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The Linguistic Turn, Social Construction and the Impartial Spectator: why Do these Ideas Matter to Managerial Thinking?

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Abstract

One’s philosophical points of view, which form the bases for assumptions that we bring to management theory and practice matter, and matter deeply, to management thinking and corporate behavior. In this paper I outline three related threads of philosophical conversations and explain how they are important in management theory and practice: the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, deriving from the later writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a social constructionist perspective: a set of theories at least implicitly derived from the linguistic turn in philosophy, and the notion of the impartial spectator. I then use these three theories to analyze the idea of the corporation, corporate cultures and corporate mission statements, stakeholder theories and their differences, and the limitations of the popular notion of “corporate social responsibility.” I conclude that how one frames these management ideas makes a difference, a difference in theory and in practice.

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Notes

  1. Notice that we use that word “language” in various ways including references to describe animal communication, sign language, baby talk, computer “languages,” in the expression, “now you are speaking my language” and in various other contexts. Here we are limiting it to human symbolic linguistic communication.

  2. Many readers will be reminded of Immanuel Kant, who argued, in brief, that universally we all frame our experiences through a set of categories. This view derives from Kant, but the argument is that these frames are socially learned, not immutable or fixed, and it is possible, indeed likely probable, that in different cultures this framing process is quite different.

  3. Note that Adam Smith’s idea of an impartial spectator, one of the original developers of this idea, is not to be equated with a “view from nowhere.” Smith never claimed that human beings could be perfectly impartial nor completely divorced from any social context. Rather, the impartial spectator is an explanatory mechanism to clarify how we can study ourselves and our activities and even develop a judgmental but often flawed conscience “watchdog” of ourselves. (Smith 1767;1976)

  4. French, who started this debate with his claim that corporations are moral persons, later modifies his view to speak in terms of corporate moral agency. (e.g., French 2017)

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  1. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    Patricia Werhane

  2. DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA

    Patricia Werhane

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Correspondence to Patricia Werhane.

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I have no conflict of interest in publishing this paper.

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My deepest gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers who found my many typos and had some terrific ideas for expanding and clarifying my arguments. The shortcomings of the paper are my own.

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Werhane, P. The Linguistic Turn, Social Construction and the Impartial Spectator: why Do these Ideas Matter to Managerial Thinking?. Philosophy of Management 17, 265–278 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-018-0086-1

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