Editorial: Questioning Assumptions (original) (raw)
2019, Philosophy of Management
One of the methods for doing philosophy of management is the philosophical questioning of concepts used by management scholars. What are the assumptions of the common notions through which we imagine and understand management today? Doing such questioning is not just fun (yes there is something geekish about us) but also progressive, innovative and political. If we alter those assumptions, what management becomes thinkable and possible? The articles in this issue of Philosophy of Management are examples of such endeavour. In 'Towards a Political Philosophy of Management: Performativity & Visibility in Management Practices', de Vaujany et al. (2019) question the assumptions of both immanent and transcendental understandings of organization. Is there an underlying realist structure to management or is it a speech-act? The authors use the Merleau-Pontian concepts of visibility and continuity to articulate a notion of performativity that goes beyond the immanence/transcendence dualism. They then reflect on the implications of performance and visibility for management scholarship. Everyday activity both performs and makes visible the world, and hence the organization. Thus, it is possible for us to ask (and action) the following: 'What is the world of work and management we wish to constitute and make visible through our empirical and conceptual descriptions and what are the tools we use for this task?' (de Vaujany et al. 2019). In 'Regaining the Soul Lost', Petrosyan (2019) questions the limits of depersonalization in management scholarship. On the one hand there are those who argue that the organization has to be depersonalized as much as possible. Maximization of effectiveness and efficiency requires the reduction of workers to their pure functionality. On the other hand, there are those who reject the alienated work practices and call for humaneness at and in work. Petrosyan (2019) argues the falsity of each position. Not in a prescriptive (and perhaps naive) attempt to create a middle ground, but rather in a negative analysis: those who strife for humaneness neglect the necessary reduction implied by any division of labour; those who want full depersonalization overlook the impossibility of it. The assumption of depersonalization implies the reduction of management to a technicality. Yet organization resists such a reduction. Management then is the coping with that residue. Hence, management appears
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