God’s glory shone even in the cathedral’s interior stone. In modernity, beings appear as abstract essences systematically related to each other as with the elements of the periodic table. The beingest being would be the ordering subject (us) who creates tables of the essences of objects. Nietzsche, as we shall see, opened a new, joyful, postmodern epoch in the history of being where we are yet again radically different from heroes, who manage their emotions, saints, who give up will to follow God’s ways, or orderers, who arrange everything according to universal rules. To become a Heideggerian business consultant requires not only accepting Heidegger’s gift of seeing radical difference but also staying in constant practice. Try it. What are the beingest forms of human being, thing, and institution in your postmodern world today? Look at your everyday life. What is the thing that you deal with that exemplifies how you deal with other things? (To get a feel for this, consider that in the eighteenth century, the beingest thing would likely be a horse, which a rider trained and managed, not built and controlled, not wondered at and mastered.) How do you most typically get to know and project yourself in today’s world (as opposed to worlds of the past where family or tutors were dominant)? In dealing with others, what virtue is the one most generally admired? What new institution (it might not yet look like an institution) best enables you to deal with yourself and is typical in today’s world? Answer these questions before you read Heidegger’s account of Nietzsche in section “Heidegger on Thinking from the Lectures Comprising What Is Called Thinking?.”

1010

C. Spinosa et al.

Cultivating Wonder If thinking starts by seeing radical differences between people, things, institutions, and sometimes within oneself, then wonder is one of the best moods for noticing the difference and then for seeing a way to bridge the difference. In a mood of wonder, everything is minimally amazing in that it is at all. Leibniz spoke out of wonder when he asked, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” In the mood of wonder, we are ready to be surprised. We are ready to see things that are different from how we would expect them to be. We do not feel defensive or challenged when things thwart our expectations. In today’s age, a few people are naturally in a state of wonder. We are too critical for that. To take an example, we walk into a call center and see huge numbers of unhealthy people sitting in cubicles, eating chocolates and chips, nervously looking back and forth at clocks, other KPI monitors and their computer screens. If we get close, we hear a strain in their voices as they try to sound happy and remember the discipline as always talking with a smile on their lips. Within our critical mood of suspicion or skepticism, we see economic victims talking to other economic victims. There is some truth in this. In interviews with call center agents, especially those who handle the complaint lines, agents will regretfully say, “I feel as though I have to justify a wrong a customer has suffered.” Now, suppose you are a consultant who walks into a call center in the mood of wonder. It is as though you are putting, “It’s wonderful that. . .” in front of everything you see. Then you see that the company leaders have hired an enormous number of people in order to make sure that every customer gets to speak to an agent. Agents are eating chocolate and chips to get more energy so that they can take more calls, and they look at the KPIs because they do not want any callers to go unanswered. When they feel let down, it is because they could not answer a caller the way they think the CEO could have answered the caller. Wonder sees things as they are at their best but does not preclude seeing how things fall off from their best. Criticism thinks itself clear-sighted. But on the critical (frequently smug) view, we see the agents as versions of ourselves when we are harried by phone calls. With wonder, we see the agents as extraordinary human beings who are quite different from us and the customers they talk to. The agents give their working lives to taking care of individuals in distress. Wonder naturally reveals a difference that opens a space for management innovation. Criticism leads elsewhere. To get into the mood of wonder for doing consulting, we ask consultants to take stock of their situation and the narrative they would tell about it and then, while staying true to the facts of the situation, to adjust the narrative until they can make the four following claims: 1. 2. 3. 4.

There is no place I would rather be. There is no one I would rather be with. There is nothing I would rather be doing. And this I will remember well (Borgmann 2007, p. 1).

55

What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian. . .

1011

When people can honestly make the four assertions, they are in wonder (or another equally serviceable mood). Using these questions as guidelines leads to seeing the call center as the Heideggerian consultant does. In wonder, seeming victims genuinely become extraordinary caregivers, and that shows a distinctive way forward. We advise entering into wonder now as we plunge into the philosophical interpretation of the next section.

Heidegger on Thinking from the Lectures Comprising What Is Called Thinking? Whatever he thought earlier in his career, by 1952 Heidegger saw thinking as a skill like a craftsman’s skill. He saw too that such thinking had the power to change the way we conceive and deal with the world. To see the connection of thinking with craft, we turn to Heidegger’s account of a craftsmanly skill. Then to see how thinking changes the world, we work through his account of Nietzsche, whom he calls the last thinker. For craftsmanship, Heidegger uses the example of a master cabinet maker who draws the shape out of the wood (Heidegger 1968, pp. 14–17). We are to imagine that when the cabinet maker sees that her wood has a curve in its grain, she is drawn to make a cabinet with a curve in its shape. Thus, the cabinet maker starts (1) by discerning the shape in the wood and does that with reference to “all the different kinds of wood” she has experienced (Heidegger 1968, p. 14); then (2) she brings the shape out of the wood and to our attention (mostly by removing what obscures the shape); and finally (3) she habituates us to the shape by making it so appealing to our way of living that we might say: “That cabinet brings out the true feeling of kitchens.” Thinking too responds to its material and draws out the shapes slumbering in it (Heidegger 1968, pp. 14–15). What is thinking’s material? It is what we take most for granted, and what we take most for granted, according to Heidegger, is that we say of everything that “it is” and that we deal with everything as beings.5 Since we deal with each thing as a being, philosophers say we make things intelligible with reference to being. Being is the ground of intelligibility. But what makes something intelligible? As a first approximation, its presence makes something intelligible as a being. But presence is different in different epochs in the history of being: whooshing up, revealing God’s glory, orderable. Thinking’s job in general (not in business) is to draw out the hidden shape emerging now that enables us to attend to and then appreciate being and the beings revealed in its light. To draw out the hidden shape of being, or the meaning of being, the thinker runs through a series of propositions directed toward being, much as a prepractice turn 5

In the 1960s, Heidegger comes to think that the matter of thinking is the concealing aspect of making things intelligible or Ereignis, and not being. However, the other elements of thinking remain largely the same. The one other difference is that thinking focuses more on saying (poetry) than on dealing with things (Heidegger 1972, pp. 22–23 & 70–71). See Wrathall (2018) on mystery.

1012

C. Spinosa et al.

philosopher would. Heidegger calls it “idea formation” (Heidegger 1968, p. 55). However, while the prepractice turn philosopher uses the propositions to sift through our intuitions or concepts, Heidegger’s thinker uses the propositions to draw us into an exploration of our practical ways of coping with ourselves and with particular things. For Heidegger, thinking is a way of pointing out and thereby dealing with things as much as manual manipulation. Heidegger explicitly tells us that thinking “is . . . a ‘handicraft’” (Heidegger 1968, p. 16). For Heidegger, when we think of the old Heidelberg Bridge, we are at the bridge and dealing directly with it, not some concept or intuition; indeed, he says, we might be dealing more directly than someone indifferently walking across it (Heidegger 1971, pp. 156–157). To see how thinking deals with and transforms things, we turn to Heidegger’s account of the path of Nietzsche’s thought. We mark the central steps, which are the same as the Heideggerian consultant’s thinking in business. To avoid confusion, note that Heidegger has an ambivalent relationship with Nietzsche. Nietzsche is the last thinker who thought us into a whole new way of being: postmodernity. Heidegger shows how Nietzsche did it. Nonetheless, Heidegger thinks postmodernity a wasteland and spent his career trying to think us beyond it.

Radical Difference and Identification of Bridging Practices Thinkers discern hidden shapes of being by looking for radical differences in the way we cope with people and things. The pre-Socratics, for instance, emphasized the radical difference between the constant change of the world and the stabilities we find or create in making sense of things. On Heidegger’s account, Nietzsche primarily looked at the radical difference between the supersensible (thoughts) and the sensible (stuff) or rationality and animalness (Heidegger 1968, pp. 61–62, 91), but also at the difference between, as he put it, Caesar and Christ (Heidegger 1968, p. 69). Since it is easier to understand, we will focus on that difference. Nietzsche looked at the radical difference between the classical, domineering, heroic life and the Hebraic law-abiding or loving traditions. He asked, What is the way of coping that bridges the two different traditions? For Nietzsche, it was willing or imposing. Romans imposed Roman law. Christians imposed antiwilling in meekness and love. Nietzsche discerned the hidden meaning of being as will. It is easy enough to see will as the basis of human being; we will have to work through Heidegger’s account of Nietzsche to see how will can be the being of all things.

Historical Review After the initial identification of a difference-bridging practice, the thinker uncovers what keeps the practice hidden, or why it is disbelieved, by ripping “away the fog” (Heidegger 1968, p. 89). Why should we disbelieve that being is will? As Nietzsche looked at the history of the West, he saw that the strongest reason had been that we cannot will the past. We cannot undo it. We cannot change it. Note: since Nietzsche,

55

What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian. . .

1013

we do not feel this intransigence so strongly. Accordingly, before postmodernity, our tradition always sought ways to overcome the inertness of the past. Both the Hebraic and Greek traditions focused heavily on law (Heidegger 1968, p. 93). The point was to put the past in its place in the present. With Christian redemption and various successive secularized versions, we sought to free ourselves from the obligations of our lifeless past. Thus, Nietzsche depicts our history as one where we have been revolted by the pastness of the past and have sought unsuccessfully to revenge ourselves upon the past, even the simple passing of time (Heidegger 1968, pp. 85, 92–96).6

The Discovery of the Marginal Once Nietzsche shows us that his contemporaries and their ancestors were continuously trying to remove the hold of the past, then, according to Heidegger, what shines clearly is the stance of simply letting-things-and-people-be as found in the words of Heraclitus and Parmenides (Heidegger 1968, p. 107). Heidegger’s lectures in the second half of the course take up letting-be in Parmenides. But for Nietzsche himself, another letting-be marginal practice shone: the ancient Stoic thought experiment to decide whether to commit suicide. It was a practice in which Stoics accepted and hence willed the past. In contemplating suicide, a Stoic would bring to mind the story of her entire life, the good and the bad, and then ask whether she would choose either that life with all its marvels and shames or no life at all (Foucault 2001, pp. 283–285). If the Stoic chose the life, then the Stoic willed and affirmed the past along with everything else.7

The New Thought Experiment Of course, in Nietzsche’s day this marginal Stoic thought experiment would not convince many that they could will the past. To give the marginal practice resonating power, Nietzsche blended it with a dominant practice.8 Heidegger names the dominant practice with the unfortunate expression, “the steadily rotating recurrence of the same” (109). What would such a practice look like? Nietzsche noticed that we had become obsessive critics. It was an everyday way of coping with ourselves, others, and things. We could take nothing seriously. We always found a way to criticize, and thereby reduce, authority. Ultimately, we lived with 6

Note that in calling attention to the Hebraic, Greek, and Christian traditions, Nietzsche calls our attention to practices we still participate in, justice and redemption. (Hence, the bridging practice does not supersede (and replace) past practices in the Hegelian sense. Rather, it shows how the different practices belong together.) 7 We surmise this origin of Nietzsche’s thought experiment because Nietzsche very clearly read Seneca. Heidegger does not give this detail. 8 “Blending” is cross-appropriation from Disclosing New Worlds (Spinosa et al. 1997).

1014

C. Spinosa et al.

the dawning sense that nothing really mattered. We recurrently criticize with the same result. In doing this Nietzsche said we killed both God and serious meaning (Nietzsche 1974, §122, §307, §125). Inserting the Stoic thought experiment inside our incipient sense that nothing matters intensifies its revelatory power. Hence, Nietzsche asks us to think not just of our lives but also of the history of the universe repeating eternally in all of its great and shameful details, not just once as in the Stoic exercise, but over and over again. The endless repetition removes seriousness just as constant criticism does. Thus, the thought experiment puts us in our familiar place of sensing a coming meaninglessness. Then Nietzsche inserts the Stoic exercise. Nietzsche asks whether we can affirm our endlessly repeated lives with both triumphs and shames (Nietzsche 1974, §341). In responding at all – and we do feel obliged to respond – we have to affirm our lives. Anything less – trying to return our ticket, contemplating suicide – would simply be something we will have done over and over endlessly, and hence it would be meaningless. But in the name of what do we affirm life? Nothing meaningful or serious! We simply affirm and experience ourselves as will, willing the affirmation and in affirming our endlessly repeated lives, we are also affirming the past and thereby willing it. Hence we no longer feel that the past is beyond will. Thus, we are captivated by the thought experiment. Nietzsche’s thought experiment brought out the meaning of being that was emerging at his time. It was the hidden shape of his time. Intellectuals were captivated by the experiment, and as they changed their lives and wrote with it shaping their words, others came to see life in the same way. But why say that this willing is the experience of being in general as opposed to just human being? Nietzsche’s habituating answers that.

Habituation or Getting Used to How the World Looks Different Heidegger points out that at the end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche called for habituating us to his experiment: “We did create the heaviest thought – now let us create the being to whom it will be light and blissful!” (109).9 He had already started that task in The Gay Science (Nietzsche 1974, §341). There Nietzsche turns to the light, joyful style of self-affirming (Heidegger 1968, p. 109). Without meaningful choices, we experience everything – as we mostly do today – as options soliciting us to express ourselves. Nietzsche famously describes such a life as a kind of expressive artistry: One thing is needful. – To “give style” to one’s character – a great and rare art! . . . Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed – both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. (Nietzsche 1974, §290)

Nietzsche calls his experiment his “heaviest thought” (Heidegger 1968, p. 109).

9

55

What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian. . .

1015

Every aspect of ourselves, even our original nature, solicits us to bring it into our own design. That goes too for galaxies and DNA. We take pride in our attitudes toward them. Being is will in general because everything solicits us. Thus, Nietzsche’s thinking transforms everything by thinking us into postmodernity. If the mood of wonder still prevails, you will now see that the world we take as hard, everyday reality and which solicits opinions grew out of a philosopher’s thought experiment. What then would be good answers to our question about postmodernist beingest beings? We feel ourselves engaging in the greatest optionality when we are online. Our favorite tool for connecting to the worldwide web is our beingest being. The worldwide web is likely our beingest institution. We are designers treating ourselves as resources so that we can be all we can be. Our chief virtue is flexibility (Heidegger 1977).

Summary: What Is Thinking? Thinking first focuses on what is most taken for granted in a domain and then identifies the radical difference between practices for dealing with what is most taken for granted. Then, thinking finds the marginal practice that bridges the difference and looks at the place of the marginal practice in history. Thinking blends a form of the marginal practice with a dominant practice to form a thought experiment that brings out the power of the marginal practice. Last, thinking habituates people to the marginal practice that comes out in the thought experiment. The main differences between Heideggerian thinking about being and Heideggerian business thinking are that what is taken for granted in business is something other than being and instead of a thought experiment, business thinking comes up with a new product or service.10

Finding the Matter for Business Thinking What in business is most taken for granted? It will likely be some practice that has been a core part of business since its beginning and whose complexity found early expression but its meaning was mostly lost on later codifiers of business practice. We might consider division of labor or the practice of laboring to make things serve our purposes. But these practices need not develop into commerce. We 10

Would Heidegger countenance the claim that genuine thinking could be called by the taken-forgranted of a particular domain of activity such as business? In his “Origin of the Work of Art,” (1971, pp. 32–37), Heidegger claims that art and thinking are essentially both versions of establishing a regime of truth and that works of art can manifest what is essential to a particular domain (reliability for equipment). Thinking can do the same. Hubert Dreyfus brilliantly illuminates Heidegger’s distinction between the widely shared public world, with which thinkers are concerned when they think being, and special or subworlds like business, where thinkers think what is most taken for granted in the subworld (Dreyfus 1991, pp. 89–91).

1016

C. Spinosa et al.

might consider the practice of an open market place, the agora. But business has occurred in restricted marketplaces as well. We propose exchanging value for value even in barter as the most taken for granted practice in business. Heideggerian consultants therefore ask, what is the meaning of exchange? What is its hidden shape? The question might seem perverse. What is plainer than the meaning of normal exchanges? In 1602, the common law settled its understanding of exchange. It went from a possessory process (you take this, and I take that) to a contractual one (we make a mutually beneficial agreement exchanging the right to a thing) (Spinosa 1994, pp. 370–385). Both understandings assume that what is mine can easily become yours. But how can what is truly mine – part of how I recognize myself in coping with the world – become yours? That was a live question before Roman lawyers in 450 BC started to codify their tradition in the famous XII Tables (Jolowicz and Nicholas 2008, p. 13). The XII Tables show that Romans distinguished exchanges between Romans from exchanges with non-Romans, and then, for exchanges between Romans, they distinguished two kinds of property, res mancipi and res nec mancipi. Mancipium means simply a taking in hand and seems likely to have indicated a possessory understanding of exchange. Res mancipi included land subject to Roman ownership (generally Italian land), slaves, beasts of draft, beasts of burden, and rustic servitudes (mostly rights to take goods from or use someone else’s land). Res nec mancipi was any other kind of property (Jolowicz and Nicholas 2008, p. 137). Roman law demanded a special form of exchange for res mancipi called a mancipatio. To exchange a res mancipi, the transferor and the transferee had to appear with five adult Roman citizens, a pair of scales, a sixth Roman citizen to hold the scales, and a brick of bronze. To effect the exchange, the transferee grasps the thing to be transferred and says: “I assert that this [item] is mine by Quiritary right, and let it have been acquired by me with this piece of bronze and bronze scale.” Then the transferee strikes the scales with the piece of bronze and gives it to the transferor (Jolowicz and Nicholas 2008, p. 144). In his institutes, Gaius (161 CE) called the mancipatio a symbolical sale (Jolowicz and Nicholas 2008, pp. 137–138, 146). But what does it symbolize? To understand the symbolism of the mancipatio, we need to look not at the transfer of goods but at the transformation of yours into mine. Consider the slave who has learned how to anticipate and deal with all of your whims. Consider the field that you have cultivated in various ways until you have found the best pattern of cultivating and irrigating, whose paths and slopes are a part of your daily routine. Consider the horse you have trained and who responds to your gestures as if its instincts were your own. It turns out that res mancipi are all items that a bonus paterfamilias (the reasonable paterfamilias) has nurtured to suit his way of life. Are any of these really mine as soon as I pay you for them and carry them off? The nurturing has made them deeply yours. That does not simply rub off. Still, the Roman paterfamilias had the power to sell his slave and even his child using the mancipatio (Jolowicz and Nicholas 2008, pp. 118–120). Romans invented absolute ownership, which follows from a strong sense of mine and yours and

55

What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian. . .

1017

enables an equally strong sense of the capacity to sell or give away (Jolowicz and Nicholas 2008, pp. 140–142). But what would such a sale look like? Why should the sale need five mature witnesses instead of one or two? The Romans believed in counsel as much as absolute ownership. A paterfamilias could put his child to death but only with the agreement of the family council (Jolowicz and Nicholas 2008, p. 119). The five witnesses were the council. They needed to confirm and allow (by serving as witnesses) that something hard to believe was indeed taking place: the owner is making something deeply his into yours. Such taking would look like violence, and so it is in the ceremony. If I am to have your horse, I need to grab the horse with my own hand to show that I am in fact taking it, as I would in violence. But I also must hit the scale (the measure of rightness) with the bronze and then hand the bronze to you to show that I am peacefully purchasing the horse. The person, animal, land, or right is so markedly yours that it seems quite inalienable and thus the mancipatio is required. The shape hidden in exchange – the meaning of exchange – is the bridging of a radical difference between buyer and seller. The purchaser grabbing the horse with one hand and passing the bronze brick with the other himself represents in that action the bridge that brings buyer and seller close enough to transform yours into mine. Trading value for value, which is how we normally think of exchange, only arises out of acknowledging difference and bridging the difference. Today, we acknowledge the difference through a kind of disavowal. We use big data and algorithms to find the moment when a customer is appraising the seller’s product in a fashion close to the seller’s own. Say we are looking at a new suit online. We click on it and accessories that suggest we are preparing for an important meeting, perhaps a Board Meeting. Suddenly the algorithm picks up that our cursor movements are those of an aspirational mood directed at the garment, and suddenly we receive an enticing offer. Thus, we recognize the difference between the buyer and seller by acting on those moments when it is the narrowest. Old-fashioned advertisements usually tried to narrow the difference between seller’s and buyer’s appraisal of the goods. That is the past. We can easily foresee the day when the buyer’s algorithm interacts with the seller’s algorithm. When that happens, we believe the transformation of mine into yours will become a central issue again. We are now ready to look at the two contemporary cases of Heideggerian consulting and see them as instances of Heideggerian thinking about transformation of mine to yours. As a simple reminder before we begin, Heideggerian business thinking works by (1) bringing out the ad hoc bridging of the radical difference between buyers and sellers, (2) finding a blend between that marginal bridging practice and a dominant practice, and then (3) finding a way to habituate people to the newly developed bridge. Business thinking follows the same path as thinking in general except that business thinking generates a new product or service concept rather than a new thought experiment. Because this thinking blends and strengthens cultural practices, we call these offerings cultural innovations.

1018

C. Spinosa et al.

Thinking and Market Transformation We will show how Heideggerian business thinking works in a much-noted case CEMEX’s Patrimonio Hoy (Kim and Mauborgne 2005, pp. 73–76; Prahalad 2006, pp. 219–240; Flores et al. 2003, pp. 77–103) and one other recent case where most would think there was no difference between the suppliers and customers. We will also take time out to distinguish Heideggerian thinking from Kim and Mauborgne’s logical reconstruction.

CEMEX and Patrimonio Hoy Francisco Garza, CEMEX’s Senior Manager in charge of Mexico started with a simple strategic goal: find a way to sell more cement to Mexico’s poorer, mostly doit-yourself builders. He saw that the class differences between these do-it-yourselfers and middle-class Mexicans were huge and therefore asked for help from Heideggerian consultants. Radical difference: The consultants started looking for radical difference between sellers and buyers and found the biggest difference within the buyers themselves. Poorer Mexicans lived in a status culture where God or fate determined their places in the community; planning was seen as arrogant; and a good life came from accepting one’s place, maintaining conviviality in warm community celebrations, and holding others to account if they got ahead (presumably by taking something from someone). However, these Mexicans also had one foot in the more contractual, middle-class culture of Mexico. Accordingly, they understood that one could plan and organize to create things good for the community such as public gardens. One could even do this to get ahead a little. However, they rationalized their use of binding agreements and planning to get ahead by believing that God or fate ultimately determined if you actually got ahead and by not planning too far in advance. Since the mark of fate’s or God’s blessing was a good attitude, those with good attitudes had more flexibility in getting ahead (Flores et al. 2003, p. 84). Identification of a bridge practice: Without planning, with many convivial duties, and with a strong suspicion about getting ahead, how could poorer Mexicans make any large purchases at all? Certain members of the community with good attitudes took to organizing tandas, which were informal associations of ten neighbors who contributed 100 pesos to a pool each week, and each week, one – determined by lot at the first meeting – took 1,000 pesos. The institution combined fate – the drawing of lots – with a little planning – planning to pay 100 pesos for 10 weeks. It combined a little bit of neighborhood conviviality – the tanda generally comprised people who had neighborly relations – and organizing for a nonconvivial good. The selfmotivating optimism of the organizer and the neighborly warmth generally stood against distrust of getting ahead (Flores et al. 2003, pp. 83–85). Thus, the tanda, once we discovered it, shone brightly as the bridging practice on which to build the market transforming innovation.

55

What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian. . .

1019

Thinking in contrast to a logical reconstruction of thinking: The tanda is precisely the key discovery that Kim and Mauborgne’s logical reconstruction of thinking would most likely miss. Kim and Mauborgne wisely ask strategists to start by looking at difference. Only, instead of looking at radical differences that emerge in actual customers’ lives or in the differences between customers and sellers (or others in the value chain), Kim and Mauborgne direct strategists to the six most common sites of difference: the difference (1) between the benefits your industry gives customers and those of a potential substitute industry, (2) between the benefits of one product group and another in the same market, (3) between the financial buyers and end-users, (4) between products and complementary products, (5) between the functional and emotional reasons to buy, and (6) between the reasons customers buy today and buy tomorrow. They prescribe a blend of the benefits that crosses the difference and hence produces a new value innovation and transformed market space (Kim and Mauborgne 2015, pp. 51–82). In the case of Patrimonio Hoy, Kim and Mauborgne saw that the communal warmth of the convivial status culture opposed the functional coldness of the contractual culture and identified a blend of the two in order to make cement into something that had emotional resonance: Patrimonio Hoy (Kim and Mauborgne 2015, pp. 73–76). As a logical reconstruction that classifies the nature of the innovation, Kim and Mauborgne do well. But one could work for years trying out ways to blend the emotional status culture and functional contractual culture and never hit on the tanda or find a successful blend. The strategist would find that most of the do-it-yourselfers’ practices already blended a little of the emotional with a little of the functional, as do most of ours. The Kim and Mauborgne practitioner will have to get very lucky to hit on the tanda as the premier practice for the blend that makes cement emotional. However, once one gets clear about the radical differences as they are lived – fear of planning and seeing getting ahead as arrogant while wanting to get ahead – then any practice that enables people to do some planning within a convivial context that honors fate leaps out as a wondrous bridge that blends the best of each side. That is just what the tanda did for us. That is the advantage of finding radical, lived differences. The bridge practice leaps out at you. But its leaping out does not make it appealing. Historical review: Neither poor Mexicans nor CEMEX’s managers wanted to take tandas seriously. Most tandas failed. People ended up spending their 1,000 pesos on emergencies. Tandas were still clearly instruments of fate not regular commercial exchange. CEMEX’s managers saw them as shameful. Discovery of the marginal and dominant: What could make the tanda solid? A few practical and cultural things were clear. A CEMEX tanda would be for cement and other associated building materials. Unfortunately, a cement-and-building-materials tanda just did not seem real to these customers. It was too close to the ordinary tanda for people to see why they should bother. However, there was a marginal practice of moving out of one’s home to accept a government-built home. Most considered such a move anticonvivial and would not do it, but recognized it as a practice to get a whole home. The team drew on this practice to create a tanda for getting a whole room, which did seem different and real.

1020

C. Spinosa et al.

The new product or service concept: The new reality of a whole room had to be fitted in with the values of the community. The first problem was planning. It would take about 70 weeks to pay for enough material to build a room. That required far more arrogant planning than any was accustomed to. To mitigate the sense of arrogance, CEMEX saw to it that supplies were delivered as needed so that building could take place during the same 70 weeks of the tanda. Also, CEMEX instituted the role of a construction advisor who, with a good attitude, would talk the builder through a building plan, mentioning all the things that generally go wrong, and then create a design for a simple, standard room. The conversation and written design made the room more real than other objects sought with conventional tandas, and although the tanda lasted for 70 weeks, participants did not have actively to plan for 70 weeks (Flores et al. 2003, pp. 89, 92). Thus, the blend of the marginal practices of the tanda and getting a whole something and the dominant practices foregoing planning and having a good attitude offered a new bridge for exchange. Habituation: Though the early participants built their rooms on time, they did not overcome the resentment toward getting ahead. To habituate the new practice, the team decided that the tanda would have to be embedded in something larger than building a room. Since tanda members had spoken about the planned room as patrimony for their children, the team named the cement tanda Patrimonio Hoy, Patrimony Today (Flores et al. 2003, p. 88). Passing things down to your children fitted well with the dispositions of a status society. Adding “today” made it something participants could feel proud of right away. The team, then, made Patrimonio Hoy into a club that included all the cement tandas in a region. As members in the club, participants received not only the credit and savings mechanism of the tanda but also warehousing, friendly delivery, technical assistance and a plan, construction classes, masonry certificates, and additional group sessions to talk over the feelings around seeing the tanda through (Flores et al. 2003, p. 86). Last, the Patrimonio Hoy club instituted block parties, newspaper reports, and other celebrations in the convivial community to celebrate the success of people who completed their rooms. At these celebrations, club members gave testimonials on how they saved. The Patrimonio Hoy community became a sister community to the traditional one (Flores et al. 2003, p. 94). This cultural innovation worked. It transformed the basis of competition, and poorer Mexicans built better quality rooms for 51% to 80% of the previous cost and did so in one-third the time. In Patrimonio Hoy regions, cement sales rose by 2–3 times (Flores et al. 2003, p. 99). Like other market transformations that come out of Heideggerian thinking, we call Patrimonio Hoy a cultural innovation because the exchange found a better way to blend the status and contractual cultures for both poorer Mexicans and CEMEX managers. The poorer Mexicans found themselves in a tanda that did not emphasize fate or suspect getting ahead as much as their status culture did. CEMEX managers grudgingly accepted tandas of poorer Mexicans for whom extending middle-class credit would not work.

55

What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian. . .

1021

RSA and Mid-Market Commercial Insurance in the UK CEMEX might seem like a special case because it sought exchanges between two quite different classes of Mexicans. Of our second case is one where most would say that the buyer and seller were culturally identical: UK commercial insurance underwriters and independent, UK commercial insurance brokers. They are mostly men from the same social class. Many brokers spent a part of their careers as underwriters. Both brokers and underwriters developed a sophisticated understanding of insuring commercial risk. Though the brokers are independent, they are the insurers’ sales channels to end-clients. Thus, they are closer to the sellers than are most buyers. Technically, they were the buyers’ agents. Yet, for all this similarity, RSA had to find and bridge the difference between underwriters and brokers to turn its mid-market business around. Founded in 1710 and headquartered in London, RSA provides insurance to 17 million customers in 140 countries. RSA UK senior managers believed that RSA had the best commercial underwriters in the industry; yet RSA had been losing market share in its mid-market commercial insurance area for seven years. The mid-market commercial team tried numerous solutions, in particular, various versions of step-like commission schemes where, with higher sales volumes, brokers would earn higher commissions. But with severe price competition, the schemes made little difference. Worse, it looked as though having RSA’s sophisticated underwriters, who could craft individual terms, did not matter either. Radical difference: The mid-market leader hired Heideggerian consultants to find out how to obtain the lion’s share of broker business where end-customers cared more about insurance terms than price. The team sought first to identify the radical difference between brokers and underwriters. Unlike underwriters, brokers were avid networkers. Even brokers who started out as underwriters made themselves into networkers. Brokers valued being liked above anything else. They constantly worried that their customers, staff, and insurance company underwriters did not like them. In contrast, underwriters lived to analyze and write risk. They were proud that their analytical abilities were so strong that brokers needed to form relationships with them. Brokers were lovers. Underwriters were analyzers. They could not be more different. But they saw little of the difference. Since underwriters saw brokers as slightly lazy calculators, underwriters assumed that brokers would pit insurance companies against each other for the lowest price. Hence, as more disciplined, smarter calculators, RSA underwriters developed the tactic of sending in their quotes at the last moment so that the broker could not ask other insurers to underbid RSA. Consequently, brokers saw that when they made requests to RSA for insurance quotes, the requests would go into a black hole. Brokers thought that if the RSA underwriter liked the broker or the broker’s client enough, then maybe the RSA underwriter would issue a quote on time. Since brokers saw underwriters as like themselves, the brokers could only assume that most underwriters’ behavior showed that the underwriters disliked the brokers.

1022

C. Spinosa et al.

To make matters worse, the underwriters felt hurt because brokers did not seem to appreciate the careful craftsmanship of the terms. In both cases, exchange was a grudging act of will. Identification of a bridge practice: Once the radical difference became clear, a bridging practice leapt out. Because brokers were always trying to cultivate warm relationships, every once in a while, a broker would manage to cultivate a warm relationship with an RSA underwriter. It would be warm enough that the underwriter would not play the waiting game, but move any request from that broker to the top of his pile, work out the best quote he could, and then call the broker immediately. The underwriter felt the broker appreciated his underwriting, while the broker thought the underwriter appreciated the friendship. Historical review: The long tradition of underwriters as aloof judges stood against friendships between brokers and underwriters. Virtually everyone worried that such friendship would drive underwriters to underprice risk. Thus, such relationships were discouraged and remained rare. Discovery of the marginal and dominant: While friendship was marginal, senior management did expect underwriters to exchange pleasantries. Thus the Heideggerian consultants joined the dominant practice of pleasantries with some of the key marginal practices of friendship. The new product or service concept: First, RSA promised that an underwriter would respond to brokers within 3 hours of their submitting a request. The underwriter would vet the request for risk but also ask the broker what the underwriter could do to help the broker close the sale. The underwriter would then promise to deliver the quote at a time the broker wanted. In the quote call, the underwriter would enquire about the end-client’s situation and mood and deliver a quote with an explanation of why it benefited the end-client’s. In short, the underwriter did a little of the broker’s work. Then the underwriter would ask if he could call the broker just before he presented to the end-client in order to see if the broker needed a last minute change. In that follow-on call, the underwriter spoke in an upbeat mood, wished the broker the best of luck, and said he would like the business. Win or lose, the underwriter would seek a feedback call. Brokers loved the collaboration and attention. Underwriters felt their terms appreciated. Habituation: Underwriters, however, hated the all-important follow-on and feedback calls. To align underwriters emotionally with these calls, underwriters were put into teams to listen to each other’s calls weekly, make recommendations to each other, and join together to meet team financial goals. The underwriters supported each other in making the all-important follow-on and feedback calls. In these calls, brokers would frequently identify a new, non-price-sensitive risk for the underwriter. To sustain the practice, the regional manager would hold a weekly review meeting. With this new bridge between underwriters and brokers, revenue increased by 30%, renewals increased by 6 percentage points, and RSA did that while raising the prices of its premiums. Michael Lawton, the mid-market leader said, “This achievement went beyond what anyone could have expected.”

55

What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian. . .

1023

Conclusion: Saving Focal Practices As part of thinking like Heidegger, Heideggerian consultants blend homely marginal practices with dominant ones. With Patrimonio Hoy, the communal conviviality of the tanda remained and had to remain for the market transformation to work. With RSA, friendly acknowledgment had to remain for the new service to work. We consider innovations that preserve these older practices good in their own right because they preserve a way of life and kind of practice that our dominant postmodern, technological way of living tends to co-opt and eliminate. We follow Albert Borgmann in calling these older practices focal practices, “focal,” because they take us away from the life of infinite options and center us (Borgmann 1987, pp. 196–209). To make the distinction between postmodern technological and focal practices clear, we start with technological practices. Consider using Google as an exemplary technological practice. It gives us efficiency, convenience, flexibility, freedom, and reduced risk. Technological practices generally do not take cultivation but involve simple actions like tapping a keyboard or screen. Technological practices also take over and co-opt other kinds of practice. Consider how technology has changed camping. If we used to camp to get in touch with both the difficulties and beauties of nature, we now use technological practices to enjoy the beauty and mostly avoid the difficulty. We have super-light, all-condition sleeping bags, tents that pitch themselves, kits for taking care of water, snakebites, and so forth. We have supernutritious packaged food, satellite guidance, and, of course, mobile phone coverage. At night we are free to listen to the sounds of nature and look at the night sky or to watch a movie on our tablets. By and large, we only have to experience the exigencies of nature and cultivate skills to handle them as we wish. The exigencies have become options. Focal practices are quite different. They require the cultivation of skills such as cooking good food at a campfire. They generally require others with different skillful roles such as gathering dry wood or pitching the tent. To take a less co-opted example of a focal practice, consider playing music with friends. It requires the skills of playing saxophone, piano, guitar, bass, and drums. Because in exercising focal practices we are bound to acts of cultivation and particular communities of people, focal practices generate relationships that bind more than they free. And last, because of the particularity of the skill and the community, focal practices even simple ones like creating a family dinner are full of risk that one does not want to mitigate. If people around the table feel grouchy, the focal practice demands working it out or absorbing the misfortune, not carrying your plate into a private space and texting a friend or watching a movie. In short, focal practices require cultivation of skills, others in various roles, binding relations, and risk. Technological practices do the opposite. Visionary market transformations do not tend to include focal practices. A visionary starts with a world that looks impossible, as did Steve Jobs when he created the iPod and iTunes. He knew he was creating a kind of fantasy world and

1024

C. Spinosa et al.

knew some of its costs. He loved the Beatles’ concept albums, but beloved playlists would have little room for whole albums. A life without focal practices would be one with only the delights of infinite optionality, in short, of fantasy, not the blessing of a brilliant, live, risky, skillful performance. When we think about the life of infinite optionality, we are with Yeats: “We had fed the hearts on fantasies, / The heart’s grown brutal from the fare” (Yeats 2008, p. 174). Though we think focal practices are goods in themselves, using Heideggerian thinking in consulting will drive market transforming results whether you care about focal practices or not. Heideggerian thinking will focus on finding the radical differences that let the truly generative, transformational practice leap out. Thus, it lets people in business engage in the joy and greatness of commerce.

Cross-References ▶ Critical Moral Philosophy and Management ▶ The Organization of Philosophy and a Philosophy of Organizations ▶ Why Work? What Does Philosophy (Not) Tell Us About Worker Motivation?

References Borgmann A (1987) Technology and the character of contemporary life. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Borgmann A (2007) Cyberspace, cosmology, and the meaning of life. In Ubiquity Feb 2007. Available via http://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=1232403. Accessed 1 May 2017 Bourdieu P (1992) The logic of practice. Polity Press, Cambridge Christensen CM, Bower, JL (1995) Disruptive technologies. Harvard Business Review, January–February Dreyfus HL (1991) Being-in-the-World. The MIT Press, Cambridge Flores F, Letelier MF, Spinosa C (2003) Developing productive customers in emerging markets. California Management Review 45(4):77–103 Foucault M (1985) The use of pleasure. Vintage, New York Foucault M (1979) Discipline and punish. Vintage, New York Foucault M (2001) The hermeneutics of the subject. Picador, New York Foucault M (2011) The courage of truth. Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke Heidegger M (1962) Being and time. Harper & Row, New York Heidegger M (1968) What is called thinking? Harper & Row, New York Heidegger M (1971) Poetry, language, thought. Harper & Row, New York Heidegger M (1972) On time and being. Harper Torchbooks, New York Heidegger M (1977) The question concerning technology. Harper Torchbooks, New York Isaacson W (2011) Steve Jobs. Simon and Schuster, New York Jolowicz HF, Nicholas B (2008) Historical introduction to the study of Roman law. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Kim WC, Mauborgne R (2005) Blue ocean strategy. Harvard, Cambridge Kim WC, Mauborgne R (2015) Blue ocean strategy: expanded edition. Harvard, Cambridge Madsbjerg C (2017) Sensemaking. Hachette, New York Madsbjerg C, Rasmussen MB (2014) The moment of clarity: using the human sciences to solve your toughest business problems. Harvard Business Review Press, Boston

55

What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian. . .

1025

Merleau-Ponty M (1962) The phenomenology of perception. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London Nietzsche F (1974) The gay science. Vintage, New York Porter ME (1980) Competitive strategy. The Free Press, New York Prahalad CK (2006) The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River Spinosa C (1994) The transformation of intentionality. English Literary Renaissance 24(2):370–385 Spinosa C, Davis C, Glennon B (2014) Transforming crippling company politics. Organizational Dynamics 43(2):88–95 Spinosa C, Flores F, Dreyfus HL (1997) Disclosing new worlds. The MIT Press, Cambridge Spinosa C, Hancocks M, Glennon B (2017) Coping with time in organizations. Perspectives on process organization studies, vol 7. Oxford University Press, Oxford Spinosa C, Letelier M, Calder B (2001) Taking an expanded view of customers. Mark Res 12(4):4–11 Sull D, Spinosa C (2007) Promise-based management: the essence of execution. Harvard Business Review 85(4):78–86 Sull D (2005) Made in China. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA Sull D (2009) The upside of turbulence. Harper Business, New York Wittgenstein L (1958) Philosophical investigations. Basil Blackwell & Mott, Oxford Wrathall MA (2011) We still need an education in thinking: Heidegger on education in a technological age, (Published in Chinese, original English from author). J Educ Stud 7(1):3–14 Wrathall MA (2018) The Task of Thinking in a Technological Age. Heidegger on Technology, ed. Wendland, Hadjioannou, and Merwin. Routledge, New York. Yeats WB (2008) Meditations in time of civil war: the stare’s nest by my window. In: The collected poems of W.B. Yeats. Wordsworth Poetry Library, Ware

Why Work? What Does Philosophy (Not) Tell Us About Worker Motivation?

56

Dale Tweedie

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Motivation and Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Foundational Dichotomy: Aristotle on Praxis and Poiesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arendt: Labor Versus Work (Versus Action) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Honneth on Recognition at Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Remarks: Retrieving Philosophical Questions in Management Research . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1028 1029 1031 1034 1037 1039 1041 1042

Abstract

This chapter explores what philosophy tells us about why we work. Of course, most people need the goods or income work provides. However, philosophy raises broader normative questions about how work affects the “well-lived” human life. The chapter covers three main philosophical perspectives, drawn from Aristotle, Hannah Arendt, and Axel Honneth. Contemporary (re)interpretations of Aristotle offer insight into work’s potential role in eudaimonia or “human flourishing.” Arendt analyses how the objects we produce – and more precisely, their durability – affects the meaning and value of our tasks. Honneth elucidates work’s social dimension, namely, how others’ (mis)recognition of our work shapes both the experience of work and our self-relations. Prior management theory, especially in critical traditions, has touched on similar themes. However, one contribution of philosophy is paradoxically its ambivalence towards work, which can help bring what seems ambiguous or contradictory about work, and therefore about our motives to work, more fully into view. D. Tweedie (*) Department of Accounting and Corporate Governance, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_49

1027

1028

D. Tweedie

Keywords

Arendt · Aristotle · Critical management studies · Honneth · HRM · Labor · Management · Motivation · Work

Introduction When management scholarship asks what motivates workers, it is typically a psychological rather than philosophical question. Psychology characteristically asks descriptive questions about workers’ mental state or characteristics, such as whether workers have intrinsic or extrinsic motives and whether workers’ and employers’ values “align.” Philosophy raises a broader set of normative questions about the meaning and value of work. These include ethical questions of the narrow and prescriptive sort, such as what duties we owe to our colleagues, managers, or customers. But since to work is also to live a certain type of life, philosophy also raises the more fundamental ethical question of what makes work admirable, which is to say, part of a life worth living. So we may, for example, appreciate that medical doctors’ adhere to professional ethics codes. But we admire doctors for other reasons: because their work serves core human needs or because medicine requires capacities we respect, such as knowledge, skilled hands, and calm nerves in moments of crisis. A full understanding of workers’ motives must consider both psychological and philosophical questions. Inter alia, workers’ mental states make sense only within shared narratives about how we spend, or how we ought to spend, our working hours. To explore the norms and narratives of work is not to deny the critical role of economic incentives and compulsion. Nor need we ignore what Terkel (1972) termed the violence of work – its harms to body and spirit or the injustices in how these harms are distributed. Indeed, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith (2004, p. 18) described the very word “work” as fraudulent, because it subsumes under one concept what are radically different experiences for rich and poor: Those who most enjoy work – and this should be emphasized – are all but universally the best paid. This is accepted. Low wage scales are for those in repetitive, tedious, painful toil.

Yet we can consider work philosophically, in the sense introduced above, without either romanticizing work or ignoring its violence and injustices. From this standpoint, to explore work’s norms and narratives requires only insisting that work cannot be reduced to violence or injustice; or for that matter, to a tool for organizational profits. In more scholarly parlance, work is not just about power and performativity. There is more to be said about why and how we work and which philosophy can help articulate. This chapter introduces three influential philosophical perspectives on work, drawn from Aristotle (1976), Hannah Arendt (1998), and Axel Honneth (1995a, b, 2010), and considers what these perspectives can add to how management scholars

56

Why Work? What Does Philosophy (Not) Tell Us About Worker Motivation?

1029

interpret workers’ motives. There is no claim that philosophers have all the answers, and far less the “right” answers, management scholars lack. To the contrary, since at least ancient Greece, philosophers have exhibited a recurrent impulse to devalue work as mundane, even profane, compared to transcendent realms of reason or politics. Instead, the chapter aims to raise philosophical questions about workers’ motives relevant to management research, but which management scholarship rarely considers. In addressing these questions, philosophers also introduce concepts, and conceptual distinctions, that might help extend the analytical vocabulary management scholars can call on to discuss work and workers’ motivations. In this regard, philosophers’ ambivalence to work can paradoxically be instructive, insofar as it stems from what Malpas (2005, p. 256) labels work’s dual face: [Work] is experienced as something to be avoided, as a burden we would rather not bear. . . [Yet] it is also something that many of us find to be an absolutely essential part of our lives . . .a source of self-definition and self-fulfilment, that dignifies and empowers.

If work is simultaneously something we avoid and seek out, and which can degrade or inspire in equal measure, an adequate philosophy of work must also be ambiguous. The chapter is organized as follows. The first section, “Motivation and Management,” briefly reviews influential management perspectives on workers’ motivations, in order to be more specific about what philosophical approaches could add. Although critical management studies draws widely on philosophy, the section argues even this interdisciplinary scholarship rarely explores work’s “dual face” in Malpas’ (2005) sense. Subsequent sections introduce the three philosophical perspectives, which each highlight different aspects of both what can draw us to, and what can repel us from, our work. The second section, “A Foundational Dichotomy: Aristotle on Praxis and Poiesis,” introduces work’s role in Aristotle’s (1976) famous account of the “flourishing” human life, including contemporary (re)interpretations. The third section, “Arendt: Labor Versus Work (Versus Action),” elucidates Arendt’s (1998) influential distinction between work and labor, while the final section, “Honneth on Recognition at Work),” outlines the significance of work in Honneth’s (1995a) theory of recognition. The chapter concludes by exploring how these three perspectives might inform management research into workers’ motivations, despite – or arguably because – of philosophers’ own ambivalence about work’s capacity to either diminish or improve our lives.

Motivation and Management While workers’ motives are critical to management praxis, mainstream management research is constrained by the dual dominance of a performative agenda and descriptive-psychological methodologies. In Fournier and Grey’s (2000) definition, performative management research aims to advance organizations’ goals (e.g., profit) and analyzes workers as means to this end. This performative standpoint is

1030

D. Tweedie

especially evident in the stream of management research that addresses workers’ motives most directly, namely, human resource management (HRM). Since its inception, the principal objective of HRM has been to either persuade or compel workers to “align” their beliefs and behavior with organizational strategy (Greenwood 2012; Beer et al. 2015). This performative framework restricts mainstream management research by excluding motives that do not affect profits, or by reinterpreting workers’ own norms and narratives into a strategic-organizational paradigm. The organizational justice stream of HRM, for instance, nominally researches what workers view as fair or just performance management. In practice, however, workers’ views of fairness are incorporated only insofar as they affect performance (Tweedie et al. 2019). The more normative – and paradigmatically philosophical – question of what makes management actually fair or just is largely ignored. The dominance of positivistic methodologies, drawn especially from psychology, reinforces this performative agenda. Psychology is a multifaceted discipline, with extensive and significant insights into both sides of workers’ motives. However, the predominately positivist application of psychological concepts and methods reinforces mainstream HRM’s performative framework, by evacuating workplace research of norms that contest management imperatives. One illustration is how mainstream HRM analyzes “psychological contracts.” Prima facie, a psychological contract, implies understanding both workers’ and employers’ perspectives as reciprocal poles of the psychological exchange. Yet from a performative standpoint, the primary purpose of psychological contracts is to reproduce firms’ culture and value, and thereby to bind workers emotionally as well as contractually to their employers (Dick and Nadin 2011). Guest (1999, 6) labels this a “unitarist” approach, which denies the legitimacy of alternative perspectives. There is no room for the expression of any form of pluralism. You either have to buy wholeheartedly into the [firm’s] culture or get out.

A descriptive-psychological framework buttresses this standpoint because, unlike discussions of justice and fairness in philosophy, positivistic methodologies eschew the normative commitment to consider the interests of workers and management equally. Critical management studies challenge both the performative and positivistpsychological methodologies that dominate mainstream research. Indeed, one constitutive axiom of critical management studies, broadly defined, is precisely its rejection of performative intent. As Alvesson’s and Willmott’s (1992, p. 1) outlined in their seminal edited collection, critical management scholarship maintains that “management is too potent in its effects on the lives of employees, consumers and citizens to be guided by a narrow, instrumental form of rationality.” The more diverse – and more explicitly philosophical – set of theories in critical management studies is a corollary of this standpoint, because heterogeneous theories are needed to express the disparate norms and logics that performative frameworks exclude. Alvesson and Willmott (1992), for example, position their early work within the tradition of German Critical Theory inaugurated by Horkheimer. Subsequent critical

56

Why Work? What Does Philosophy (Not) Tell Us About Worker Motivation?

1031

management studies cite myriad philosophers and philosophical concepts, from Aristotle to Foucault to Deleuze and beyond, and publish this research in a thriving subset of management journals like Human Relations, Organization, and Organizational Studies. Nonetheless, while critical management studies mount a robust challenge to the more myopic elements of mainstream research, this critical literature predominately engages with one side of work’s “dual face,” namely, work as a “burden we would rather not bear.” Consider, for example, critical studies of control and resistance (Knights and McCabe 2000; Mumby 2005). With some exceptions (Dashtipour and Vidaillet 2017; Sayer 2007), this literature mostly foregrounds workers’ desire to escape working conditions that are oppressive, exploitative, or tedious (e.g., Paulsen 2014; Rhodes 2009). One interpretation is that in its assiduousness to retrieve the understanding of power and exploitation that mainstream management research omits, critical scholars tend to downplay other aspects of workers’ experiences. Moreover, just as positivistic methodologies reinforce the performativity of mainstream literature, so too can influential – albeit less hegemonic – critical theories reinforce this emphasis. For example, Foucault has been a core reference in critical studies of performance management (e.g., Townley 2011; Newton and Findley 1996), albeit less prevalent in contemporary work. Yet by foregrounding power, Foucauldian perspectives often gloss over how working affects workers’ well-being for either better or ill (Tweedie et al. 2019). To be sure, power is critical to understanding work. However, to discuss management practices only in terms of power is – at least from the philosophical perspectives we will consider – invariably partial (Dejours 2012). To understand workers’ motives more fully, we must articulate what can draw us to work as well as what can control or drive us away.

A Foundational Dichotomy: Aristotle on Praxis and Poiesis Aristotle’s (1976) Nichomachean Ethics provides a – perhaps the – classic philosophy of human motivation. According to Aristotle, the ultimate aim of all human endeavors is eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is sometimes translated as happiness but is better understood as a “flourishing” human life (MacIntyre 1984). To flourish in Aristotle’s sense is not just to feel happy; rather, it is to do well, and be well, in a life that goes well for you. As MacIntyre (1984, p. 148) elaborates, eudaimonia denotes: Blessedness, happiness, prosperity. It is the state of being well and doing well in being well, of a man’s being well-favoured himself and in relation to the divine.

So the mystic or monk, for example, might feel happy in the most objectionable circumstances. By contrast, when we flourish in Aristotle’s sense, our feelings, character, and circumstances align. For him, we feel well because we act and live as we should, and in so doing, thrive on all those more or less objective measures of a prosperous human life.

1032

D. Tweedie

So in what exactly does eudaimonia consist, and hence what goods, traits, or activities ought we seek? Aristotle’s answer is that we flourish when we develop and exercise those specific capacities that serve our purpose (telos). While this reply might seem tautological, it invokes a far-reaching ontology of what is “good” for any object or creature. In this ontology, all things have a natural purpose, and flourish insofar as they develop, or “actualize,” the capacities this purpose requires. For instance, if a plant’s purpose is to grow, flower, and reproduce, then it flourishes insofar as it develops the capabilities that enable this goal: deep roots, strong stems, and so on. The plant that does cultivate these capacities is simultaneously “good” in the normative sense of achieving its purpose and in the descriptive-functional sense that it thrives in its environment. Extending this logic, Aristotle argues the good person flourishes when she develops and exercises those capabilities that realize her purpose, of which, Aristotle claims, virtues are the paradigmatic case. So the person who is brave, wise, and magnanimous, for example, is not only “good” in the sense of being morally admirable but also in realizing her potential most fully. Consequently, according to Aristotle (1976), the virtuous person flourishes in the descriptive-functional sense that – like the healthy plant – she thrives in her natural (and social) environment. Where does work fit in this narrative? Aristotle’s (1976) explicit answer is that work provides the material preconditions of eudaimonia but not its substance. The conceptual root of this answer is Aristotle’s distinction between two ways of acting – praxis and poiesis, and his corresponding distinction between two types of capabilities – arete and techne, each type of action deploys and develops (Hinchliffe 2004; Murphy 1993). Praxis denotes actions we value for their own sake, rather than because they achieve some other goal. If we save a drowning child, for example, we would typically do so because it is right, not in order to achieve extrinsic rewards like pay, praise, or promotion. In turn, praxis exercises and develops arete, which moral philosophers usually elaborate in terms of moral virtues like courage, wisdom, and prudence. However, arete has a broader meaning of excellence in almost any activity, including in objects, animals, or people, which is defined – for Aristotle at least – relative to one’s natural purpose (Urmsom 1988). So human arete denotes those specific forms of excellence that most fully realize our human telos. In this sense, in praxis, we simultaneously exercise and develop the highest human capabilities and achieve the harmony of feeling, character, and circumstances that constitutes eudaimonia. Poiesis, by contrast, denotes actions we take to achieve some other purpose, of which – in Aristotle’s stated view – work is the paradigmatic case. So, while we save the drowning child for its own sake, we work for the product (or income) working provides. Thus, the builder works to produce the building, the doctor to produce a healthy body, and so on. Whereas praxis exercises and develops arete, work (poiesis) develops technical knowledge (techne), in which we learn to produce more effectively. Aristotle’s (1976, p. 63) analysis of the respective role of poiesis and techne in eudaimonia invokes a logical hierarchy, as when he writes: “where there are ends distinct from the actions, the results are by nature superior to the activities.” Applying this dictum to paid work, insofar as we work to achieve an

56

Why Work? What Does Philosophy (Not) Tell Us About Worker Motivation?

1033

extrinsic goal, the goal we seek (e.g., goods, wages, etc.) is logically superior to the activity by which we seek it. Moreover, insofar as the primary end of both poiesis and techne is the artifact rather than the act, the ideal human life extracts the product without the work. This is Aristotle’s justification for the Athenian gentleman whose life serves the polis – the political community of praxis – while his labor is performed by slaves (Arendt 1998). However, while Aristotle explicitly relegates work to “mere means,” contemporary philosophy has extracted a more multifaceted interpretation of work from two main Aristotelian ideas (Murphy 1993; Sayer 2009). The first is Aristotle’s claim that eudaimonia is primarily found in the exercise of our capacities, and so in what we do rather than in what we have (Tweedie 2010). For Aristotle himself, only praxis enables eudaimonia directly. Yet recent philosophy shows that the sharp distinction Aristotle tries to draw between praxis and poiesis is more porous than it first appears. On one hand, some activities combine praxis and poiesis. Consider, for example, the doctor whose heart surgery saves a child: Does she act for its own sake (praxis) or because she wants to be paid (poiesis)? And does her work enact appropriate compassion (arete) or technical surgical skill (techne)? The answer to these questions would appear to be both. Moreover, even exemplar cases of praxis have attributes Aristotle ascribes to poiesis, and vice versa. For example, the soldier’s self-less courage might achieve military victory, while the virtuoso chef might value her craft more for its own sake than for the monetary rewards her skills bring (Sennett 2008; Tweedie and Holley 2016). To be sure, Aristotle’s distinction between praxis and poiesis turns on what we intend when choosing our actions, not on the outcomes we achieve (Ackrill 1980). Nonetheless, unless all our intentions are singular, this clarification does not resolve the problem. Thus, the soldier might intend both to be virtuous and to win victory, and the chef might seek both to earn a living and to perfect her craft (Sennett 2008). If Aristotle’s distinction between praxis and poiesis is too sharp, then – contemporary philosophers have argued – work may contribute to flourishing in precisely the same way Aristotle attributes to praxis (Hinchliffe 2004; Murphy 1993). That is, in work we can exercise forms of human excellence (arete) that enable us to flourish by enacting those purposes that are natural to us in Aristotle’s specific sense. Second, contemporary philosophers have marshalled Aristotle’s idea that humans flourish in exercising their realized capacities, an outcome that work also seems able to provide (Murphy 1993; Sayer 2009). To recall, in Aristotle’s view, eudaimonia requires “actualizing” our latent capacities, in the sense that the full-grown and healthy plant has actualized capabilities latent in the seed. On Aristotle’s (1976) narrative, however, human capacities (i.e., arete) do not spontaneously emerge but come into being when – guided by a moral community – we repeatedly exercise such virtues in praxis. As we have seen, Aristotle himself rejects that work cultivates arete in this way. However, Murphy (1993) extracts from Aristotle’s own words indications that work could play an analogous role. It is telling, for instance, that Aristotle (1976, p. 92) uses the process of developing technical skills (techne) at work as a metaphor for how humans cultivate virtue, when he writes that “men will become

1034

D. Tweedie

good builders as a result of building well, and bad ones as a result of building badly.” The point Aristotle aims to illustrate here is that we develop moral virtue by acting as virtue requires. Yet if praxis and poiesis overlap, then work might build moral character in precisely the same way (Sennett 2008; Tweedie 2017). Extending this idea, contemporary political philosophers, such as Beate Roessler (2011), have emphasized John Rawl’s (1972, p. 426) “Aristotelian Principle,” which states: other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realised capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realised, or the greater its complexity.

If well-being requires opportunities to learn and exercise complex skills, then work is an obvious domain in which, under contemporary social conditions, these opportunities are either provided or denied. These more recent (re)readings of Aristotle foreground two potential benefits of work that, consciously or otherwise, might motivate workers. First, work is paradigmatically an activity where people can exercise their capacities to act in the world. Contra Aristotle himself, empirical links between unemployment and diminished well-being imply that opportunities to act through work are directly linked to at least psychological preconditions of a flourishing life (Jahoda 1982; Theodossiou 1998). This idea has also been advanced theoretically in recent philosophical research into the “centrality of work,” which claims – drawing in part on Aristotle – that work is critical to healthy self-development (Dejours et al. 2018). Second, work is one activity where people can develop their capacities by repeatedly performing actions well under the guidance of other already skilled practitioners (Sennett 2008). Consequently, professional communities might, under the right conditions, develop excellences of character in an analogous way to communities that explicitly serve “moral” ends. Ideally, although of course not always, working initiates us into communities of practitioners who are skilled in both arete and techne, and who can therefore guide us to develop both the character traits and technical skills that a flourishing life requires.

Arendt: Labor Versus Work (Versus Action) Arendt’s (1998) The Human Condition introduces a more fine-grained analysis of poiesis. Arendt shares Aristotle’s overarching normative hierarchy in which praxis – rather than poiesis – is the most valuable and most properly human activity. However, Arendt (1998) distinguishes two types of productive activity – work and labor, which each have a distinct logic and normative standing. Arendt builds this distinction from the etymologically discrete words for production in most European languages, only one of which has connotations of pain and suffering. The French word travailler, Arendt (1998, p. 80) writes, has semantic roots in a kind of torture, while the German word arbeit originally described farm labor performed by serfs in

56

Why Work? What Does Philosophy (Not) Tell Us About Worker Motivation?

1035

contradistinction to craft-based werk. As we will see, Arendt’s distinction between labor and work revives a similar dichotomy. One of Arendt’s motives is her concern that labor, which she sees as the normatively lower form of production, is subsuming work and praxis. Nonetheless, just as contemporary philosophy has drawn from Aristotle a more constructive analysis of work’s role in eudaimonia, so too have contemporary philosophers used Arendt’s (1998) distinction between labor and work to foreground work’s constructive as well as harmful possibilities (Hinchliffe 2004; Malpas 2005). Arendt (1998) defines labor as production whose product is consumed in the moment of its creation. The most obvious example is food and clothing, which we perpetually (re)create and consume to sustain our basic needs. In this respect, labor is what we share with the animals, such as the carnivore that simultaneously rends and consumes its prey. Yet Arendt’s (1998, p. 85) more evocative contrast is internal to human endeavor, when she distinguishes between the “labour of our body and the work of our hands” [emphasis added]. Labor is bodily because it belongs to the endless cycle of birth, growth, and destruction into which, qua natural organisms, humans are born and bound. In Arendt’s (1998, p. 7) words, therefore, labor: corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labour.

Arendt’s (1960, 1998) social critique is that industrial capitalism transforms all productive activity into labor, by driving ever-faster rounds of creation and consumption. Industrial capitalism also disrupts natural eco-systems. However, Arendt’s point is that the faster we create and consume our goods, the more closely our productive activities mirror the transitory shape of natural biological cycles. From this standpoint, mass labor is a corollary of mass consumption (Malpas 2005), because the immediacy of consumption not only drives customer demands for faster production but also strips the product of the dignity inherent in more permanent objects. Thus, far from mass production freeing us from dependence on natural cycles, Arendt (1998) claims, mass production and consumption chain us more deeply to nature, or more precisely, to that part of nature captured by our bodily needs. Work, by contrast, creates durable objects and thereby raises production out of quasi-biological cycles of labor into distinctively human activity. Arendt’s analysis of work emphasizes the literal meaning of poiesis as to create, in the sense of bringing into being something that did not exist before. In Arendt’s view, the products of labor are not true creations, because they vanish almost as soon as they appear. In fashioning artifacts that endure, work is properly creative because it shapes the natural and social world. We can now see more clearly Arendt’s distinction, cited earlier, between the laboring body and the work of the hands. Although primates also have hands, human hands are at least figuratively distinct from our bodies in enacting our conscious designs, and thereby separating us from

1036

D. Tweedie

the mechanical-causal chains that characterize natural systems. By imposing human designs on biological systems, work corresponds to: the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not embedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever returning life cycle (Arendt 1998, p. 7).

Where food and clothing are paradigmatic forms of labor, architecture is paradigmatic work. In creating a house, the architect steps out of the seasons figuratively as well as literally, because the house both begins and ends by human design. Consequently, work introduces a form of freedom not found in labor, because the maker inscribes both her reason and her temporality on the product. In Arendt’s (1998, p. 144) words: “Alone with his image of the future product, homo faber is free to produce, and again facing alone the work of his hands, he is free to destroy.” Arendt’s (1998) distinction between work and labor introduces a parallel dichotomy between the satisfactions each activity can yield, and therefore the different rewards laborers and workers respectively might seek. Although Arendt presents labor as the lowest rung of human activity, she also describes a quasi-existential role for labor in bringing the biological conditions of human existence most vividly into view: The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are rather the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the “easy life of the gods” would be a lifeless life [emphasis added] (Arendt 1998, p. 120).

From this perspective, “labor-saving” devices that make production less physically painfully can paradoxically undermine the value labor can offer. As Malpas (2005) also notes, Sennett’s (1998) account of the automated bakery illustrates Arendt’s point. While modern automated bakeries are cool and quiet, they seem – to Sennett at least – lifeless compared to the boiling, crunching heat of bakeries of old. According to Arendt (1998, p. 140), the pleasure – even “ecstasy” – of labor stems from “the violent exertion of a strength with which man measures himself against the overwhelming forces of the elements.” So in being chained to nature’s exigencies, we also share in nature’s joys. In Arendt’s image of a “violent exertion of strength,” we also see a particular kind of labor: kneading loaves in the roiling bakery heat or pulling fishing nets on deck in the storm. Without over-romanticizing manual labor, Arendt’s analysis implies technology that dims the “violence” of our confrontations with nature also dims the visceral pleasures labor offers. Moreover, since labor is where our biological nature makes itself felt, Arendt argues technology can be a dangerous soporific, by masking the futility of lives given to nature’s rhythms alone. Arendt (1998) attributes different satisfactions to work, which stem from the meaning we can find in extracting out of natural cycles objects that bear our mark. Arendt’s discussion recalls Marx’s (1976, Sc I.) famous analysis of what separates human from animal production:

56

Why Work? What Does Philosophy (Not) Tell Us About Worker Motivation?

1037

. . .what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own. . .

Arendt criticizes Marx for failing to sufficiently differentiate work from praxis, and thereby conflating a society of workers with properly human societies that are also fully free. Nonetheless, she concurs with Marx’s view of what gives production a human logic and meaning, which is when work creates objects that embody our ideas and rational capacities. In labor, we exert our strength in nature but leave nothing behind to mark our passing. In work, we embed our reason in nature and leave behind objects that bear our trace. As Shelly’s famous poem “Ozymandias” reminds us, no objects last forever. Yet we can surely also understand Ozymandias’ haunting call to “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”. While Ozymandias’ words express uncommon hubris, they also voice the common ideal that one’s works are the criteria by which a life’s achievements are measured. Not only does the activity of work offer unique satisfactions, so too do the products we leave behind, which – for a time – “offer mortals a dwelling place more permanent and more stable than themselves” [emphasis added] (Arendt 1998, p. 152). The value Arendt (1998, p. 173) attributes to the durable products of work is – as for Aristotle – partly derivative of praxis. In this regard, our work builds a stage “fit for actions and speech,” and – especially in art, poetry, and history – records the actions and speech that have come before. Yet, if we draw also on Heidegger’s analysis of dwelling, we might also see work as making a home of our natural and social world. On Heidegger’s (1971) account, to dwell is to inhabit a place without either being alien to it or imposing oneself upon it. For Heidegger, work – and the product of work – can enable us to dwell in nature in this sense. Heidegger’s (1971) example is a bridge which leads humans “to and fro” while also “gathering” together the river, bank, and sky. By building this bridge, the engineer creates a place to “dwell” that reifies her capacities, transcends her finitude, but also helps create a home in an otherwise alien and fragmented landscape. Of course, not all work does this; Arendt argues that machines – which are themselves enduring objects – can be alien to both ourselves and our environment. Nonetheless, in distinguishing work from action, Arendt foregrounds the satisfactions that different types of productive activity might offer, even if the reality of our work falls short of this potential, and even if work itself fails to express our most properly human capabilities.

Honneth on Recognition at Work Honneth’s analysis of work departs from Aristotle and Arendt in two main respects. First, Honneth (1995b) explicitly argues work has more than merely instrumental value and so rejects their sharp distinction between praxis and poiesis. In a similar way to how contemporary neo-Aristotelians problematize Aristotle’s praxis

1038

D. Tweedie

versus poiesis dichotomy, Honneth argues productive activity already incorporates normative aspirations and claims. Rather than drawing on Aristotle, however, Honneth’s primary reference is Hegel, especially the role of work in Hegel’s famous “master-slave” struggle. One point Honneth draws from Hegel’s complex analysis in this passage is that our capacity to objectify our skills and creative powers in the objects we produce is not simply a form of pleasure or self-satisfaction but can also play a critical role in self-development, which is to say, in making the subject what he or she is. Insofar as we create ourselves partly through our work, Honneth (1995b) argues, the forms of sociality Aristotle and Arendt locate exclusively in praxis – in Arendt’s terms, our capacity to “appear” to others as fully human subjects – is part of production as well as politics. Thus, where Arendt (1998) critiques Marx for forgetting about politics by focusing too much on production, Honneth (1995b) critiques Arendt for failing to see the political moment innate in work. Honneth’s (1995a, 2010) second departure, which follows from the first, is to foreground one specific social dimension of work, namely, the role of work in providing the recognition subjects require. We also see a social role for work in recent rereadings of Aristotle (Murphy 1993; Tweedie 2017), and in contemporary sociology (Sennett 2008), which foregrounds how working can furnish communities of skilled colleagues that support workers to develop the capacities “flourishing” requires. However, past critical philosophy has tended to marginalize these social dimensions of work by contrasting the isolated instrumental act of production with the collaborative discourse evident in civil society (Dejours et al. 2018). Arendt (1998, p. 7) is explicit on this point, when she describes action – and so not work – as “the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, [and] corresponds to the condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world” [emphasis added]. Arendt’s perspective is consistent with other social philosophers, most notably Habermas, who conceptualize work in essentially instrumental terms (Breen 2007; Honneth 1995b). Honneth (1995a, 2010), by contrast, views work as a critical sphere of self and social development, because – at least under contemporary conditions – work has a critical role in providing the recognition we need to develop healthy self-relations. For this reason, some commentators have labelled Honneth’s approach neo-Aristotelian, insofar as we can conceptualize healthy self-relations as another precondition of a “flourishing” human life (O’Neill and Smith 2012). However, Honneth elucidates more fully than contemporary neo-Aristotelians the role of others in creating this identity at work. Honneth (1995a) distinguishes three types of recognition that, in his view, we require to develop full and fully flourishing subjectivities, two of which work provides (or at least, which work should provide). The first type of recognition is rights, which recognizes subjects in their equality with others. Clearly, work is a central locus of rights claims, albeit claims that are often denied. The second, and most distinctive, is recognition as esteem, in which we are recognized for our unique contributions to social reproduction. According to Honneth (1995a), one distinctive feature of contemporary industrial societies is to allocate esteem largely, and almost exclusively, via the work one performs.

56

Why Work? What Does Philosophy (Not) Tell Us About Worker Motivation?

1039

More recent philosophy has developed Honneth’s typology of the forms of recognition work provides, or fails to provide, by providing a more granular analysis of the types of esteem we need to develop and sustain autonomous self-relations (Klikauer 2016; Schaub and Odigbo 2019; Voswinkel 2012). Voswinkel (2012), for example, distinguishes appreciation from admiration. Both appreciation and admiration are forms of esteem, because both (mis)recognize the value of workers’ particular contributions. However, they differ in how workers are recognized. Appreciation rests on belonging to a group and so is tied to forms of intergroup reciprocity. Characteristically, therefore, one is appreciated for patterns of behavior at work that reinforce group belonging and identity, such as in public awards for long service to one organization. Admiration, by contrast, recognizes the singularity of the individual, such as in recognizing the virtuosity of a worker’s talents or achievements. Voswinkel (2012) views appreciation as more “morally grounded.” However, both appreciation and admiration are normative judgements of workers’ particular contributions and both build on Honneth’s claim that we require certain types of recognition to sustain healthy self-relations. From this perspective, workers’ motives to work are not simply the goods work provides, nor even the skills and capacities we learn and enact. In addition, work secures – or ought to secure – the preconditions of the stable self-identities autonomous selves and social interactions presuppose. Although Honneth’s (2010, 2014) more recent work has revised his initial analysis, the social implications of work remain central to his framework. Honneth’s major methodological shift has been to focus more on defending the norms of social systems rather than on the normative demands generated by the activity of work itself. For example, Honneth (2010) now argues the key normative basis of fair work is workers’ legitimate expectation that labor markets provide opportunities for workers to exercise their skills and capacities. In this regard, alternative forms of recognition theory centered more on the work activity itself, such as a growing body of work on Dejours (2012) “psychodynamic” approach, are closer to the methodological commitments that underpinned Honneth’s original project (Deranty 2010). Nonetheless, what both Honneth’s earlier and later work share is an emphasis on work as a locus of self-realization in which recognition from others for the work one performs enables one to realize oneself most fully. From this perspective, under contemporary social conditions, we are not just drawn to work but driven to it, in order to secure the psychosocial preconditions that a fully functioning, or at the very least, an intact, self requires.

Concluding Remarks: Retrieving Philosophical Questions in Management Research This final section briefly considers how the philosophical perspectives outlined above might inform management research into workers’ motives, in three main ways. First, by contrast to mainstream HRM in particular, the philosophies of work considered above all take as their primary objective to analyze what is

1040

D. Tweedie

“good” for workers and societies, rather than the performative issue of what attitudes make organizations more efficient or profitable. In this respect, despite mobilizing different concepts and arguments, the philosophical discussions of Aristotle, Arendt, and Honneth introduced above all raise a similar set of questions about work and workers’ motives. For instance, although Aristotle explicitly conceptualizes work as only an instrumental contributor to human flourishing, it is axiomatic to his account that what constitutes a flourishing human life is the fundamental philosophical question. From this standpoint, we can (re)interpret recent calls for HRM to develop a more ethical standpoint on management practice as much as calling for HRM scholars to recover certain types of questions as to develop or apply new theories (Beer et al. 2015; Greenwood 2012). Since philosophies of work raise just those types of questions most apposite to ethical reflection, this literature is one way to reengage HRM, and mainstream management scholarship more generally, with ways of interrogating and conceptualizing workers’ motives in which workers’ own interests, concerns, and well-being are front and center. The relationship between philosophies of work and critical management studies is more complex and iterative because there are overlaps of both intent and content. For example, Honneth is a recent representative of the Frankfurt School tradition of Critical Theory that influential critical management scholars have endorsed, such as in – although by no means limited to – Alvesson’s and Willmott’s (1992) seminal text cited earlier. Nonetheless, one distinctive feature of the discussions above is that all three philosophies of work offer concepts and paths – albeit sometimes implicit or indirect – to articulate both sides of work’s “dual face” and thereby to simultaneously consider what organizational and social conditions draw workers to, or repel them from, their work. In Aristotle’s case, although work is nominally an instrumental activity best left to slaves, the more granular readings of praxis and poiesis in neo-Aristotelian philosophy show how working might cultivate both the virtues and skills a flourishing life entails, at least under the right organizational and social conditions. Similarly, although Arendt ranks labor and work below action, she also articulates joys, albeit “violent” and “animalistic” joys, to be found in even the “meanest” forms of labor. Conversely, while Honneth sees the recognition work provides as central to autonomous self-development, he also highlights how the denial of recognition, or misrecognition, can cripple these capacities. These dualities provide one way of balancing – and in this sense, of extending – those critical management literatures that foreground, in Rhodes’ (2009) evocative terms, the “horror[s] of work” to which flight and resistance are the only rational responses. Third, the philosophical perspectives outlined above offer concepts that might help deepen and broaden how management scholarship answers these characteristically philosophical questions about work’s role in the well-lived life, even as management scholarship could also inform contemporary philosophies of work. One way to deepen management scholarship of workers’ motives is to use relevant philosophy to add layers of meanings to concepts that management scholars already deploys. For example, Aristotle’s (1976) analysis of praxis and poiesis has overlaps

56

Why Work? What Does Philosophy (Not) Tell Us About Worker Motivation?

1041

with psychological concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic motives but adds a richer, or at least, a different, meaning to these themes. For instance, praxis is not simply an intrinsically motived activity but mobilises a specific kind of intrinsic motive. In particular, in Aristotle’s view, to be engaged in praxis is to be part of a community that cultivates those specific excellences that lead to flourishing human lives. From this perspective, there is something inherently suspect about management initiatives to “align” workers’ values with management goals, but not only because of the unequal power between managers and workers. Rather, the normative basis of a neo-Aristotelian critique is that the standards from which we should draw our values at work – as in the broader public sphere – are defined by human rather than organizational criteria of “excellence” (arete). An Aristotelian (re)reading of work can also foreground the central role of communities of skilled workers, rather than managers, in cultivating and reproducing these properly human values. So it is the senior engineer, for example, rather than the CEO, who is the most critical influence on whether the novice develops the capabilities that “actualize” their potential most fully. If managers cannot fulfill this role, they can at least avoid actions, such as highly centralized or punitive performance management, that fragment the collegial workplace relationships that collective forms of self-development require (Dejours 2000). The philosophical concepts of work introduced above can also help broaden management discussions by bringing concepts and ideas, even if previously available, more deeply into the ambit of management research. For example, despite being a major philosophical figure, one of Honneth’s (1995a) key reference points is the developmental psychologist Donald Winnicott, who he uses to show the central role of recognition in developing stable self-relations. In this respect, one of Honneth’s contributions to philosophy has been to draw psychological concepts into philosophical discourse, to the extent that some commentators have described Honneth’s philosophy as a psychological rereading of Hegel. Insofar as HRM’s studies of workers’ motives, for example, are also often grounded in psychology, Honneth’s (1995a) research indirectly reminds us that the descriptive and positivistic psychology that HRM typically mobilizes is just one type of psychology, which by no means exhausts the conceptual and empirical resources available within this disciplinary paradigm (Dashtipour and Vidaillet 2017). Closer attention to recent philosophy of work by psychologically minded management scholars, therefore, might paradoxically help these scholars retrieve and creatively redeploy – in both management and philosophical discourse – modes of understanding that are latent within their own disciplinary heritage.

Cross-References ▶ Critical Moral Philosophy and Management ▶ The Organization of Philosophy and a Philosophy of Organizations

1042

D. Tweedie

References Ackrill JL (1980) Aristotle on action. In: Rorty AO (ed) Essays on Aristotle’s ethics. University of California Press, Berkley/Los Angeles, pp 93–102 Alvesson M, Willmott H (eds) (1992) Critical management studies. Sage, London Arendt H (1960) Society and culture. Daedalus 89(2):278–287 Arendt H (1998) The human condition. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Aristotle (1976) Ethics. Penguin, London Beer M, Boselie P, Brewster C (2015) Back to the future: implications for the field of HRM of the multistakeholder perspective proposed 30 years ago. Hum Resour Manag 54(3):427–438 Breen K (2007) Work and emancipatory practice: towards a recovery of human beings’ productive capacities. Res Publica 13(4):381–414 Dashtipour P, Vidaillet B (2017) Work as affective experience: the contribution of Christophe Dejours’ ‘psychodynamics of work’. Organization 24(1):18–35 Dejours C (2000) The psychoanalysts view of the economic war. Ecole de Paris du Management, Paris Dejours C (2012) Work and subjectivity: towards a philosophical anthropology from the psychopathology to the psychodynamics of work. In: Smith N, Deranty JP (eds) New philosophies of labour. Leiden/Boston, Brill, pp 207–250 Dejours C, Deranty JP, Renault E, Smith NH (2018) The return of work in critical theory. Columbia University Press, New York Deranty JP (2010) Beyond communication: a critical study of Axel Honneth’s social philosophy. Brill, Leiden/Boston Dick P, Nadin S (2011) Exploiting the exploited: the psychological contract, workplace domination and symbolic violence. Cult Organ 17(4):293–311 Fournier V, Grey C (2000) At the critical moment: conditions and prospects for critical management studies. Hum Relat 53(1):7–32 Galbraith JK (2004) The economics of innocent fraud. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston Greenwood M (2012) Ethical analyses of HRM: a review and research agenda. J Bus Ethics 114:1–12 Guest DE (1999) Human resource management – the workers’ verdict. Hum Resour Manag J 9(3):5–25 Heidegger M (1971) Building dwelling thinking. In: Heidegger M (ed) Poetry, language, thought. Harper and Row, New York, pp 143–162 Hinchliffe G (2004) Work and human flourishing. Educ Philos Theory 36(5):535–547 Honneth A (1995a) The struggle for recognition. Polity Press, Cambridge, MA Honneth A (1995b) Work and instrumental action. In: Wright CW (ed) Fragmented world of the social: essays in social and political philosophy. State University of New York Press, New York, pp 15–49 Honneth A (2010) Work and recognition: a redefinition. In: Schmit am Bush HC, Zurn C (eds.) The philosophy of recognition. Lexington Books, Lanham p 223–240 Honneth A (2014) Freedom’s right. Columbia University Press, New York Jahoda M (1982) Employment and unemployment. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Klikauer T (2016) Negative recognition: master and slave in the workplace. Thesis Eleven 132(1):39–49 Knights D, McCabe D (2000) ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’? Opportunities for resistance under new forms of ‘quality’ management. Sociology 34(3):421–436 MacIntyre A (1984) After virtue. Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame Malpas J (2005) The duality of work. Philos Today 49(3):8 Marx K (1976) Capital. Penguin, New York Mumby DK (2005) Theorizing resistance in organization studies: a dialectical approach. Manag Commun Q 19(1):19–44 Murphy J (1993) The moral economy of labour. Yale University Press, New Haven

56

Why Work? What Does Philosophy (Not) Tell Us About Worker Motivation?

1043

Newton T, Findley P (1996) Playing god? The performance of appraisal. Hum Resour Manag J 6(3):42–58 O’Neill S, Smith NH (2012) Recognition theory as social research. Springer, London Paulsen R (2014) Empty labour: idleness and workplace resistance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Rawls J (1972) A theory of justice. Claredon Press, Oxford Rhodes C (2009) “All I want to do is get that check and get drunk” testifying to resistance in Charles Bukowski’s factotum. J Organ Chang Manag 22(4):386–401 Roessler B (2011) Meaningful work: arguments from autonomy. J Polit Philos 20(1):71–93 Sayer A (2007) Dignity at work: broadening the agenda. Organization 14(4):565–581 Sayer A (2009) Contributive justice and meaningful work. Res Publica 15(1):1–16 Schaub J, Odigbo IM (2019) Expanding the taxonomy of (mis-)recognition in the economic sphere. Eur J Soc Theory 22(1):103–122 Sennett R (1998) The corrosion of character. W.W. Norton & Co., New York Sennett R (2008) The craftsman. Allen Lane, London Terkel S (1972) Working. Pantheon Books, New York Theodossiou I (1998) The effects of low-pay and unemployment on psychological well-being: a logistic regression approach. J Health Econ 17(1):85–104 Townley B (2011) Foucault, power/knowledge, and its revelance for human resource management. In: Alvesson M (ed) Classics in critical management studies. Elgar Research, Cheltenham, pp 518–545 Tweedie D (2010) Recognising skills and capacities. In: Bagusat C, Keenan WJF, Sedmak C (eds) Decent work and unemployment. LIT Verlag, Wien/Berlin/Munster, pp 203–216 Tweedie D (2017) The normativity of work: Retrieving a critical craft norm. Crit Horiz 18(1):66–84 Tweedie D, Holley S (2016) The subversive craft worker: challenging disutility theories of management control. Hum Relat 69(9):1877–1900 Tweedie D, Wild D, Rhodes C, Martinov-Bennie N (2019) How does performance management affect workers? Beyond human resource management and its critique. Int J Manag Rev 21(1):76–96 Urmsom JO (1988) Aristotle’s ethics. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford Voswinkel S (2012) Admiration without appreciation? The paradoxes of recognition of doubly subjectivised work. In: Smith NH, Deranty JP (eds) New philosophies of labour. Brill, Leiden/ Boston, pp 271–299

Informing Educational Approaches to PRME Using Foucault

57

Donella Caspersz and Elly Leung

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A “History of the Present” About PRME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An “Art of Living” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Care of the Self and PRME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1046 1047 1053 1055 1056 1057 1057

Abstract

This chapter argues that careful thought should be given to understanding the impact that external forces and the university milieu have on the potential of learning approaches that inform Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME). Drawing on Foucault’s “early” work on power-knowledge (1980), the essay discusses how the potential of PRME to graduate students who will be everyday responsible managers is constrained by the “logic of performativity” that is a dominant ethos in university education. However, following Foucault’s “later” work, we subsequently suggest that education approaches to PRME can nurture an “art of living” (1988), whereby responsible management becomes an everyday response in students. This requires pursuing self-care practices that engage the self in critically enquiring how forms of domination exist and can thus be changed. Keywords

PRME · Foucault · Power-knowledge · Self-care D. Caspersz (*) · E. Leung University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_24

1045

1046

D. Caspersz and E. Leung

Introduction In this chapter we adopt a philosophy in practice approach (Morton 2015; Volpi 2018) and discuss how the ideas of the French philosopher Michel Foucault can inform educational approaches to PRME, that is, Principles of Responsible Management Education. PRME is a United Nations (UN) initiative that was established in 2007 to “raise the profile of sustainability in schools around the world, and to equip today’s business students with the understanding and ability to deliver change tomorrow” (PRME 2018d). PRME provides a holistic framework for business schools in universities to foster a greater sense of the common good in business students (Forray et al. 2015), with more than 650 leading businesses across countries having adopted PRME principles since 2007 (PRME 2018d). However, in reviewing the status of PRME (see, for instance, Academy of Management 2018), it is clear that there is an inherent tension associated with a “logic of performativity” (Flint and Peim 2012, p. 155) that has developed in business schools and universities following the “epidemic of reforms” (Ball 2003, p. 216) driven by the neoliberal ideas of marketization, competition, and accountability (Clarke 2013) in higher education. It is suggested that this milieu undermines the potential that PRME offers to develop a holistic approach to influencing values and behaviors among students and other stakeholders in higher education institutions to be responsible managers (Haski-Leventhal et al. 2017). We present a discussion about how we may mediate these effects by reconceptualizing PRME with Foucault’s ideas. The fact that there remain ample instances of the consequences of irresponsible management behavior in today’s society justifies our focus. The occurrence of these suggests that despite PRME being in operation for over a decade, there remains a gap between the “theory” of students’ PRME educational experience and their practice as managers when they assume employment in their organizations (Hibbert and Cuncliffe 2015). Thus, the aim of this chapter is to describe how as an approach to education that follows Foucault (1982) to critically inquire about forms of “domination, exploitation and subjection (or subjectivity and submission)”; PRME can nurture an “art of living,” whereby responsible management becomes an everyday response in students. We focus on two of Foucault’s ideas to provide this discussion. We use Foucault’s idea of “power-knowledge” to present a “history of the present” about the status of education in PRME. Foucault describes this as a diagnostic critique, which shows us that the “truth” of what we know including how we know what we know is a contingent sociohistorical construct that is crafted through relations of power between individuals, others, and institutions (1980). We draw on Foucault’s (1997, p. 291) idea of “care of the self” to describe practices that educators may use in PRME education to stimulate their critical thinking and that of their students to adopt self-transformation practices that swing them away from being a passive receptacle of power-knowledge to “an active subject (that) constitutes itself in an active fashion through practices of the self,” in other words, not to just come to know about forms of “domination, exploitation and subjection (or subjectivity and submission)” but to be a “subject” that acts against

57

Informing Educational Approaches to PRME Using Foucault

1047

these (Foucault 1982, p. 781). By cultivating this style of living, education approaches to PRME may graduate students willing to “raise the profile of sustainability” and “deliver change tomorrow” (PRME 2018d) everyday, that is, graduate students who are responsible managers – everyday. In presenting this discussion, we adopt a practical philosophy approach. This originates with the writings by Aristotle who viewed practical philosophy as an episteme that sought to engage with the ways in which we come to know about matters (Volpi 2018). Practical philosophy subsequently refers to disciplines that are concerned with what can be achieved in action, such as philosophical ethics, politics, law, psychology, economics, anthropology, and sociology (Volpi 2018). Foucault’s work covers these areas. More importantly, Foucault’s project focuses on how to create conditions for change. For as Foucault states, “It seems to me that the political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions in such a manner that the political violence will be unmasked, so that one can fight them” (Foucault and Rabinow 1991, p. 6). We begin with presenting a “history of the present” about PRME using Foucault’s idea of power-knowledge before discussing how the idea of care of the self can inform PRME education that may stimulate students to transform themselves to be everyday responsible managers.

A “History of the Present” About PRME PRME has been supported by university deans, presidents, official representatives, and accreditation bodies of a wide range of leading business schools (PRME 2018a) (see Table 1 for illustration). Educational approaches were adopted by PRME signatories to create paradigm change (Blasco 2012). PRME education is guided by six UN principles: purpose, values, method, research, partnership, and dialogue (PRME 2018c). Purpose focuses on developing students with sustainable values and their capabilities in generating a sustainable future. Values emphasizes the incorporation of the values about global social responsibility into academic activities and curricula. Method refers to the educational environment and materials that enable effective learning experiences to produce responsible future leaders. Research stresses the role of universities in creating conceptual and empirical research that reflects and advances the understanding about the relationships between corporations and sustainable, social, environmental, and economic values. Partnership underlines the importance of cooperation between universities and business corporations to cope with social and environmental issues. Dialogue concentrates on supporting dialogue and debate among educators, students, stakeholders, and other interest groups such as consumers and media around global social responsibility and sustainability issues. As a key integrity measure, PRME signatories must submit progress reports on the PRME shared information on progress (SIP) database to “share information with stakeholders,” “create a learning community,” and to also “provide information on progress achieved” (PRME 2018b). The SIP report database is therefore a public platform. The number of shared reports has progressively increased from 3 in 2007 to 179 in 2017 (PRME 2018b).

1048

D. Caspersz and E. Leung

Table 1 Curriculum programs by PRME signatories

PRME signatory University of Amsterdam Arizona State University Auckland University of Technology Business School University of Bradford

PRMErelated course status Elective

Degree program Business Administration

PRME-related courses Business Law and Ethics

United States

Business Administration

Elective

http://www. asu.edu

New Zealand

Business

Business Law and Ethics for Managers Not for profit Accounting and Accountability

Elective

http://www. aut.ac.nz/ business

United Kingdom

Finance and Economics

Business Ethics and Social Responsibility

Elective

British Columbia Instituted of Technology University of Essex

Canada

Accounting

Applied Ethics

Core

http://www. bradford.ac. uk/ management/ http://www. bcit.ca

United Kingdom

Accounting

Business Ethics

Elective

The British University University of Cologne

Egypt

Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Corporate Social Responsibility

Elective

University of Leeds

United Kingdom

Finance and Accounting Master of Business Administration Economics

Elective

University of London

United Kingdom

Introduction to Creating Sustainable Futures Ethics and Business

Country Netherlands

Germany

Business Management

Elective

Elective

University website http://www. abs.uva.nl

http://www. essex.ac.uk/ ebs http://www. bue.edu.eg http://www. wiso.unikoeh.de/ http:// business. leeds.ac.uk/ http://www. busman. qmul.ac.uk

Sources: Participant Reports (PRME 2018b)

An analysis of the SIP reports shows that while there is a significant difference in the approaches of fostering PRME principles between signatories, PRME education generally focuses on three areas: sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and business ethics. Table 1 provides an example of the curriculum programs that have been offered by signatories in these areas and indicates their status as core or elective units of education.

57

Informing Educational Approaches to PRME Using Foucault

1049

Following Foucault, we suggest that PRME should be viewed as a “truth” that has been created by “police (policy) government” (or cameralism) as a technique to modify management education in light of changing ideas about corporate citizenship, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability (Alcaraz et al. 2011, p. 542). For example, in his analyses of madness (2001), medical knowledge (2003), imprisonment (1977), and sexuality (1976), Foucault shows how these became “truths” of the oeconomy (Gordon 1991) as the state sought to “conduct (the) conduct” of the population (Hindess 1996) to foster liberal capitalist aims. In these narratives Foucault illustrates that the “truth” about madness, medical knowledge, prisoners, and sexuality has no essence, because this “truth” is simply “fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms” (Foucault 1984, p.78 cited in Thacker 1997, p. 34) and through a relational discourse between individuals and institutions which confirms what the “truth” is. Foucault describes this as power-knowledge, that is, relations of power that through discourse between sites of power create knowledge that become “truth.” For instance, in Madness and Civilization, Foucault (2001) shows how asylums were not in fact inhabited by the “mad” but by lazy, poor, and unemployed people who were categorized as “abnormal.” It was these “abnormal” people who subsequently came to be known as “the mad” because their behavior was conceptualized as a violation of the work ethic of their society (Foucault 2001). Their morally deviant behavior was thus connected to the “truth” of “unreason,” “dangerous,” and “idleness,” justifying disciplinary practices such as chaining these “madmen” in their cells in order to be segregated from the “normal” (Oksala 2007). A “truth” SUBSEQUENTLY emerges to “normalize” the way people behave in their societies (Bacchi 2012) and, in this case, to distinguish mad from sane persons and behavior. Similarly, university involvement in PRME followed a recommendation from universities engaged in the UN Global Compact (PRME 2018a). This is a forum that brings together CEOs of companies to implement universal sustainability principles (PRME 2018a) and to foster principles of responsible management in business students. Thus, it was relations of society (the UN with universities) that “created” PRME, with the influence of the UN Global Compact directing the knowledge that PRME education should focus on educating business students able to implement what were considered as principles of responsible management. Thus, it was through these same relations (or sites of power) that the “truth” of what is PRME knowledge was constructed. As Table 1 shows, this equates to three areas: sustainability, responsibility, and ethics. Hence, by this truth “principles of responsible management” are equated with learning how to attain and maintain sustainable enterprises and communities in accordance with principles of corporate responsibility and with due deference to “business” ethics or how the business as an organization acts ethically. Nonetheless, it appears that even within these areas, some knowledges are more PRME than others. A search of the SIP reports using the keywords “sustainability,” “responsibility,” and “ethics” shows that whereas there are 240 entries for the first two words, “ethics” returns 196 entries (PRME 2018b), suggesting that a dominant emphasis in PRME is on “ethics.”

1050

D. Caspersz and E. Leung

However, it could be argued that to understand and be able “to deliver change tomorrow” (PRME 2018a) requires more than education about sustainability and responsibility and, perhaps, even ethics. In fact, if the focus in approaches to PRME education is mostly tunnelled into sustainability, responsibility, and ethics, the question arises as to how PRME education can foster the creativity or criticality of innovative thinking (Fisher and Williams 2004) that is necessary “to equip today’s business students with the understanding and ability to deliver change tomorrow” (PRME 2018d). Further, reinforcing (or limiting) PRME knowledge to the “truth” of sustainability, responsibility, and ethics is achieved through other ways. Firstly, by requiring PRME signatories to submit their progress reports to the SIP platform, universities can be “named and shamed” if they do not demonstrate performance in accordance with what the sites of power (in this case the UN and accreditation agencies such as EQUIS and AACSB) determine as being what business schools must do to demonstrate that they perform according to the “truth” of PRME. If they fail to do so, university business schools can be delisted. For instance, in December 2014, 52 schools were delisted from the PRME initiative for failing to comply with the mandatory reporting requirements (PRME 2014), in other words for failing to demonstrate they had sufficient practical evidence that they were PRME-focused. Thus, business schools as organizations and faculty and students must “perform” in accordance with the expectations of the PRME “truth.” Secondly, as a benchmark that bodies such as EQUIS and AACSB use in accrediting business schools (PRME-News 2013), PRME is another level at which these institutions must “perform” if they are to be accredited by these bodies. Given that accreditation is a vital indicator of the quality assurance that universities use to compete with each other in the education marketplace, PRME becomes another “means of incentive, control and change” (Raymond 2018, p. 135) in business schools. Thus, the role that PRME plays in the future status of business schools also makes it complicit in deepening the “logic of performativity” (Flint and Peim 2012, p. 155) in the approaches to PRME education in these domains. Importantly, in showing how relations of power – such as in the case of PRME – create a certain knowledge of what we know as the “truth” of PRME, Foucault (1991) at the same time also shows how, through this power-knowledge, subjectivities are constructed that reflect this “truth.” That is, we come to know the “rules of right” or the pouvoir-savoir 1 that shape, form, and hence constitute our social identities through power-knowledge. These rules act as an internalized “microphysics of power” that disciplines the body, mind, and soul (Foucault 1977). Thus, just as Foucault illustrates in Madness and Civilization that “truth” (or discourse) about madness was “fabricated” (Foucault 1984, p.78 cited in Thacker 1997, p. 34), through a relational discourse, a similar relational discourse of powerknowledge through societal (non-state) institutions of the UN, the UN Global Compact and universities that generate a “truth” about what PRME is, also creates Pouvoir-savoir is another term used by Foucault to describe “discourse.” See Foucault M (1991).

1

57

Informing Educational Approaches to PRME Using Foucault

1051

a new subjectivity of a PRME student and, by implication, “principled responsible managers.” These are those who become “educated” about sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and how a business acts ethically. Thus, accompanying the knowledge about what PRME is are behaviors that those aligned to PRME should exhibit. Those lying outside of this “truth” are – by default – non-PRME. In putting forward these analyses about how power-knowledge “governs” a society by constituting certain types of individuals, Foucault (1980) particularly shows us the significance of non-state agents such as universities in wielding indirect governance (Caspersz 1998) to create and perpetuate a “truth” about what we know and who we are. In fact, the nature of how universities operate is central in creating this disciplinary effect (and disciplined PRME subjects) (Ball 1990). That is, using Foucault (1980), we understand how universities exercise a “microphysics of power” upon faculty, teaching staff, students, and even administrative staff through the internalization of correct behavior or the normalization of practices as behavior that is expected of them in their role within the institution. As faculty performance (and, hence, tenure and promotion) becomes further linked to research output, teaching performance, and the ability to attract research funds, their practices are becoming linked to these activities, thus diminishing their willingness to engage in activity outside the core business of research, publishing, and teaching. The impact is of course to reinforce these practices as constituting the discourse of “what” it means to be a “performing” university faculty and therefore again instilling self-regulation by faculty to manage their time and activity to meet these indicators, in other words, a subjectivity that is identifiable by measures of performativity. Similarly, in the case of students, normalizing discourses linked to grades identify the differences between “good” and “bad” students in schools and universities (Smart 1985). Created by “dividing practices” or processes of classification and division (Ball 1990)2, these normalizing discourses guide students to establish and enforce norms and rules for themselves to ensure they themselves behave “properly” according to the rules they impose for themselves and others and “perform” in accordance with the expectations of these discourses. The implication of Foucault’s ideas is that students are caught up by discourses that shape their practices, while their practices, in turn, reproduce discourses that confirm these practices: that is, students are as embedded in expected behaviors as the pursuit of these behaviors subsequently embeds them further. Therefore, norms and rules are internalized by individuals within which normalization is operationalized by administering self-discipline on their own and others’ behavior without the need for external control or surveillance on the part of external authorities (Smart 1985). Thus, in Foucault’s (1980) view, disciplinary practices emerge, not by the making of laws but by the internalization of rules that conjoin the mind, body, and movement of individuals in guiding them to achieve the norm of a particular social context. As a result, Foucault perceives that the production of

2

Ball (1990, p. 4), for instance, describes processes of testing, examining, profiling, streaming, and entry criteria as examples of these. See Ball (1990).

1052

D. Caspersz and E. Leung

discourse not only develops useful bodies and minds but also those that serve as supervisors of others (Schrift 2013). The veil of surveillance that compels universities to “comply” with the “truth” of PRME and use their internal processes so that they create “useful” PRME “bodies and minds” (Schrift 2013) capable of aiding and abetting the state is evidenced in two ways. The first is the role that agencies such as EQUIS and AACSB play in accrediting university business schools on the basis of evidence that demonstrates they fulfill the PRME principles, which are predetermined by the relations of PRME to focus on certain knowledges. Faculty are subsequently embroiled in demonstrating how their research and teaching and learning activities reflect the PRME truths of sustainability, responsibility, and ethics, while students’ knowledge and ability in these fields is subject to assessments such as assignments and exams. Second, the significance of “measuring up” to these standards is reinforced by the actions of the UN PRME agency itself. In addition to being delisted if they fail to satisfactorily demonstrate that they are reporting against the “truths” of what PRME is, “the names of delisted signatories are publicly listed on the PRME website, in the PRME newsletter, and in our annual report” (PRME 2018b). Undoubtedly, the “terror of performativity” (Raymond 2018) and being publicly exposed through the SIP platform can quench the creativity of business schools and their faculty and staff in how this task is approached. It is not surprising therefore that instead of attempting to “meet” the benchmarks of the “truth” of PRME, some business schools have chosen to withdraw from PRME (PRME 2014). Further, despite PRME, concern remains about managers behaving responsibly. This may be because as Table 1 illustrates, while there is “evidence” of a substantial increase in the number of courses with PRME-related content in recent years, these remain predominately stand-alone units that students “elect” rather than “must” do (Rasche et al. 2013). In other words, not all students from PRME signatory business schools are PRME educated. In fact, the high level of implementation costs to assess and redesign course materials to integrate PRME-related courses into existing curriculum is one factor that prevents some university business schools from participating in PRME (Rasche et al. 2013). Thus, the core course content in most business schools that are PRME signatories continues to emphasize “narrow shareholder value ideology” (Matten and Moon 2004, p. 323) and prepare students to meet the demands of specific corporate job markets (Haski-Leventhal et al. 2017) rather than consider how to meet these demands while also being responsible managers. In summary, we show how Foucault’s idea of power-knowledge and tool of a “history of the present” is useful to uncover the embedded tension in education approaches to PRME. However, and in keeping with the critique about this “early” Foucault (Gordon 1991), developing a “history of the present” about PRME exposes the question that if there are such strong external and internal forces at work to regulate and normalize our thoughts about “what” constitutes PRME and, by implication, responsible management and managers, how can we inform our educational approaches to PRME so that students’ subjectivities become that of an everyday responsible manager?

57

Informing Educational Approaches to PRME Using Foucault

1053

Thus, like others, we also look at the “later” Foucault’s works, in particular his ideas of living through care of the self (1988), to develop this understanding. However, unlike this first section where we have been able to show the efficacy of Foucault’s tool of the “history of the present” as a methodological approach, the rest of our essay is as Foucault himself suggests of his work, “unfinished abutments” (1991, pp. 73–74). This is because care of the self remains as his unfinished genealogical project as Foucault’s untimely death meant that the interpretations of this reflects “anticipatory strings of dots” (1991, pp. 73–74).

An “Art of Living” What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to object and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life? (Foucault and Rabinow 1991, p. 350)

While the “early” Foucault illustrates to us how our subjectivity is unavoidably constituted by power-knowledge relations, the “later” Foucault (1988, 1997) contends that we can reconstitute our subjectivities by “knowing the self” (or practices of the self) to reeducate our soul so that we can think, act, and live differently. Foucault (1997) tells us that our relations to ourselves, others, and our lives are not simply given, but we are able beings who partake in that construction to alter ourselves. Even though forms of subjectivisation develop through codes of behavior created by dominant discourses, Foucault shows us how, by using the self-care techniques and practices, we can nourish our soul and transform ourselves to be something other than what we are, in other words, to create “new” subjectivities of ourselves to take control of shaping our ways of life and behaviors (Bazzul 2017). We show how Foucault’s concept of care of the self helps us to do this and subsequently choose an “art of living” as an everyday responsible manager. In reassessing his analysis of power-knowledge from 1982 onward, Foucault suggests that resistance against the exercise of power is always present (Smart 1985), because those who are subject to the effects of power are free to act on the actions of others (Foucault 1982; Hindess 1996). In other words, because power-knowledge is constructed through relations of power that we have through ourselves with others and the world, we can refashion the knowledge that we know about what and who we are. Thus, while being subjected to, the “subject” (or the self) retains the freedom to act, demonstrating what Foucault refers to as the “reversibility of power” or the “power” to think and behave differently to what is expected (Minson 1980). Foucault suggests that this involves “ethical reasoning,” whereby we freely put certain rules and precepts about behavior into practice (Dean 1994) or choose to abide by or resist the influence of practices on our behavior and our identity that were formed through the process of power-knowledge. Dean (1994) concludes that by opening up this domain, Foucault argues that the subject is not just a space

1054

D. Caspersz and E. Leung

constructed by exterior discursive practices nor purely by the influence of strategies, techniques, and procedures of government. We – or the self – also freely form the subject. In other words, by recognizing these possibilities, Foucault endows the subject with a sense of “consciousness” or awareness of actions to govern or “re-subjectify” the self. Thus, we can “re-subjectify” ourselves by studying the ethical practices (or aesthetics of existence) that guide our self-governing, in other words by becoming aware of the power relations which we are part of. Foucault (1997) emphasizes that unearthing this “truth” about the self requires parrhesia (2014, p. 143), or “fearless speech,” “So speak freely [leg’oun ho ti soi philon: speak, say what you like; M.F] without consideration for my age” (Socrates cited in Foucault 2014, p. 142). However, studying the ethical practices that guide self-government also engages the ascetic or, as Foucault defines, an “exercise of self upon the self by which one attempts to develop and transform oneself, and to attain a certain mode of being” (1997, p. 282). Foucault argues that we can do this by developing and pursuing practices that aim for self-improvement in relation to the individuals’ ethics (Foucault 1982, 2014). However, “ethics” for Foucault is not about acting in accordance with a code or power-knowledge as in a collection of values and rules of action arising through social institutions such as the family, educational institutions, or the Church. For Foucault, developing an ethical way of life involves studying the practices, techniques, and discourses by which the self comes to know, decipher, and act on, in other words, developing an understanding of how the self governs the self in response to government by the state and others (Dean 1994). Foucault describes this as autopoiesis, which is to make our own being (Bazzul 2016, p. 997). This is because when we do this, we then “free” ourselves from the power-knowledge that has made us. By understanding, questioning, and then choosing how we “practice” our daily living, we “self-transform” (Oksala 2007). Foucault subsequently says that when we transform the self by understanding the practices that apprise our ethical substance, our personal ontology, or our soul of existence, we develop the understanding and awareness to be able to choose our art of living or our “activity of life,” in other words, to “judge, and choose, how to shape power relations” (Van Baarle et al. 2018, p. 132). Foucault describes a number of techniques that can be used to cultivate an art of living. These include activities such as walking (to think) exercises, meditation, silence, and keeping the hypomnemata, that is, “account books, public registers, individual notebooks serving as memoranda. They constituted a material memory of things – read, heard, or thought, thus offering these as an accumulated treasure for rereading and later meditation. . ..and this to an end which is nothing less that the constitution of oneself” (Foucault and Rabinow 1991, p. 364). In Foucault’s view these are parrhesiastic exercises that engage the ascetic and through which the self can “train” oneself by oneself. Foucault further suggests that listening to others is another activity that helps the self to develop an art of living: “taking time, listening carefully, suspending judgement, asking critical questions that make you and the other person think, thinking ‘with’ that other person, not against the other person,

57

Informing Educational Approaches to PRME Using Foucault

1055

analysing underlying values and not fixing on solutions, and finally reflecting critically on one’s initial opinion, one’s moral intuition, impression and emotion” (Van Baarle et al. 2018, p. 134). In summary, Foucault recommends practices of “self-reflection, self-knowledge, self-examination, for the deciphering of the self by oneself, for the transformation one seeks to accomplish with oneself” (cited in Rose 1986, p. 245). Through these practices, we engage in a “care of the self.” Using Foucault, by caring for the self, we form an ethical subjectivity because we not only care about how our body performs daily practices, but we also care about our soul that is our being (our ethical substance).

Care of the Self and PRME Foucault recognized that education is one of the most powerful sites for the constitution of subjectivity (Bazzul 2017). Like others who draw on Foucault’s ideas to describe how subjectivities can be reconstituted through education (see, for instance, Besley 2005), we also draw on Foucault to suggest that business schools can foster a rethink about PRME by promoting practices that engage a care of the self to nurture an art of living that is against forms of domination exploitation and subjection by critically inquiring how those forms are constructed. This is by using the spaces of business schools to implement the practices of care of the self that Foucault describes to provide the conditions for students to exercise parrhesia (or truth-telling) to the self, and others, while understanding the relevance of this critique for the world (Bazzul 2017). However, this approach to education requires PRME educators to have an implicit ethical responsibility to engage in self-care practices for themselves and their students. Blasco (2012) calls these implicit dimensions of hidden curricula wherein educators subtly integrate ethical values into teaching practices but explicitly socialize students by provoking questions around behaviors, ethics, and social issues, that is, the power-knowledge of what they know. For example, educators may repeatedly emphasize “the responsibility for others” to students and exemplify this with the practice of reducing paper consumption to save the trees by replacing printing of PowerPoint handouts in the classrooms. Thus, besides implementing green classroom practices implicitly, students attention is explicitly and repeatedly drawn to ethical thoughts and actions that are beyond their own self-interests (Blasco 2012). Given the lack of PRME-related research or, as Foucault says, the “unfinished abutments” (1991, pp. 73–74), we suggest that repetition of the practices of care of the self is fundamental to inculcate PRME into habitual ways of students’ thinking and acting where they can then exercise the practice of the care of the self (Haski-Leventhal et al. 2017, p. 222). Advocating this trajectory through Foucault is clear. That is, underlying the care of the self is the injunction that it is only by taking care of others that we care for the self. Foucault argues that the “way in which one lives,” or the way in which one governs the self, is not about how well one attends to the self but rather how the “way

1056

D. Caspersz and E. Leung

in which one lives” (i.e., the art of living) attends to “the care of men (others)” (2014, p. 149). That is, we “govern” not solely for ourselves but also for others because knowing about our self comes through the relations that we have with others (and the world) (Deslandes 2012). While lying outside of PRME and even education domains, research shows how by caring for others the self can care for the self. Research finds that those engaged in voluntary activities are less prone to depression (Brown et al. 1992), experience greater life satisfaction (Wheeler et al. 1998), and have higher self-esteem (Gecas and Burke 1995). Further, giving help has been found to foster more positive levels of mental health (Schwartz et al. 2003), life adjustment (Crandall and Lehman 1977), and lower feelings of hopelessness (Miller et al. 1986). Thus, we suggest that we may be able to re-subjectify the subjectivities of students to be everyday responsible managers when implementing PRME by using the practices of self-care as Foucault describes to show students how by caring for others they care for themselves. However, following Foucault this is not a narcissistic practice of care of the self. Instead, practicing this care of self will guide an individual toward practicing a care of self-ethic (Deslandes 2013), that is, an internal ethical self that does not act in response to an externally imposed code or rules about behavior but instead develops a critical inquiry of the power-knowledge that guides their behavior and thus develops an internal understanding that enables the self to regulate the self by itself (Dean 1994). In summary, Foucault’s (1990) ideas show that even though individuals are historically constituted within a regulatory framework, they are not simply constructed, but they themselves are able beings that can modify their behavior and hence their identity through practices of the self. Thus, it is only by knowing the self that the individual is able to take control of shaping their ways of life and behaviors, that is, freely adhering to their ascetic criteria and ethics of existence for the self, that is, to practice a care of the self. We suggest that by drawing on these ideas of Foucault’s PRME approaches to education may be able to swing students to being “active subjects” who choose to be everyday responsible managers because by so doing they care for the self. As Foucault says: The emphasis is placed on the relationship to self, which means that one does not allow oneself to be swept away by appetites and pleasures; [one is] to keep mastery and superiority over them, to keep one’s sense in a state of calmness, to remain free from any inner slavery to passion and to reach a mode of being which can be defined by the full enjoyment of oneself or the perfect sovereignty of self over self. (Foucault cited in Smart 1985, p. 111)

Conclusion By adopting a philosophy in practice approach that engages with Foucault’s ideas, we have been able to present both a critique about PRME and offer ideas for teaching PRME that can transform students’ worldview. The critique that we develop shows that while there is an increased number of business schools that have publicly

57

Informing Educational Approaches to PRME Using Foucault

1057

committed to PRME education, current teaching and learning practices of PRMErelated courses conform to the “logic of performativity.” Following Foucault, the effects of this power-knowledge have implicitly directed educators and students to impose norms and rules to regulate themselves and others to achieve the predefined performance in universities. We argue that this has undermined their potential to put into practice the principles of PRME. However, using Foucault’s ideas we show how teaching approaches that are informed by the care of the self can foster critical understandings and attitudes toward the self that enable one to think actively and differently about how to both resist and change forms of domination in everyday social relations. Importantly, by developing this critical ontology of the self, the possibility emerges to graduate students willing to be everyday responsible managers. In conclusion, our essay is grounded in the quest to understand the “form” of PRME, so as to be able to rethink how else education about PRME can be. In pursuing this task, we have attempted to show how Foucault’s ideas can be fruitfully used to understand a problem and develop responses to this, in other words, to illustrate how a philosophy can guide practice.

Cross-References ▶ Educating Business Students about Kant and Dignity for a Theory of Business-inSociety ▶ The Performativity of Theories

References Academy-of-Management (2018) Principles for responsible management education virtual collection. Available from: http://aom.org/Publications/AMLE/Principles-for-Responsible-Man agement-Education-Virtual-Collection.aspx. 20 Feb 2018 Alcaraz J, Marcinkowska M, Thiruvattal E (2011) The UN-principles for responsible management education: sharing (and evaluating) information on progress. J Glob Responsib 2(2):151–169 Bacchi C (2012) Why study problematizations? Making politics visible. Open J Polit Sci 2(1):1–8 Ball S (1990) Introducing monsieur Foucault. In: Ball S (ed) Foucault and education. Disciplines and knowledge. Routledge, London, pp 1–8 Ball S (2003) The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. J Educ Policy 18(2):215–228 Bazzul (2016) Ethics and Science Education: How Subjectivity Matters, Springer Nature, Netherlands Bazzul J (2017) The ‘subject of ethics’ and educational research or ethics or politics? Yes please! Educ Philos Theory 49(10):995–1005 Besley T (2005) Foucault, truth telling and technologies of the self in schools. J Educ Enq 6:76–89 Blasco M (2012) Aligning the hidden curriculum of management education with PRME: an inquiry-based framework. J Manag Educ 36(3):364–388 Brown D, Gary L, Greene A, Millburn N (1992) Patterns of social affiliation as predictors of depressive symptoms among urban blacks. J Health Soc Behav 33(3):242–253 Caspersz D (1998) Globalization and labour: a case study of EPZ workers in Malaysia. Econ Ind Democr 19(2):253–286. https://doi.org/10.1177/0143831X98192003

1058

D. Caspersz and E. Leung

Clarke M (2013) Terror/enjoyment: performativity, resistance and the teacher’s psyche. Lond Rev Educ 11(13):229–238 Crandall J, Lehman R (1977) Relationship of stressful life events to social interest, locus of control, and psychological adjustment. J Consult Clin Psychol 45(6):1208 Dean M (1994) Critical and effective histories: Foucault’s methods and historical sociology. Routledge, London Deslandes G (2012) The Care-Of-Self Ethic with Continual Reference to Socrates: Towards Ethical Self-Management. Business Ethics: A European Review 21(4)325–338 Deslandes G (2013) The care of the self ethic with continual reference to Socrates: towards ethical self-management. Bus Ethics 21(4):325–338 Fisher R, Williams M (2004) Unlocking Creativity: Teaching Across the Curriculum, David Fulton, London Flint M, Peim N (2012) Rethinking the education improvement agenda. Continuum, London Forray J, Leigh J, Kenworthy A (2015) Special section cluster on responsible management education: nurturing an emerging PRME ethos. Acad Manag Learn Educ 14(2):293–296 Foucault M (1976) The history of sexuality. Penguin Books, New York Foucault M (1977) Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison (trans: Sheridan A). Vintage Books, New York Foucault M (1980) Truth and subjectivity. University of California, Berkely Foucault M (1982) The subject and power. In: Dreyfus H, Rabinow P (eds) Michel Foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp 208–226 Foucault M (1988) Technologies of the self. In: Martin L, Hutton P (eds) Technologies of the self. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, pp 16–49 Foucault M (1990) The Use of Pleasure, trans. R Hurley, Vintage Books, New York Foucault M (1991) Politics and the study of discourse. In: Burchell G, Gordon C, Miller P (eds) The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality: with two lectures by and an interview with Michel Foucault. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp 53–72 Foucault M (1997) Ethics, subjectivity and truth: the essential works of Foucault 1954–1984 (trans: Hurley R). The New Press, New York Foucault M (2001) Madness and civilization: a history of insantity in the age of reason. Vintage Books, New York Foucault M (2014) On the government of the living: lectures at the College De France 1979–1980 (trans: Burchell G). Palgrave Macmillan, New York Foucault M, Rabinow P (1991) The Foucault reader: an introduction to Foucault’s thought. Penguin, Harmondsworth Gecas V, Burke P (1995) Self and identity. In: Cook K, Fine G, House J (eds) Sociological perspectives on social psychology. Allyn & Bacon, Boston, pp 41–67 Gordon C (1991) Governmental rationality: an introduction. In: Burchell G, Gordon C, Miller P (eds) The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality with two lectures and an interview with Michel Foucault. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp 1–53 Haski-Leventhal D, Pournader M, Mckinnon A (2017) The role of gender and age in business students’ values, CSR attitudes, and responsible management education: learnings from the PRME International Survey. J Bus Ethics 146:219–239 Hibbert P, Cuncliffe A (2015) Responsible management: engaging moral reflexive practice through threshold concepts. J Bus Ethics 127:177–188 Hindess B (1996) Discourses of power. From Hobbes to Foucault. Blackwell, Oxford Matten D, Moon J (2004) Corporate social responsibility education in Europe. J Bus Ethics 54(4):323–337 Miller M, Denton G, Tobacyk J (1986) Social interests and feelings of hopelessness among elderly persons. Psychol Rep 58(2):410 Minson J (1980) Strategies for socialists? Foucault’s conception of power. Econ Soc 9(1):1–43 Morton S (2015) Progressing research impact assessment: a ‘contributions’ approach. Res Eval 24(4):405–419

57

Informing Educational Approaches to PRME Using Foucault

1059

Oksala J (2007) How to read Foucault. Granta Books, London PRME (2014) – Former PRME Signatories. Available from: http://www.unprme.org/resource-docs/ DelistedPRMESignatories022015.pdf. [14 August 2018] PRME (2018a) History. Available from: http://www.unprme.org/about-prme/history/history/index. php. 15 Jan 2018 PRME (2018b) Participamt reports. Available from: http://www.unprme.org/reporting/participantreports.php?sort=year&dir=desc&start=150. 9 Jan 2018 PRME (2018c) Six principles. Available from: http://www.unprme.org/about-prme/the-six-princi ples.php. 9 Jan 2018 PRME (2018d) Overiew. Available from: http://www.unprme.org/about-prme/index.php. 20 Mar 2018 PRME-News (2013) Business school accreditation bodies AACSB International and EFMD Embrace Responsible Management Education. Available from: http://www.unprme.org/news/ index.php?newsid=251#.WopfGK17G9M. 20 Feb 2018 Rasche A, Gilbert D, Schedel I (2013) Cross-Disciplinary Ethics Education in MBA Programs: Rhetoric or Reality? Acad Manag Learn Educ 12(1)71–85 Raymond P (2018) Terror versus soul: the struggle for creativity in primary initial teacher education. Res Educ 100(1):130–147 Rose N (1986) Governing the soul: the shaping of the private self. Routledge, London Schrift A (2013) Discipline and punish. In: Falzon C, O’Leary T, Sawicki J (eds) A companion to Foucault. Wiley, Chichester, pp 137–153. 11 August, 2016 Schwartz C, Meisenhelder J, Ma Y, Reed G (2003) Altruistic social interest behaviors are associated with better mental health. Psychosom Med 65(5):778–785 Smart B (1985) Michel Foucault. Tavistock Publications Limited, London Thacker A (1997) Foucault and the writing of history. In: Lloyd M, Thacker A (eds) Michel Foucault on the social sciences and humanities. Macmillan Press Ltd, London, pp 29–53 Van Baarle E, Verweij D, Molewijk B, Widdershoven G (2018) The relevance of Foucauldian artof-living for ethics education in a miltary context: theory and practice. J Moral Educ 47(1):126–143 Volpi A (2018) Gadamer and Vico: The common Sense in Philosophical Hermeneutics, MetaResearch in Hermeneutics Phenomenology and Practical Philosophy 10(1):122–148 Wheeler J, Gorey K, Greenblatt B (1998) The beneficial effects of volunteering for older volunteers and the people they serve: a meta-analysis. Int J Aging Hum Dev 47(1):69–79

Educating Business Students About Kant and Dignity for a Theory of Business-in-Society

58

Walter P. Jarvis and Natalia Nikolova

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dignity as a Moral Threshold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cultivating an Orientation toward Preserving Human Dignity Via Reflective Judgment . . . . How Kant’s Principles Contribute to Cultivating Reflective Judgment for CommunityOriented, Reality-Facing Sensus Communis: An Illustration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1062 1065 1066 1070 1073 1075 1075

Abstract

Within the philosophy of management field, especially management education, we address the increasingly urgent need for a normative basis to understanding business-in-society by building upon Donaldson and Walsh’s (Res Organ Behav 29(35):181–207, 2015) conceptualization of the “Human Dignity Threshold” as a premise and guide for business practice and business education. We focus on the seminal significance of dignity in Kant’s and Kantian scholars’ work and the importance of sensus communis, i.e., engaging reflective judgment for reasoning in public (Kant’s “enlarged mentality”), especially as it is adopted by Arendt. In doing so, we shift focus from achieving consensus over actions and policies, which (for Arendt) only flattens reality, to seeing the realities of those actions or policies as experienced by stakeholders, together, in communities. This requires learning and sharing various perspectives of “what it is like” for others and, more specifically, understanding the situated circumstances of felt experiences (facing W. P. Jarvis (*) University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] N. Nikolova UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_70

1061

1062

W. P. Jarvis and N. Nikolova

realities) from multiple perspectives. This approach to ensuring plurality fosters reasoning for an enlarged sensitivity to situations that undermine the categorical imperative (i.e., the dignity threshold). Crucially, this reasoning is undertaken in public spaces. We draw from our pedagogical experience with postgraduate students to raise opportunities for cultivating deeper normative grounding of business practice and education. Keywords

Kant · Arendt · Enlarged mentality · Dignity threshold · Reflective judgment · Business education

Introduction In the wake of the 2007–2010 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and ongoing public outrage at poor corporate behavior in some sectors (examples from Australia include 2018/2019 Australian Banking and Finance Royal Commissions followed by a 2019/ 2020 Royal Commission into Aged Care and Safety), the default standing of shareholder primacy in neoliberal economics (and Anglo-US business schools) for the last 40 years has been exposed and widely criticized (Ghoshal 2005; Khurana 2007; Ulrich 2008; Stout 2012 Parker 2018; MacDonald 2017; O’Brien 2019; Mayer 2018). And while Ed Freeman’s stakeholder theory (for an updated summary, see Harrison et al. 2019) is being slowly revisited in some boardrooms, we support claims for a more ambitious change agenda where moral foundations are explicitly offered as the justification of business purpose. We argue that Donaldson and Walsh’s call (2015) for a social movement to underpin a theory of business purpose holds great promise. They identify, inter alia, the “Dignity Threshold” (p. 188) as a conceptual and practical premise and guide for business practice and business education. Yet, what this dignity threshold means and how it can be developed through business education is still unclear. This is not helped by the myriad definitions of dignity and lack of clarity about how it can be cultivated through business education to support morally responsible actions and behaviors. To shed light on what the dignity threshold might mean for business practice and how it can be cultivated through business education, we focus on the seminal significance of dignity in Kant’s and Kantian scholars’ work. According to the humanity formulation of the categorical imperative, which is Kant’s most commonly cited example of a priori (transcendental) moral reasoning: “act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or that of another, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means” (Kant, in Wood 1999: xx). According to Wood, foremost for Kant’s moral theory is respect for a person’s dignity; it is “absolute, hence equal, worth of all rational beings” (Wood 1999: xiv). Kant’s view of the absolute standing of human dignity has been pivotal in shaping national constitutions (e.g., Germany, 1947) and international conventions and obligations, e.g., the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Charter of Human Rights (Donaldson and Walsh 2015: 192).

58

Educating Business Students About Kant and Dignity for a Theory of. . .

1063

Fundamental to our understanding of dignity is Kant’s notion of maturity, i.e., his view that maturity is a process of learning, and that independent thinking and reasoning (along with what Kant called an “enlarged mentality”) are required for personal autonomy and self-regulation. Maturity means “letting go” of the subservience to traditional and entrenched views of authority as vested, long before and still during Kant’s time, in the Crown (Monarchy) and the altar (Rome). The notion of “enlarged mentality” (or “enlarged thought”) is drawn from Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790/2000) (CPJ), which is his third major critique (after the Critique of Pure Reason, 1781/1998, and the Critique of Practical Reason, 1788/1999). The CPJ primarily addresses aesthetics and introduces the distinction between reflective and determinate judgment, which is central to this chapter. Briefly, in Kant’s view, we make judgments about something (such as a work of art) that it is beautiful. This judgment is subjective and private: “it is beautiful to me.” But he claims we also want to share that judgment with others, and ideally have them also agree that it is beautiful. Kant claims that moving from the private judgment to a shared judgment means we need to persuade (or “woo”) others into our view (Nedlesky 2001: 107). He further argues that, for us to persuade others, we also need to be able to view the object of our judgment (the work of art, for example) from others’ perspective. We build on our own judgment by using our imagination to consider how others might also judge the same piece: “We test our judgment against what others would say . . . and the capacity to do this is ‘enlarged thought’” (ibid, emphasis added). Hannah Arendt adopts that enlarged thinking from Kant and extends it to moral and political concerns – a shift which is also central to this chapter. We argue that Kant’s notion of an enlarged mentality is essential to the growing relevance of public accountability for business and management. To that end, we frame our contribution according to, first, how we might understand Kant and Kantian notions of dignity, and then how that understanding helps shape public engagement for normative legitimacy of the dignity threshold in business practice and education. In line with Sangiovanni (2017), we argue that dignity means treating persons as moral equals. In our view, ignoring dignity is a major systemic factor, which contributes to poor organizational and management behavior across the globe and industry sectors. Drawing on Kant and Kantian scholars, we argue that dignity can be cultivated in two key and related ways. First, building upon Kant’s CPJ and drawing on Hannah Arendt’s application of Kant’s reflective judgment, we argue that reflective judgment supports the development of an enlarged mentality so as to progressively engage with others in testing judgments (Degryse 2011) via what Kant (and later Arendt) identifies as sensus communis (a form of common sense) – but a distinctly community-oriented, reality-facing sensus communis. This reality-facing approach resists the move to consensus in public reasoning. Instead, it insists on protecting plurality by recognizing the extent of different contexts persons face. According to Degryse (2011), this community-oriented sensus communis is surprisingly neglected in the scholarship of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. In the case of business, this community-oriented, reality-facing sensus communis would imply that executives and various leaders test judgments (e.g., regarding pressing situations with widely distributed impacts) via a Town Hall style audience comprising an enterprise’s primary stakeholders (e.g., employees, customers, suppliers, and shareholders). In

1064

W. P. Jarvis and N. Nikolova

these circumstances, leaders ostensibly present not just key decisions but grounds for those decisions, seeking feedback and hearing stories from those present. In this process, testing one’s judgments and actions ideally exposes the grounds of those decisions and actions, i.e., whether and to what extent the decision-maker has not only viewed but also treated those others as morally equal (i.e., in accordance with the dignity threshold). Depending on the context, a larger agenda of coagency could emerge. A plurality of stakeholder perspectives can reasonably be expected to emerge, some of which are likely to conflict if not only in terms of goals (e.g., increasing short-term shareholder value versus provision for more sustainable futures) but also in timing expectations and access to resources. In other cases, there might be prospects for working together to achieve agreed results (e.g., employees working with government agencies toward higher safety standards in the workplace). This mix of prospects helps to illustrate Kant’s practical approach toward taking action, which is to change current circumstances but across multiple perspectives. Second, based on personal experiences of being an “other,” we suggest that the development of personal action-guiding principles (O’Neill 1996) contributes further to the development of an enlarged mentality and to accountability toward treating others with dignity. O’Neill defines action-guiding principles as principles that guide practical (moral) judgment and action. We progressively link actionguiding principles with the neglected community-oriented judgment testing sensus communis. Both of these contribute to an enlarged mentality, to Donaldson and Walsh’s dignity threshold-based theory of business. In so doing, we outline a distinctive orientation for business and management education, one far more attuned to public, broadly normative expectations of management and corporate behavior. We argue that educational approaches where Kant’s moral philosophy is at the heart of a threshold concept for teaching management and leadership can underpin business education, with significant positive outcomes for a justly critical and demanding public. We illustrate this by outlining a case study of a postgraduate management and leadership course we designed, offered biannually over the last 6 years at an Australian Business School. A key focus of the course is to support students in understanding dignity as treating persons as moral equals (Sangiovanni 2017), and experiencing the effect this has on others, via experiential learning elements (Berti et al. 2021). Data from the course illustrate that this Kantian frame breaks new ground for students’ learning toward maturity. In the following, we first outline Kant’s formulation of humanity and how this has informed understandings of dignity, and we expand this understanding by drawing upon Sangiovanni (2017). Next, we discuss reflective judgment, drawing extensively on Arendt’s application of Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgment for political and moral considerations. This larger perspective, which Arendt also calls “representative thinking” (Arendt 1977: 220), invites students to imagine and anticipate the influence of various stakeholder interests in their business judgments and decisions – but now, more pointedly, with implications for testing those judgments for the sake of a community-oriented, reality-facing sensus communis. We then explain the role of developing personal action-guiding principles (O’Neill 1975/2013), to assist in

58

Educating Business Students About Kant and Dignity for a Theory of. . .

1065

the cultivation of an orientation that sees dignity as a key premise for human behavior. We also illustrate how these Kantian concepts can be used to design business education that focuses on developing reflective judgment for practitioners increasingly subject to, and largely dependent on, public scrutiny regarding the normative legitimacy of their actions. We conclude with implications for business practice and education.

Dignity as a Moral Threshold To identify broadly agreed guideposts on the breadth of meanings and contested perspectives relating to the concept of dignity, we can refer to The Cambridge Handbook on Dignity (Duwell et al. 2014), and the British Academy Conference Proceedings published by Oxford University Press in 2013 (McCrudden 2013). These publications alone have produced over 100 chapters seeking to capture and describe various perspectives on human dignity. In these massive repositories, variations to interpretations of dignity are typically drawn from legal, cultural, philosophical, and religious perspectives. Such diversity risks to lose normative significance, and this loss occurs when the term “dignity” becomes so diversely interpreted that it stands for almost anything and becomes a cliché. At that stage, dignity is devalued and nihilistically dismissed as irrelevant. Such an outcome corrupts humanity and leaves open perverse, authoritarian views of ends and means (Arendt 1951/2004). In this chapter, we focus on a limited range of dignity-related concepts, filtered via (i) the aims of Donaldson and Walsh (2015), and (ii) our own management education research and pedagogical practices. A key criterion in our selection of authors on dignity is that they are recognized as Kantian scholars, with an influential orientation on human dignity which is consistent with a grounding orientation in Donaldson and Walsh’s (2015) normative theory of business. We start with a minimal definition of dignity, and for simplicity, we draw on Meyer (2001), who identifies dignity as a distinctive normative concept. There are at least two meanings of dignity. First, through some action humans are said to express dignity, i.e. persons are said to ‘speak with dignity’ or ‘carry themselves with dignity.’ (p. 405)

Second, persons are said to have dignity, and this is an attribution of a value as characteristic to humans. It is this second sense of having or possessing dignity that is “philosophically and ethically most fundamental . . . and a moral ideal” (Meyer 2001: 405). Drawing upon Kant, Meyer further elaborates that all human beings have dignity . . . in that all things have either a price or dignity . . . (in that) when things have a price this entails that there is something for which it would be morally acceptable to trade them, . . . whereas for human beings there is nothing – neither power, not pleasure, not good consequences for all of society – for which it is morally acceptable to exchange any human being. (p. 405)

1066

W. P. Jarvis and N. Nikolova

This distinctive perspective of the unique value and status of human persons is captured in Kant’s concept of categorical imperative (The Groundwork for Metaphysics of Morals, 1785/2002). The Humanity formulation is one of Kant’s four variations of the categorical imperative and is deemed by Kant (in his later Metaphysics of Morals, 1797) and by many Kantian scholars (e.g., Wood 1999; Formosa 2017) as his most influential. Formosa (2017) identifies the humanity formulation as central to what he terms Kant’s ethics of dignity. That is, he sees it as Kant’s core normative principle, which deepens an understanding of human dignity as vulnerability. Formosa understands vulnerability as “being susceptible to harm, injury, failure or misuse” (Formosa 2014: 89). Kantian ethics, therefore, focuses on the importance of the vulnerability of human beings to attack on, interferences with the proper exercise of, and failures to sustain and cultivate their capacities for rational agency (ibid: 90). Similarly, Sangiovanni (2017) argues for human dignity to be understood as treating others as moral equals, i.e., respecting a person’s inherent vulnerability by refusing to treat persons as moral inferiors. Sangiovanni defines inferior treatment as dehumanizing persons by treating them as objects, as instruments, and as animals in need of restraint and control by a superior, through stigmatization or by being excluded on account of some physical property, character, or background (Sangiovanni 2017: 74). Such practices and attitudes change the nature of social relations between people and involve cruelty and wrongful use of another’s vulnerability in order to cause severe harm or suffering (Sangiovanni 2017: 75). Coupling dignity with vulnerability helps to expose a defining perspective also vital to the purpose of Donaldson and Walsh’s (2015) normatively grounded theory of business to avoid negative or adverse impacts on human dignity.

Cultivating an Orientation toward Preserving Human Dignity Via Reflective Judgment We argue that an understanding of how to develop an orientation toward preserving human dignity can be cultivated via Kant’s aesthetic analysis of reflective judgment appropriated by Arendt for the public sphere. Both Kant and Arendt emphasize that judgment is not private but intersubjective (Schwartz 2016) – it starts as an opinion but becomes a judgment when shared in public. The implications are significant for higher education but especially profound for business schools and management education. In order to see the connection between dignity and reflective judgment, we draw next on Kant’s third critique, the CPJ (1790/2000). We argue that when Kant’s explanation and illustrations of reflective judgment is extended from aesthetic applications, i.e., what it means to judge a work of art or a spectacular scenic view as “beautiful,” to relational engagements, seeking to persuade others about the beauty of that art or natural scene (via Arendt 1951/2004 and Ferrara 2008), reflective judgment is central. We argue that this shift from an aesthetic judgment to testing those justifications via the community-oriented, reality-facing sensus

58

Educating Business Students About Kant and Dignity for a Theory of. . .

1067

communis provides a relevant context supporting Donaldson and Walsh’s public call for a social movement where the dignity threshold is a premise for a theory of business-in-society. We follow, inter alia, Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1989) and Alessandro Ferrara’s work on The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment (2008). Arendt and Ferrara appropriate Kant’s illustrations of reflective judgment in aesthetics but go beyond, into those domains which are, for management and organizations, no longer deemed the relatively private inner circle concern of shareholders, but are now inescapably intersubjective, relational, and public, i.e., political and moral domains relevant for enterprises when viewed as embedded in global society (Polanyi 1944) and natural ecologies. What is reflective judgment? In the introduction to the CPJ, Kant draws a fundamental distinction between determinant and reflective judgment. According to Makkreel (2015: 29–30): [d]eterminant judgment proceeds from a given universal to subsume a particular under it, whereas reflective judgment proceeds from a given particular to a universal. Determinant judgment is rule-bound and subordinate. Kant expects reflective judgment to arrive at its own rule . . .. Another way to think of the determinant-reflective judgment distinction is to see the former as directed from without and the latter as self-orienting.

Indeed, the task of reflective judgment is finding universals for particulars. For Kneller (2007), this task calls for imagination – of presenting what is not present. Two central concepts in Kant’s CPJ serve our interest in connecting dignity with reflective judgment. The first is Kant’s notion of sensus communis, and the second refers to an enlarged mentality. Kant’s original use of sensus communis was in relation to aesthetic judgment, where he sought to illustrate how forming a judgment (e.g., regarding the beauty in a work of art) was something we would want to share with others, or at least explain if not justify to others. For our purposes, it is Hannah Arendt’s study of Kant’s political philosophy that has contributed an enduring influence on the role of reflective judgment. Arendt comprehensively appropriates Kant’s aesthetic context for judgments in the political and moral domains. For Arendt, sensus communis is far more political and moral, i.e., it refers to matters of judgment not just concerning but essential to reasoning within the public domain. Let us reflect for a moment on the connections between Kant’s and Arendt’s references to sensus communis. On the one hand, Kant advocated three maxims to cultivate the judgment needed for sharing ideas with others. These three maxims also constitute the means to recognize his categorical imperative regarding respect for the dignity of persons, never to be used solely as means but always as ends, viz.: 1. To think for yourself 2. To think from the standpoint of others – to develop an “enlarged mentality” (Kant 1790/2000: 175) 3. To do so consistently

1068

W. P. Jarvis and N. Nikolova

On the other hand, Arendt championed the same “enlarged mentality,” also as “representative thinking” (Arendt 1977: 220), not for the purposes of empathy but through exposure to situated realities for others, not to the feelings of others (Acreman 2018: 73). Being awakened to the realities of others’ lives means maximal exposure to their situated stories so as to understand what is heard, felt, seen, and needs to be accounted for (Acreman 2018: 101). Arendt suggests that such mental enlargement would be fostered if one was to “go visiting” (Arendt 1992: 43). The aim of developing an enlarged mentality is so we can “face reality together” (Acreman 2018: 98). In his analysis of Arendt’s ideas on judgment, Jonathan Schwartz (2016: 175) offers a powerful image of cultivating judgment via the enlarged mentality: The process (of cultivating judgment) is something like climbing a high hill. We begin at the bottom with an uncultivated and crude understanding that is trapped in our individual private conditions and our community’s prejudices and unreflective understandings, what Kant had called “common human understanding.” But as we cultivate our judgment, we, so to speak, climb up the mountain and as we get higher our perspective can take in more and more of the landscape, we can take in the viewpoint of more and more perspectives. The essential point, however, is that this is still my own perspective. I have two different vantage points, one that is based in my subjective private conditions, and one that takes in a broader political landscape of perspectives.

Makkreel (2015) argues that, by drawing upon Kant’s early work in anthropology and geography, we can orient ourselves in the world in much the same way we get to know the physical difference between our left and right. By drawing on our imagination across a diverse range of concepts to form reflective judgments (in the sense illustrated above), we are learning to discern variations of our understanding and evaluations in forming our own maxims, giving direction and orientation to our thinking. In so doing, Makkreel is not only demonstrating the unity of those cognitive faculties but also “orienting our thought,” i.e., pointing the way in which we participate in the world (Makkreel 2015: 78). What is clear from this brief account of Kant’s CPJ is that the shift to judgment is not intended to identify a single dimension from which to focus but to recognize the defining human need for judgment as a powerful means for coping with complexity. Second and related, nor is the shift to judgment intended to isolate judgment from understanding and/or imagination. Concerning what we see in connecting the “dignity threshold” to Kant’s reflective judgment, the following extensive quote from Ferrara (2008: 2–3) is warranted: Alongside the force of what is [facts/things/habits/customs/practices] and of what ought to be [ideas/principles/the moral point of view/the best argument/the good life], a third force gives shape to our world: the force of what is as it should be or the force of the example. For a long time unrecognized and misleadingly assigned to the reductive realm of the aesthetic, the force of the example is the force of what exerts appeal on us in all walks of life—in art as in politics, in religious as in moral matters, in economic as in social conduct, in medical practice as in managing large organizations—by virtue of the singular and exceptional congruence that what is exemplary realizes and exhibits between the order of its own reality

58

Educating Business Students About Kant and Dignity for a Theory of. . .

1069

and the order of the normativity to which it responds. Authenticity, beauty, perfection, integrity, charisma, aura, and many other names have been attributed to this quality of bringing reality and normativity, facts and norms not just to a passing, occasional, and imperfect intertwining but to an enduring, nearly complete, and rare fusion.

We argue there is merit in adding the dignity threshold to the above list of universal normative examples, especially when coupled or illustrated with the experiences of Sangiovanni’s distinction of being treated as morally equal, or as morally inferior, when instrumentalized, infantized, coerced, objectified, and dehumanized (Sangiovanni 2017: 4–5). By so doing, the force of the example (in this instance, the dignity threshold) can help to illuminate ways of transcending the limitations of what is (e.g., management’s frequently dehumanized practices of instrumentalization in restructuring) and of expanding the reach of our normative understandings (e.g., clearer, more explicit understanding of corporate social responsibilities) (Ferrara 2008: 3). Moreover, Ferrara’s “Force of the Example” (2008) is directed at developing the exemplar for understanding the normative dimension in the public sphere – the space where public reason operationalizes Kant’s sensus communis by promoting an enlarged mentality. Relevant for our pedagogical responsibilities to prepare future practitioners to be directly and indirectly engaged with – and morally accountable to – others, we build upon Kant’s emphasis on public reasoning and personal accountability by identifying human dignity as a norm, which is broadly understandable and followable by plural agents (O’Neill 2018). To that end, we draw on Onora O’Neill’s work, which has focused on the development of principles to guide practical (moral) judgment and action (O’Neill 1975/2013, 1996). O’Neill’s doctoral dissertation and subsequent writing on action-guiding principles offer practical example of how reflective judgment can lead to an enlarged mentality via personal action-guiding principles. Action-guiding principles are principles that could be universalized (i.e., they are law-like principles). O’Neill (1996: 205) offers two examples of principles relevant for our pedagogical purposes, both based on Kant’s categorical imperative of universalization: (i) Avoid damage (to social fabric and/or the material basis of life) caused by indifference and neglect (an institutional principle) (ii) Avoid injury (to social fabric and/or the material basis of life) caused by indifference and neglect (a personal principle) We argue that human dignity represents an example of enacted law-like principles of the categorical imperative – drawing on Kant’s maxim that we should think from the standpoint of others (i.e., the maxim of “enlarged thought”). Some implications of this can be glimpsed by considering Darwall’s second person standpoint (Darwall 2006), which operationalizes the moral equality between persons in the following terms: Each can demand reasons and make claims on each other. Extensions of this would embrace, first, key stakeholders’ interests, and second, distant others, e.g., secondary stakeholders. O’Neill suggests that “it means seeking to see one’s own initial judgments from the standpoint of others” (1990: 46).

1070

W. P. Jarvis and N. Nikolova

To sum up, we argue that avoiding negative or adverse impacts on human dignity is a key norm to Donaldson and Walsh’s (2015) theory of business-in-society. Building upon Kant, we argue that an orientation toward preserving human dignity can be cultivated via reflective judgment. Reflective judgement invites us to imagine and anticipate the influence of various stakeholders on our judgments and decisions and to test those judgments for the sake of a community-oriented, reality-facing sensus communis. Such testing promotes and is enabled by an enlarged mentality (a plurality of others) and is fostered by the definition of personal action-guiding principles (O’Neill 1975/2013) which recognize dignity as a key premise for human behavior.

How Kant’s Principles Contribute to Cultivating Reflective Judgment for Community-Oriented, Reality-Facing Sensus Communis: An Illustration A 6-year case is used to illustrate postgraduate business students’ transformations as they complete a course on Managing, Leading and Stewardship (MLS) which we developed at an Australian Business School. Since the course commenced, more than 1500 postgraduate students have completed it. Here, we refer to our experience in the course as an illustrative example of our experiential pedagogy underlined by theoretical concepts and constructs drawn on the basis of the work by Kant and Kantian scholars.1 Our pedagogical approach consists of three key components. First, the powerful relevance of Kant’s moral anthropology is illustrated in our teaching program via several role-plays based on real case studies, which students engage in during the 12-week duration of the course. In these role-plays, students assume the role of a manager/leader who faces complex decisions, or the role of a stakeholder impacted by these decisions (e.g., employees, customers, shareholders, supplies, and the broader community). Students are asked to imagine what it is like to be a manager/leader or a stakeholder, and to become aware of feelings, assumptions, and constraints they would be facing in this context. To embed students into the specific situational context, we provide rich descriptions, including visual clues, about the context. Students are then asked to role-play the testing of the judgments made by the “manager/leader” in town hall style meetings, with the students playing stakeholders (i.e., employees, suppliers, community groups, school principals, government agencies, etc.) putting forward their views and perspectives to challenge management/leadership decisions. Second, students are asked to reflect in teams on their experiences of the roleplays. This challenges students to share their reflections with each other to gain 1

While in this chapter we focus on Kant and Kantian constructs, in the MLS course we also draw heavily on Aristotle’s phronesis (practical wisdom) in cultivating moral insights and capabilities (see Berti et al. 2021)

58

Educating Business Students About Kant and Dignity for a Theory of. . .

1071

further perspective into others’ views. In the aftermath of these experiences, Kant’s humanity orientation is highlighted, in particular the obligation to respect the dignity of each human person. Third, students are asked to write an individual reflection at three points during the course (as one of their assessments) and to formulate their personal actionguiding principles in light of their experiences during the course. Based on the work of Kantian scholars as outlined above, we explore with students what the obligation to respect human dignity means. Here are a few key observations: 1. The notion of dignity, when unpacked, refers (inter alia) to persons being treated as moral equals (Sangiovanni 2017). Moral emotions (such as anger or outrage) become central to class discussions, as well as team and individual reflections on forming personal action-guiding principles, as students experience situations in which they, as an “other” (e.g., as an employee, a supplier, and a family member of an employee), are not treated as moral equals by managers/leaders. Moreover, the students role-playing managers and leaders often feel stressed and anxious during the role-play (after volunteering to assume these roles), as they realize that the behavior and practices they display in the role-play (which are based on their experiences as organizational members) lead to treating others as morally inferior. 2. These role-plays, discussions, and reflections, in turn, open engagement with and questioning of the premises and assumptions underpinning commonly used organizational theories and management systems and processes. 3. When students begin to emphasize this ignored/dismissed moral equivalence as an obligation to respect the dignity threshold in persons, much that underpins business-oriented organizational theory and management practices becomes morally problematic, e.g., agency theory, shareholder theory, and business ethics (in the sense of ethics appropriated by business, as illustrated in Jones et al. 2005). Recognizing moral problems is an essential first step in developing students’ enlarged mentality. For example, students are confronted with a real-life case of a plant closure: Students who have just role-played (as employees) the direct and negative impacts of a plant closure are advised that the CEO responsible for the plant closure decision claimed at the time that redundant employees had “left with dignity” (see Jarvis and Logue 2016, for a detailed discussion of the role play and underlying pedagogy). The CEO argued that they had “left with dignity” as they (employees) accepted, without any aggression, an executive decision to close the plant. And yet, when students play the part of employees and their family members, they find their treatment by the executives to be anything but respectful. There is palpable anger in hearing that they have no say in the closure, thus realizing that they have in fact been treated as “moral inferiors” (under the definition by Sangiovanni 2017) and below the dignity threshold (as defined by Donaldson and Walsh 2015). For most students, this plant closure experience triggers deep questioning of many commonplace management assumptions, highlighting a threshold of dignity below which

1072

W. P. Jarvis and N. Nikolova

students learn what it is like to be treated as moral inferiors, dehumanized as mere “numbers on an excel spreadsheet” (Jarvis and Logue 2016: 364). Our research of students’ reflective journals identifies the impact this experience has in helping them craft their own action-guiding principles. Dignity is no longer just about behavior; rather, it is seen by many as a defining quality of autonomy – one which many also describe as commanding respect, and thus warranting engagement in decisionmaking as opposed to being subject to an arbitrary decision – in this instance, as imposed by the CEO. Students’ heightened awareness of dehumanizing attitudes enables deeper engagement with community sensitivities against poor corporate and management behavior. Figure 1 illustrates how our theoretical framework and pedagogical choices contribute to the development of an enlarged mentality that exposes the need to protect (and not undermine) the dignity threshold. Both Kant (for his aesthetic judgment) and Arendt (who applies Kant’s aesthetic analysis to her political and moral judgment) lay the groundwork for public discussion and testing (sensus communis) by promoting an enlarged mentality. Indeed, reflective judgment and an enlarged mentality could be seen as working interdependently. Fostering an enlarged mentality cultivates capacities for reflective judgment, and vice versa – with each exposed to realities that emphasize the need to protect and not undermine the dignity threshold. For MLS students, the experience of learning what it is like (the realities) of being an employee (at Foxconn, Apple, King Gee, and Enron) is to experience and reflect on insights from Sangiovanni, in these various instances appraising, through their roles, whether they were treated as a moral equal or as an inferior (i.e., understanding the dehumanizing experiences of instrumentalism, and being treated as mere means). As mentioned from the outset, these moral inferiority issues for stakeholders (customers, employees, and the broader public) have been the center of extensive public concerns regarding corporate and management attitudes and behavior for over two decades (O’Brien 2019). Following Sangiovanni (2017), we argue that many common management practices espouse attitudes that treat employees as inferior persons, i.e., in ways that undermine the foundational principle of respect for human dignity. Treating employees as commodities, as resources merely to be made productive and efficient,

Fig. 1 Connection between theoretical framework and pedagogical model for the development of students’ enlarged mentality

58

Educating Business Students About Kant and Dignity for a Theory of. . .

1073

imposing major decisions without consultation (such as a plant closure), exposes asymmetries of power and justifications of decisions concerning others (Forst 2017). In most US-Anglo structures, managers and managed are anything but equal. Anderson (2017) goes so far as to describe this current inequality as reflective of private government – that is, forms of governance whereby corporate management sets and dictates terms and the managed respond without security and confidence in their standing (Anderson 2017). In management parlance, respecting human dignity means seeing managers and managed (workers) jointly and equally responsible for both the recognition and protection of human dignity in their relations. The consequences of this equal moral recognition and protection are profound. Herein lies the focal point for what we see as the threshold of human dignity: It means seeing management as the warrant for protecting and not undermining that inherent human respect reflected equally in workplace relations. Like Anderson, we see much of that moral equality in, for example, almost a century of publicly supported success of German codetermination (Silvia 2013; Logue et al. 2015; Berti et al. 2017).

Conclusion Our approach to addressing how management can protect and not undermine the dignity threshold takes a microperspective: An individual agent faces a complex situation which calls for moral judgment in a Kantian sense – namely, an awareness of how various stakeholders to a decision or judgment (e.g., employees, customers, suppliers, agencies, and communities) would individually be seeking to “face the issue/situation together” (Acreman 2018: xi). We revisit this wider orientation via Hannah Arendt’s application of Kant’s aesthetics to her political theories – which we now interpret as being able to face “reality together” (Acreman 2018: xi) – as a complex context for the role of business in society. Doing so presents significant curricula and pedagogical challenges and opportunities for business schools, which we consider below. We draw attention to the civic responsibilities and obligations of graduates regarding the human dignity threshold. In our assessment, advancing responsibility for the dignity threshold gives expression to the public role of a university (Nixon 2011: 14–17), educating for public responsibility as expressed in terms of graduate attributes. This public orientation constitutes a profound development, fostering graduate capacities for reflective judgments. Those judgments go to protecting, not undermining human dignity. The empirical evidence of our experiential approaches to postgraduate moral awareness helps advance a view of the moral justice foundations of business/organizations-in-society. We find clear shifts in student interpretations (as we examine their reflective portfolios), and we use these findings to motivate the orientation of postgraduates toward cultivating reflective judgment. By revisiting and reflecting on still deeply entrenched (see Arendt’s “thoughtlessness,” 1963: 288) amoral views of organizational purpose and managerialist attitudes (via Ghoshal 2005; Khurana 2007; Parker 2018; O’Brien 2019), we demonstrate how such an approach to teaching management and leadership enables

1074

W. P. Jarvis and N. Nikolova

us to engage students in reflections that are structured toward cultivating graduate capabilities for ethical and moral practice (Berti et al. 2021), upholding the human dignity threshold. The significance of Kant’s deontology for a reflective judgment and decisionmaking framework is consistent with widening public demands for a business-insociety perspective, increasingly shaped by environmental, social, and governance (ESG) values (Ghosh 2020). Corporate business (and its relationship to society) post-GFC is already a dominant interest for the public sphere, as ongoing public enquiries into poor corporate behavior demonstrate. “Poor corporate behaviour” can be summed up, based on Sangiovanni, as treatment of another as a moral inferior – that is, risking “a dilution of respect and dignity” (O’Brien 2019: 55). We close by suggesting that public legitimacy of business school qualifications can be enhanced through a reorientation toward education for reflective judgment and enlarged mentality – which means engaging with a less instrumental and more formative humanistic and ecologically astute literature. In terms of practical contributions, we put forward that pedagogical approaches to cultivating moral awareness in future managers and leaders based on Kant’s moral anthropology provide rich ground for cultivating moral accountability in graduates. Empirical evidence from our educational experiences of over 6 years demonstrates that engaging students in learning based on the human dignity threshold is vital for cultivating, via action-guiding principles, humanism-grounded and anthropologically informed moral-civic accountability as a postgraduate attribute. We also illustrate the unity of theoretical and practical (moral) reason in Kant’s categorical imperative and how it serves in preparing our students to make, defend, and be morally accountable for their judgments. Thus, we seek to cultivate students’ enlarged mentality (imagining the standpoints of others) through Kantian moral thinking, to support the development of their own action-guiding principles for intelligent (moral-public) accountability as a distinctive postgraduate attribute, and as community-oriented, reality-facing sensus communis. After engaging with Kant and Arendt’s perspectives on enlarged thinking, students can effectively anticipate the views of those stakeholders previously treated as being of instrumental use in the business of making money. Our proposed orientation toward cultivating an enlarged mentality may be regarded as too risky for a self-interested appropriation of this enlarged mentality. Wouldn’t it be easy for a person to be self-deceiving by appropriating the larger perspectives through the prism of self-interest? Isn’t there a need for Socratic humility? Here we believe Arendt’s application of Kant (by extending Kant’s enlarged mentality to political issues) is matched by her application of Socrates as her exemplar of reflexivity, bringing together thinking, judging, and willing, using the Socratic “stingray” and “gadfly” and “midwife” metaphors. As Amoureux (2016: 84) points out, where the stingray paralyses the self and others to ‘stop and think’, a gadfly stimulates and arouses others to engage in questioning and acting, and a midwife delivers and judges the vitality of the infant.

58

Educating Business Students About Kant and Dignity for a Theory of. . .

1075

Fostering this range of Socratic activities would hopefully serve to cultivate an enlarged mentality of ethical-moral humility in reflexivity. Kant also addressed this concern by viewing humility not in a single frame (e.g., to guard against delusional and corrupting inclinations) but in a larger frame, i.e., as an essential dimension to exercising a moral disposition (Grenberg 2005). After more than a decade since the GFC, there is increasing awareness of a need to restore public trust in how those affected by management decisions are treated in relation to the dignity threshold. Doing so would make not just for a higher business purpose (beyond profit) but would help future business and management graduates to recognize that the role of the business school from which they graduated was to prepare them for intelligent (moral-public) accountability. This includes engaging fruitfully and respectfully with the community-oriented, reality-facing sensus communis. It is a purpose that a bruised public, having endured the Covid19 pandemic, post-long-term corporate indifference and neglect, would respect. It is time to have business schools that effectively prepare graduates for their defining public roles in business as well as in global citizenship.

Cross-References ▶ How Methods of Moral Philosophy Inform Business ▶ How Utilitarianism Can Inform Decent Managers in Plural and Culturally Diverse Contexts ▶ Organizations, Virtue Ethics, and Narrative Identity ▶ Philosophical Anthropology and Business Ethics ▶ What Calls for Thinking in Business: Consulting as a Heideggerian Philosopher

References Acreman S (2018) Political theory and the enlarged mentality. Routledge, New York Amoureux J (2016) A practice of ethics for global politics: ethical reflexivity. Routledge, London Anderson E (2017) Private government: how employers rule our lives (and why we don’t talk about it). Princeton University Press, Princeton Arendt H (1951/2004) The origins of totalitarianism. Schocken Books, New York Arendt H (1963) Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil. Penguin, New York Arendt H (1977) Between past and future. Penguin, New York Arendt H (1992) Lectures on Kant’s political philosophy. Beiner R (Ed) Chicago: Chicago Berti M, Clegg SR, Jarvis W (2017) Future in the past: a philosophical reflection on the prospects of management. In: Wilkinson A, Armstrong S, Lounsbury M (eds) The Oxford handbook of management. Oxford University Press, Oxford Berti M, Jarvis W, Nikolova N, Pitsis A (2021) Embodied Phronetic pedagogy: cultivating ethical and moral capabilities in postgraduate business students. Acad Manag Learn Educ 20(1):6–29 Darwall S (2006) The second-person standpoint: morality, respect and accountability. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Degryse A (2011) Sensus communism as a foundation for men as political beings: Arendt’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Philos Soc Crit 37(3):345–358

1076

W. P. Jarvis and N. Nikolova

Donaldson T, Walsh JP (2015) Toward a theory of business. Res Organ Behav 29(35):181–207 Duwell M, Braarvig J, Brownsword R, Meith D (2014) The Cambridge handbook of human dignity: interdisciplinary perspectives. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Ferrara A (2008) The force of the example: explorations in the paradigm of judgment. Columbia University Press, New York Formosa P (2014) The role of vulnerability in Kantian ethics. In: Mackenzie S, Rogers W, Dodds S (eds) Vulnerability: new essays in ethics and feminist philosophy. Oxford University Press, Oxford Formosa P (2017) Kantian ethics, dignity and perfection. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Forst R (2017) Normativity and power: analyzing social orders of justification. Oxford University Press, Oxford Ghosh I (2020) Powering prosperity: a Citizen’s guide to shaping the 21st century. Bombardier Books, New York Ghoshal S (2005) Bad management theories are destroying good management practices. Acad Manag Learn Edu 4(1):75–91 Grenberg J (2005) Kant and the ethics of humility: a story of dependence, corruption, and virtue. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Harrison J, Barney J, Freeman RE, Phillips R (2019) The Cambridge handbook of stakeholder theory. University of Cambridge, Cambridge Jarvis WP, Logue D (2016) Cultivating moral-relational judgment in business education: the merits and practicalities of Aristotle’s phronesis. J Bus Ethics Educ 13:349–372 Jones C, Parker M, ten Bos R (2005) For business ethics. Routledge, London Kant I (1781/1998) In: Guyer P, Wood A (eds) Critique of pure reason. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Kant I (1785/2002) Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals (trans: Wood A). Yale University Press, New Haven Kant I (1788/1999) In: Gregor M (ed) Critique of practical reason. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Kant I (1790/2000) In: Guyer P, Wood A (eds) Critique of the power of judgment. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Kant I (1797) The Metaphysics of morals. In: Gregor M (ed) (1996) Practical philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Kneller J (2007) Kant and the power of imagination. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Khurana R (2007) From higher aims to hired hands: the social transformation of American business schools and the unfulfilled promise of management education. Princeton University Press, Princeton Logue DM, Jarvis WP, Clegg SR, Hermens A (2015) Translating models of organization: can the Mittelstand move from Bavaria to Geelong? J Manag Organ 21(1):17–36 MacDonald D (2017) The Golden passport: Harvard Business School, the limits of capitalism, and the moral failure of the MBA elite. HarperCollins, New York Makkreel R (2015) Orientation & judgment in hermeneutics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Mayer C (2018) Prosperity: better business makes the greater good. Oxford University Press, Oxford McCrudden C (ed) (2013) Understanding human dignity. British Academy conference proceedings. Oxford University Press, Oxford Meyer M (2001) Dignity. In: Becker L, Becker C (eds) Encyclopedia of ethics, 2nd edn Nedlesky J (2001) In: Beiner R, Nedlesky J (eds) Judgment, diversity and relational autonomy. Rowman & Littlefield, U. Lanham Nixon J (2011) Higher education and the public good: imagining the university. Continuum, London O’Brien J (2019) Trust, accountability and purpose: the regulation of corporate governance. Cambridge University Press

58

Educating Business Students About Kant and Dignity for a Theory of. . .

1077

O’Neill O (1975/2013) Acting on principle: an essay on Kantian ethics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge O’Neill O (1990) Constructions of reason: explorations of Kant’s practical philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge O’Neill O (1996) Towards justice and virtue: a constructive account of practical reasoning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge O’Neill O (2018) From principles to practice: normativity and judgment in ethics and politics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Parker M (2018) Shut down the business school: what’s wrong with management education. Pluto Press, London Polanyi K (1944) The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time. Beacon Press, Boston Sangiovanni A (2017) Humanity without dignity: moral equality, Respect and Human Rights. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Schwartz J (2016) Arendt’s judgment: freedom, responsibility, citizenship. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia Silvia SJ (2013) Holding the shop together: German industrial relations in the postwar era. Cornell University Press, Ithaca Stout L (2012) The shareholder value myth: how putting shareholders first harms investors, corporations, and the public. Barrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco Ulrich P (2008) Integrative economic ethics: foundations of a civilized market economy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Wood AW (1999) Kant’s ethical thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Index

A Abduction, 6, 214, 244–249, 266 Action-based responsible management, 899, 906–907 Action nominalism, 971, 973 Action research, 33, 189 Actor-network theory, 105 Adaptive dynamics, 338 Adaptive processes, 338 Advocacy, 519–520 Aesthetic(s), 2, 7, 391–396, 400, 424–425, 468, 513 corporate, 480 and ethics, 441–444 imagination, 358 organizational, 464, 465, 473 perception, 438–441 Aesthetic judgement, 439–440 Aesthetic knowing, 385, 433 Affect theory, 110 African Slave Trade, 645, 648, 649 Agafonow, Alejandro, 205–217, 265–282, 287–305 Agencement, 108–110 Akrasia, 817 Alÿs, Francis, 449–451, 456 Analogy of attribution, 913, 914, 919, 923–930 Analytical inquiry, 220 Analytical philosophy, 221, 226, 227 Analytic-synthetic distinction, 974 Anthropocentrism, 29, 57 Anti-Black racism, 647, 657 Anti-capitalist, 534 Anti-rational authority, 964 A Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice, 30 Applied ethics, 664, 665 Aquinas, Thomas, 462, 467–469, 473, 474 Ardagh, David, 911–939

Arendt, Hannah, 732, 734, 736, 738, 739, 741, 1034–1037, 1063, 1064, 1066–1068 Arete, 1032 Aristotle, 467, 812–815, 817–818, 914, 917, 918, 920–923, 927, 931, 961, 963, 1031–1034 Artificial persons (APs), 913–916, 919, 927, 928, 930–933, 935, 936, 939 Art(s), 391–393, 400, 405, 442, 511, 530 and cultural sectors, 511 practice, 510, 518 practitioners, 512–514, 517, 519, 522, 524 research, 503 Astronomy, 206–209, 213 Athenian democracy, 224 Attentiveness, 577 Austin, John, 161, 167 Axiology, 222 B Baptist, Edward, 648 Barnesian theory, 175 Basic science, 213 Bathurst, Ralph, 363, 413–428 Behavioral integrity, 606, 607 Being, 1006, 1007, 1009, 1011, 1012, 1015 Bereson, Ruth, 365, 509–527 Bertolaso, Marta, 216, 333–351 Beuys, Joseph, 536 Bevan, David, 713–728 Bhaskar, Roy, 41, 57–60, 65, 66, 246, 247, 251 BigData, 256–260 Black exploitation, 656–658 #BlackLivesMatter social movement, 554, 644–646 Blackness, 647, 653 Blagoev, Blagoy, 30, 79–94

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Neesham et al. (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1

1079

1080 Blaikie. Norman, 235–262 Blok, Vincent, 565–582, 897–908 Bodily habits, 436 Bodily knowledge, 433 Böhme, Gernot, 540 Bourdieu, Pierre, 184, 670, 694, 701, 800, 801, 806 Bunge, Mario, 4, 5, 8, 11, 19, 21–26, 29, 34, 45, 56, 57, 59–63, 65–72, 553 Bureaucratization, 7 Business education, 7, 1062, 1064 Business ethics, 8, 10, 455, 644, 664–666, 668, 672, 794, 808 Business school(s), 207, 208, 213, 214, 295, 296, 298, 303, 531 Butler, Judith, 875 Byrne, Caitlin, 365, 509–527 C Cairns, George, 362, 369–385 Cancer, 335, 340–345, 348 biology, 340, 349 research, 340, 345 Capitalism, 531, 751, 954 Care-based approaches, 434, 437 Care tradition, 437 Carton, Guillaume, 33, 159–179 Caspersz, Donella, 1045–1057 Casuistry, 917, 930–935 Cell behavior, 341, 342 Chauvin, Derek, 644 Chen, Michelle, 363, 413–428 China, 422, 424 Chinese philosophy, 838–839, 846, 852, 855 Civic humanism, 224, 225 Civic sacrifice, 653, 655 Civil society, 624–637 Cixous, Hélène, 871 Cognition, 83 forms, 651 psychology, 20 Collective identity, 829, 832 Collective leadership, 513 Collective responsibility, 912–919 Collective voice, 512 Common decency, 780 Communication, 534, 966 Communicative rationality, 24 Community, 745, 950 Compassion, 871, 877, 879 Complexity, 335, 347 disorganized, 339

Index intrinsic, 335, 341 organized, 339 and self-organization processes, 340 Comprehensibility, 3 Computer-based simulations, 151 Conrad, Jordan, 309–329 Confucianism, 671, 841–845 Confucian principles, 9 Consequentialism, 434, 453 Constructivism, 30, 81, 83–86, 885 Contradictions, 237, 248, 253–256 Control theory, 351 Cooperative management, 999 Cornelissen, Joep, 32, 139–155 Corporate racial justice, 645 Corporate Social Performance (CSP), 899, 903, 907 Corporate social responsibility (CSR), 350, 557, 558, 624, 898–901, 903 Costas, Jana, 30, 79–94 Counterfactual(s), 140, 142, 146–149, 153, 154 COVID-19, 40, 42–45, 47, 213, 554, 1075 Critical art, 449 Critical management studies, 1029, 1030, 1040 Critical organizational theory, 954 Critical performativity, 132–134 Critical realism, 58 Critical scenario method (CSM), 379, 382 Critical theory, 9, 625 definition, 732 management, 733–735, 739–741 moral reason, 739 reason and moral philosophy, 735–738 Critobulus, 566 Culture, 512 innovations, 657 mapping, 512 sectors, 511 Cunningham, Tom, 364, 461–475 Cybernetic(s), 340 organism, 22 D Dahl, Peter, 533 Daoism, 671, 852–859 Debord, Guy, 539 Decent management issues, 781 and moral agency, 778–779 Decency and management, 779–783 at work, 783–787

Index Decision-making, risk of, 276 Deduction, 6, 242–244 Dejours, Christophe, 997, 998 Delalieux, Guillaume, 623–638 De-naturalization, 123 Denkungsart, 761, 770 Deranty, Jean-Philippe, 981–1000 Descriptive psychology, 1041 Designed order, 586 Designerly thinking, 376, 384 Design-led approach, 377 Design science, 56, 70 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 628 Dewey, John, 532, 884–887, 889, 890, 893–895 Dialectical synthetic method, 225 Dignity, 784 discourse, 648–650 human, 778, 785 and racial invisibility, 648–650 and racial justice, 644, 647 and respect, 785, 786 and slavery, 645 threshold, 1062, 1063, 1065, 1066, 1068, 1069, 1071, 1072 Dignity-in-sacrifice, 653–655 Discourse analysis, 130, 132 Discriminating power, 213–214 Discrimination, 552, 558, 653 Disinterested interest, 440, 441 Disorganized complexity, 339 Disruption, 944, 948, 949, 953 Dissensus of sensibility, 451–456 Distributive justice, 615 Diversity, 822, 831–832 Division of labor, 586–596 Donaldson, Thomas, 677–689 Double hermeneutics, 32 Drucker, Peter, 745 Dubbink, Wim, 757–774 E Eabrasu, Marian, 551–560 Education business, 538 management, 531, 532 microcosm, 532 Einstein, Albert, 207 Ekphrasis, 531 Elasticity, 553–555 Ellison, Ralph, 650, 656 Embodiment, 435, 437 Emmanuel, Myrtle, 364, 447–458

1081 Empathy, 437, 439 Empirical realism, 57 Empiricism, 23 Empowerment, 587 Engaged scholarship, 33 Enlarged mentality, 1063, 1064, 1068–1070, 1072 Enlightenment, 224–226, 232, 627, 715, 717 Enslavement, 653 Enslaver, 649 Entanglement, 106, 113, 115, 117 Entrepreneurship, 359, 586 Entwinement, 111, 113, 114, 116 Environmental degradation, 230 Epistemic methods, 685 Epistemological level, 343 Epistemological realism, 60 Epistemology(ies), 2, 5, 58, 81, 123–125, 222, 681 of emancipation, 140 of imagination, 6, 27, 31–32 of interpretation, 6, 27, 29–31 of intervention, 6, 27, 32–34 of representation, 6, 27–29, 140 Essentialism, 318 Esteem, 1039 Ethics, 838, 845, 854, 858 decision making, 7 ethics of care, 867 habits, 435 meta-ethics, 9, 10, 664, 665, 913, 914, 922, 923, 934 perception, 440 pluralism, 752 relativism, 752 responsibility, 936 theory, 744 Ethical engagement, 432, 434, 435, 437–439 Ethnomethodology, 30 Ettinger, Bracha, 877 Eudaimonia, 904, 1031–1033, 1035 Evidence-based management (EBM), 28, 29, 33, 40, 41, 43–51, 190 Existential philosophical questioning, 949 Experimentation, 517, 518, 520, 523, 524 F Facebook, 26 False and negative positives, 208 False positive, 310, 311, 314, 315, 317, 325, 329 Falsifiability criterion, 681

1082 Falsificationism, 143 Feminist ethics, 867 affect, 867 of care, 866 cohabitation, 865 compassion, 871 conception of care, 867 developments in, 864, 869 different strands of, 869 interconnectedness, 865 issues, 864 in management, 869–870 precariousness, 874 relationality, 865 Fertility criterion, 34 Fictional inquiry, 32, 140, 141, 143, 145, 152–154 counterfactual reasoning, 146–149 figurative imagination, 145–146 ideal types, 144 simulation, 151–152 thought experiments, 149–151 Figurative imagination, 145–146 Florentine Renaissance, 224 Floyd, George, 645 Focal practices, 1022–1024 Forgiveness, 616 Formal modeling, 151, 152 Fotaki, Marianna, 863–880 Foucault, Michel, 1004, 1009, 1046, 1051 Frese, Michael, 28, 39–51 Futility, 450 G Gap spotting, 945 Gare, Arran, 214, 219–232, 693–710, 793–806 Gendlin, Eugene, 949 Genealogical dimension, 342 Gestalt, 495 Gestalt principles, 466 Gherardi, Silvia, 30, 99–117 Global warming, 230, 231 Glennon, Billy, 1003–1024 Goals, Repertoires, Evaluations, Acts, Outcomes, and Society (GREAOS), 673, 915, 916, 918, 926–930, 932–935, 938 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 536 Good manager, in Kant’s view, 758 Google, 26 Gond, Jean-Pascal, 33, 159–179 Grand societal challenges, 29, 552, 558 Grossmann-Hensel, Benjamin, 33, 183–199

Index Group identity, 829 Guillet de Monthoux, Pierre, 365, 529–545 Gustafson, Andrew, 743–754 Guy Debord, 539 H Habermas, Jürgen, 23, 25, 627, 628, 686, 687 Habersang, Stefanie, 29, 55–74 Habits, 435 Habitus, 800, 801, 803 Hamington, Maurice, 436, 437 Hancocks, Matthew, 1003–1024 Harman, Graham, 539 Harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA), 311, 322 Harper, Paul, 557, 643–658 Harvey’s hypothesis, 274 Hayek, Friedrich, 274 Hegel, G.W.F., 697, 982 analysis of modern society, 994 dispositions, 995 ontology of modern society, 987 philosophy of, 990 social and political theory/philosophy, 982, 987, 997 spheres of social freedom, 993 theory of subjective spirit, 991 Heidegger, Martin, 10, 944, 948–952, 1004–1006, 1008–1022 Hennig, Alicia, 837–847, 851–859 Hermeneutic(s), 30, 89 circle, 952 turn, 30 Historical slavery, 647 Hobbes, Thomas, 696, 705 Homo economicus, 803, 804 Honneth, Axel, 650, 1037–1039 Human-centered design (HCD), 377 Human flourishing, 814, 817, 818 Humanist approaches, 100 Human resource management (HRM), 955, 1030, 1040 Hume, David, 978 Huston, James, 648 Hypothesis, 266 fertile, 266 posterior probability, 266 prior probability, 269 I Idealism, 29 Ideal types, 144

Index Identity, 515, 608, 609, 617 Imitation, 532, 536, 537 Immigration, 552 Impact, 516 Impartial spectator, 714, 716–719 Imperialism, 224 Impression management, 454 Inclusion, 831 Inconsistencies and contradictions, 253–256 Individualism-holism debate, 4 Induction, 209–211, 242–244 Industrial capitalism, 1035 Inequalities, 552 Infinite observations, 209 Ingroup-outgroup effects, 830 Innovation ethics, 898–902, 904–906 Institutionalist economics, 702, 703, 707 Institutionalization, 337 Institutional theory of art, 392 Instrumental rationality, 404, 737, 739, 740 Integrated dynamics, 342–344 Integrity, 604, 606, 607, 609–619 Interpretive inquiry, 30, 81, 86–91 Intervention, 532, 537 Intuitionism, 24 Invectives, 532, 533 Invisible hand, 714, 725–726 Irigaray, Luce, 871 Irony, 532, 534, 535 J Jacquinot, Philippe, 556, 603–620 Jarvis, Walter, 1061–1075 Javacheff, Christo, 540 Job enrichment, 825 Johnson, Steve, 947 Joint-stock companies, 276 Justice, 604, 615–616 K Kant, I., 9, 10, 225, 440–442, 536, 732, 737, 738, 740, 758, 770, 783–787, 1062–1064, 1066, 1070 Kärreman, Dan, 31, 121–134 Kepler, Johannes, 683, 684 Knowledge, 575 accumulation, 20 capacity, 20–22 concept in epistemology, 25 contemporary theory, 22 contradiction, 22

1083 empiricists, 25 evaluation and justification, 20 guided learning process, 25 hermeneutic and constructionist, 25 incremental improvements, 26 intellectual stimulation, 26 justification, 20 as justified true belief, 19 optimistic answer, 22 paramount criterion, 26 social structures, 21 sources, 23–25 usefulness, 26 values, 25 Kristeva, Julia, 872 Kuhn, Thomas, 945, 948 Küpers, Wendelin, 365, 477–488, 491–505 L Labor, 716, 723 wage, 724 vs. work, 1034–1037 Ladkin, Donna, 363, 431–445 Language, 129–131 functions of, 965 games, 184 unpublished analysis of, 977 Large samples hypotheses, 209 induction (see Induction) probabilistic explanations, 209 retroduction, 211–213 theoretical concepts, 210 Lars Strannegård, 542 Leadership, 344, 424–426, 510 aesthetic, 478, 488, 497–500, 502 art and aesthetics to, 492 and arts, 511 capacity, 512 capacity building, 526 design, 503 development, 487 dimensions of, 496 eco-aesthetic, 485 experience, 512 organizational and, 502 political, 522–523 practices of, 498 as professional artistry, 487 social, 501, 524 structural, 523–524 symbolic, 524–525

1084 Leadership (cont.) transformative practices of, 488, 496, 498 Legitimacy, 558, 559 Lescarbault, Edmond Modeste, 208 Leung, Elly, 1045–1057 Le Verrier, Jean Joseph, 208 Lewis, David, 147 Linguistic turn, 84 Local-global dynamics, 348, 350 Locke, John, 4, 8, 23, 267, 337, 396, 609, 627, 628, 688, 802, 803, 824 Logic, 237–241 Logical positivists, 962 Logics of inquiry induction and deduction, 242–244 interpretive view of abduction, 246–249 and ontological assumptions, 250–251 retroduction and abduction, 244–246 in social sciences, 245–246 Loop learning, 451 Luhmann, Niklas, 185, 191, 193, 195, 196 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 541 M MacIntyre, Alasdair, 822 Macroeconomics, 350 Malabou, Catherine, 540 Management, 2, 335–340, 344, 345, 350, 351, 392–395, 400, 404, 462–467, 473, 474, 858–859, 919, 925, 953, 962, 972 ethics, 666 studies, 80, 81, 141, 145, 151, 154, 155 theory, 555, 647 Management practice and education, 206 scientists’ capability, 207 theory-less, 207–209, 214 theory-less management, 207 Management research action research, 189 design science, 190 evidence-based management, 190 fragmentation of, 194 impact on practical relevance, 191–195 implications, 195 inconsistencies and contradictions, 253–255 institutional view, 189 mode 2 research, 189 popularization view, 189 practicalities, influence of, 241 research paradigm, 240 research problem, 238–239

Index research questions, 239–240 scheme, 238 Managerialism, 739, 741 Managerial work, 101, 104 Mapping, 31 Margalit, Avishai, 650, 784 Market strategy, 555 Marking space, 451 Marshall, Alfred, 276 Martela, Frank, 883–895 Marx, Karl, 4, 8, 251, 533, 588, 624, 625, 628–630, 632, 637, 697, 722, 724, 737, 1037, 1038 Material turn, 167 Meaningful work, 822, 825–827 Mechanistic reductionist approach, 346 Mensmann, Mona, 28, 39–51 Mental disorder, 310 Merleau Ponty, Maurice, 436 Meta-ethics, 9, 10, 664, 665, 913, 914, 922, 923, 934 Metaphor, 214, 451–454, 457 Metaphysics, 225, 231, 649 Methodological realism, 62 #MeToo, 554 Microenvironmental factors, 341, 342 Midgley, Mary, 437 Mir, Alexandra, 534 Moderation, 843–844 Modernity, 797–798 Mom Test, 213 Moral action, 436 Moral agency, 787–789 Moral character, 758, 770 Kant, 770 MPE’s, 770 Moral development, 894 Moral growth, 887–893 Moral habits, 888, 889 Moral philosophy, 8, 9, 678 active moral agency, 670 analyses, 667 applied ethics, 665 basic feelings, 665 business ethics, 665, 672 business management, 670 communities, 665 debates, 669 definition, 664 ethical challenges, 672 ethical dimensions of management, 665, 667 ethical implications, 664

Index ethics of character development, 671 foundational inquiries, 668 human relationships, 669 human task, 668 innovation processes, 672 interpretations, 667 inter-relationships, 670 management activity, 664 management research, 664 management scholarship, 666, 667 meta-ethics, 665 methodology, 667 neoliberal political economy, 669 normative ethics, 665 organizations, 672 social institutions, 668 social responsibilities of business, 669 vulnerability strategy, 672 Moral virtues, 1032, 1034 Morgan, Gareth, 451–455 Motivation, 1029–1031 Multi-frame leadership, 513, 522–525 Multi-unity, 335, 349 Music, 417–421, 426 Musk, Elon, 206 N Narrative, 87 environment, 406 inquiry, 511, 513–515 identity, 822–825 and meaningful work, 825–827 and social identity, 829–832 themes, 515–520 Naturalistic fallacy, 680 Natural persons (NPs), 913, 914, 916, 917, 931 Neesham, Cristina, 1–11, 214, 219–232, 663–673, 793–806 Neo-classical organizational theories, 463 Neoliberalism, 826 Network analysis, 347 Newtonian physics, 226 Nicomachean Ethics, 370, 812, 814, 817 Niedenführ, Matthias, 837–847, 851–859 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1005, 1009, 1011–1015 Nikolova, Natalia, 6, 10, 29, 55–74, 955, 1061–1075 Nodal office, 407 Nominalism, 966, 967, 969 Non-performativity, 123 Nonsensical propositions, 975 Normative ethics, 664, 665

1085 O Ontological realism, 60 Ontology, 221, 250, 251, 343, 362 Open systems, 347 Organization, 335–345, 347, 348, 350, 351, 390, 393, 399, 401, 404, 405 discourse, 231 economics, 275 misconduct, 762–765 research, 221 storytelling, 87 structures, 288, 294, 300–303, 305 studies, 221, 228–229, 983, 986 Organizational theory, 462, 473, 945–947 Organizational aesthetics, 448, 462 approaches, 464 development of, 464 implications for, 473 lack of authority and deployment of, 465 Organizational ethical responsibility, 919–937 Organized complexity, 339 Orientational pluralism, 22 P Paradigm, 237, 238, 240, 241, 251–252 fragmentation, 336–338 Participatory design, 377 Passmore, John, 684 Patient-oriented evidence that matters (POEMS), 46 Pedagogy, 361, 366 Pellissier-Tanon, Arnaud, 585–598 Perceptual blindness, 950 Perez, Marybel, 215, 265–282, 287–305 Performance art, 535 Performativity approaches to, 171 as a social mechanism, 160 conceptual roots of, 161–162 mechanism-focused, 170 as a mindset, 160, 165–174 mode of, 175 scholars, 168 self-constitution, 175 social mechanisms of, 165–174 of theory, 160, 162 Permeability, 553–555 Personality, 953 Personal purpose, 948 Personhood, 363 Person’s dignity, 651 Person’s intelligibility, 651

1086 Phenomenalism, 968 Phenomenology of invisibility, 650 Philosophical aesthetics, 391 Philosophical analysis, 220 Philosophical anthropology, 694–710 Philosophical inquiry, 221–223 Philosophical method/methodology, 221, 991 Philosophical processes, 944–948 Philosophical understanding, 557–559 Philosophy of biology, 311 Philosophy of management, 311, 328, 329 Philosophy of psychiatry, 311, 328 Philosophy of science, 6, 7, 140 Phronesis, 370, 379, 385, 556, 587, 610, 812, 905 Plato, 441, 467, 473 Pleonexia, 801 Poiesis, 1032–1034 Political community, 1033 Political leadership, 522–523 Political obligation, 558, 559 Political sphere, 552–556 Popper, Karl, 23, 267, 966 Positivism, 23, 28 Positivistic methodologies, 1030 Positivistic psychology, 1041 Posthumanism, 22 Posthumanist practice epistemology, 100, 114–117 Postmodernism, 30 Post-structuralism, 30 Poverty, 552, 558 Power, 128–129 Power-knowledge, 1046, 1049, 1050, 1052, 1053, 1055, 1057 Practical knowledge, 184 Practical relevance forms of, 192 impact of management research, 191–195 input-output model, 188 of management research, 184 Practical wisdom, 587 Practice epistemology, 101–104, 111–116 Practice turn, 168 Pragmatism, 24, 532, 884, 886–888, 895 definition, 885 epistemological position of, 886 managerial ethics, moral growth (see Moral growth) Prâxis, 479, 1032, 1033 Precariousness, 878, 880 Presencing, 536 Priest, Jan, 235–262

Index Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME), 944, 955, 1046–1048, 1050, 1052, 1055–1056 Problematization, 26 Processual turn, 167 Production flow planning, 404 Productive activity, 1034, 1037 Proto-economic theory, 555 Chris Provis, 821–833 Prudence, 556, 587, 593 Psychoanalysis, 864–866, 870, 875 Psycho-dynamic approach, 1039 Psychological contracts, 1030 Psychoneural identity, 20–21 Public admiration, 555 Publish-or-perish, 295, 296, 305 Purposiveness, 440, 441 Q Quasi-person model (QPM), 913, 917, 919, 920, 927, 930, 935 Quinian analytical philosophy, 221 R Race, 647 Race-based inquiry, 644 Racial invisibility active power, 651 affirmational gestures, 651 cognitive and figural invisibility, 652 enslaved person, 652 humiliation, 652 phenomenology, 650 practical reason, 652 social disrespect, 651 Racial justice, 644, 645, 650, 657, 658 Racism, 647 anti-Black sentiments, 648 business ethics, 649 cultural and social impacts, 649 cultural significance, 650 economic value, 648 financial innovations, 648 positive effect, 649 slavery, 649 Radical difference, 1006–1010, 1012, 1017–1019, 1021–1022 Radical individualism, 346 Rancière, Jacques, 448, 449, 453, 455 Rationalism, 23 Rational reflection, 2

Index Rawls, John, 434 Realism, 28, 56 anthropocentrism, 57 critical, 57–59 design science, 70, 71 empirical, 57 engaged scholarship, 71, 72 epistemological, 60, 61 grand societal challenges, 72 nature of management and organizations, 65–67 new methodological developments, 73 new theorizing, 73 ontological, 60 scientific, 57, 59, 60, 62, 63 semantic, 62 study of management and organizations, 67–70 technology, 70 Realist Inquiry, 29 Reason, 732, 735–741 Reasoning, 965 Reciprocity, 843 Recognition, 1038, 1039 Recognition-oriented organization, 557 Re-contextualization of truth, 359 Re-description, 951 Reductionism, 232, 338, 346 Reductionist approaches, 342 Reflection, 944, 956 Reflexive, 948, 952, 956 equilibrium, 685 methodology, 32 and reflexive practice, 10 thinking, 435 Reflective judgment, 1063, 1065–1073 Reflective praxis, 41 Reflexivity, 123, 126–127 Regulative ideals, 686 Reihlen, Markus, 1–11, 17–34, 41, 55–74, 134 Relational epistemology, 335, 346, 348, 351 Relationality concept, 874, 876 dimension of, 875 ethical conception of, 870 feminist politics, 865 feminist post-structuralist perspective, 870 management and organizations, 878–880 notion of ethics, 865 for organizations, 874 Renaissance, 224 Research paradigms, 251–252

1087 Research questions, 238, 239, 241, 249–251, 253, 255, 258, 259 Resonance, 196, 197 Respect, 779, 780, 784–786 Responsible Innovation (RI), 899, 902–904 Responsiveness, 486 Rest’s model, 436 Retroduction, 6, 211–214, 244–246, 266–268, 270–276, 290 Rhetoric, 87, 534 Rights, 715 basic, 723 basic natural, 721 personal, 723 property ownership, 727 Ritual propriety, 415, 416, 423, 424 Roman republicanism, 224 Rorty, Richard, 951 Rosenthal, Caitlin, 646 Rousseau, Denise, 28, 39–51 S Sacrifice, 645 civic, 653 See also Dignity-in-sacrifice Scenario analysis, 378–380 Scharmer, Claus Otto, 536 Schiller, Friedrich, 536 Schoeneborn, Dennis, 1–11, 17–34, 139–155 Scientific communication, 186–187 Scientific discoveries, 266, 268, 270, 273, 288–290, 292–294, 297–305 Scientific management, 337 Scientific materialism, 225 Scientific misconduct, 297–299, 302, 303 Scientific realism, 59 epistemological, 61 methodological, 63 ontological, 60 semantic, 62 Scientific research, 186 Scientific revolution, 224 Segal, Steven, 943–956 Seidl, David, 33, 183–199 Self-care, 1053, 1055, 1056 Self-cultivation, 844 Self-development, 456, 1038 Self-interest, 654, 715 sociality and, 715–716 Self-organized, 21 Self-reflexivity, 22 Self-transcendence, 655

1088 Semantic realism, 62 Sense perception, 222 Sensory experience harmony through music, 363 human, 362 management, 357 Serving society, 555 Simulation, 151–152, 534 Situated knowledge, 103 Slave economy, 648 Slavery, 645 conditions, 647 historical, 646 institutional, 645 investment, 649 Slave Trade, 655 Small Data, 256–260 Smith, Adam, 714–716, 718, 721, 722 Social change, 359 Social community, 21 Social contract, 654 Social development, 1038 Social dynamics, 350 Social epistemology, 21 Social group identity, 829 Social identity, 822 Social influence, 426 Social innovation, 376, 378, 380 Social interaction, 449 Social invisibility, 653 Social issues, 557 Social leadership, 524 Social license to operate, 557 Socially invisible, 651 Social movements, 644, 646 Social philosophy, 610–612, 614 Social-political sphere, 8 Social reality, 6 Social respect, 651 Social roles, 604, 609–610 Social sciences, 21, 29, 32, 952 Social scientists, 24 Social segregation, 452 Social sphere collective decisions, 553 management practice, 557 scientific controversies, 554 Social struggle metaphor, 656 Social theory, 454 Social validation, 651 Sociology of science, 184, 198, 199 Sociology of sociology, 19 Sociomateriality, 105–106 Socrates, 917, 924

Index Space, 390 aesthetics of, 391 as hermeneutic framework, 397 research on office, 402 sociology of, 397 Spatialization of life, 398 Spatial mobility, 408 Spatial planning, 403–404 Speculative philosophy, 226–230 Spillane, Robert, 952, 959–979 Spinosa, Charles, 1003–1024 Spontaneous order, 586 Stakeholders, 555 Standardization, 7 State of nature, 654 Steiner, Rudolf, 536 Stereotype effects, 830 Strannegård, Lars, 542 Strati, Antonio, 542 Symbolic interactionism, 30, 799, 801 Symbolic leadership, 524–525 Synthetic data, 151 Synthetic propositions, 975 Systemic approach, 336, 338, 339, 341–343, 345–351 Systemism, 60 Systems theory, 347 T Tautologies, 974 Taylor, Charles, 951 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 744 Taylorism, 402 Techne, 1032 Technical skills, 1033 Technostructure, 301 Teleocracy, 586 Theory of action, 798 Theory of performativity, 33 Theory of relativity, 223 Theory of social recognition, 647 Thermodynamics, 226 Thick description, 513 Thought experiments, 149–151, 687, 688 Transaction cost economics (TCE), 276 Transaction costs, 268, 273, 279, 280 Transferability, 193, 197 Transformation, 1005–1007, 1017, 1018 Triangular Trade, 648 Trust, 604–606, 619 Tsahuridu, Eva, 777–790 Tweedie, Dale, 1027–1041 Tyranny of experts, 554

Index U Uncertainty principle, 223 Unitarist approach, 1030 Unitary movement, 223 Utilitarianism, 9, 434, 932 business managers, 745 calculus, 747–748 capitalism, 751 community, 745 competition, 751 defined, 744 ethical basis, 750 ethical pluralism, 752 ethical relativism, 752 ethical theory, 746–754 greatest happiness, 746, 754 individual liberty, 750 justice and fairness, 747, 750 long-term benefit, 746 macro level, 748 management approach, 748–749 micro-level, 748 modern management theory, 744 rights of minorities, 750 shareholder theory, 753 successful management, 745 teamwork attitude, 750 value pluralism, 753 V Valid reasoning, 961 Value pluralism, 753 Vandekerckhove, Wim, 357–366, 447–458 Van Liedekerke, Luc, 757–774 Verifiability principle of meaning, 23 Verstehen, 89 Vickery, Jonathan, 389–409 Violence, 1028 Virtual organization, 463 Virtue(s), 575, 812, 814–818 approaches, 434 character-based, 813, 816 moral agent, 815 of practical wisdom, 612, 613

1089 Virtue ethics, 707–710, 794–795, 810, 822, 823, 825, 904–905 Aristotelian, 812–815, 817–818 Voice, 516 VUCA, 543 W Wakefield, Jerome, 309–329 Weakness of will, 817 Weber, Max, 144, 146, 247, 251, 364, 404, 462, 737, 840 Werhane, Patricia, 713–728 Wesensschau, 24 West, Andrew, 809–819 White equality, 649 Whole self-engagement, 443 William, Eric, 645 Williamson, Oliver, 215, 268, 277 Wisdom, 443, 500, 694, 701, 708, 709 Work benefits, 1034 centrality of, 1034 influential philosophical perspectives, 1028, 1029 labor, 1035, 1036 multi-faceted interpretation, 1033 norms and narratives, 1028 professional ethics codes, 1028 satisfaction, 1036, 1037 Workers’ motivation, 1029 critical management, 1040 mainstream HRM, 1039 philosophical perspectives, 1040 Work-life balance, 827–829 Workplace, 390, 393, 395 design, 7 World Health Organization (WHO), 554 Wray-Bliss, Edward, 731–741 X Xenophon, 567–582 Y Yin-yang logic, 854, 856, 859