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Organizational Epistemology pp 197–219Cite as

Summary: A New Vocabulary for a Normative Theory of Organizational Knowledge

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Part of the book series: Contributions to Management Science ((MANAGEMENT SC.))

Abstract

Our inquiry began with the attempt to philosophically describe the deeper source of organizations. We claimed that to organize is a mode to cope with the radical openness of human existence. As several philosophical positions have pointed out, humans do not simply deal with a pre-given world of readymade, external objects. In contrary, human perception initially faces a chaotic environment of “manifoldness”. What knowing subjects face is an unordered flux of chaos which has to be arranged, structured, organized, and made sense of. It is the internal system of human understanding, the concepts and processes used which enable us to construct distinctions and to distinguish “things” in the world. This general position was located at early thinkers like Immanuel Kant, as well as at philosophical anthropology, existentialism, or constructivism (Sect. 1.3). We summarized that the “conditio humana”, i.e. the radical openness of human existence, makes is necessary to make distinctions and to create meaning. A radical openness which forces us to become active designers of ourselves, our world, and our actions. As “thrown beings” (Heidegger 1927/1962) we are obliged to participate in the permanent and never-ending “domestication of being” (Sloterdijk, 2001). How our world and our actions look like is heavily dependent on how we deal with that openness we encounter, i.e. which concepts we use—and how we use them—to “synthesize” the given “manifoldness” (Kant, 1781/2003).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Other proponents of this paradigm have pointed out the rational structuration of organizations (Fayol, 1949) and the whole idea of rationalistic management as rational control over organizational activities (e.g. Gulick & Urwick, 1969).

  2. 2.

    We also mentioned early critical objections considering “uncertainty” (Knight, 2006) and “bounded rationality” (Simon, 1991, 1997).

  3. 3.

    But also e.g. (Boland & Tenkasi, 1993; Czarniawska, 1997; Geiger, 2006; Orr, 1996; Schreyögg & Geiger, 2005)

  4. 4.

    A term taken from epistemology and philosophy of science (Duhem, 1954; Longino, 2002) and which played an important role for the development of an “organizational epistemology” in Part III of this inquiry.

  5. 5.

    Some authors explain this by referring to the “equivocality of action”, i.e. that we have to focus on the processual and controversial character of knowledge because organizing is constituted by action, and action is per se equivocal and in permanent flux (Cooper, 1998; Patriotta, 2003, p. 200ff.). But our attempt showed that equivocality of knowledge is rooted deeper, i.e. in the concept of knowledge itself (Part II); not only “action-knowledge” but knowledge in general remains in a permanent tension (or “gap”) between abstract and concrete, between theory and data, between generalizations and particularities, between organizational distinctions and organizational practice.

  6. 6.

    (Nonaka, Toyama, & Hirata, 2008, p. 138ff.)

  7. 7.

    See our first research question and hypothesis defined in Sect. 5.4.

  8. 8.

    (Popper, 1959)

  9. 9.

    Notice, that this step ultimately connects our general description of organizations, as “structured towards goals” (from Chap. 1) with the whole dynamics of our organizational epistemology.

  10. 10.

    This means that our framework also is nothing else than a hypothesis, a piece of knowledge which stands against a wide practice of possible application. Thus, all discussed normative criteria of knowledge also are valid for this inquiry. This makes the talk about knowledge (and epistemology) to a circular discussion, i.e. where the main subject (knowledge) always possibly re-enters the discussion on a meta-level: to claim something about knowledge itself is knowledge, hence a claim about itself.

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  1. University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Vienna, Austria

    Kasra Seirafi

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Seirafi, K. (2013). Summary: A New Vocabulary for a Normative Theory of Organizational Knowledge. In: Organizational Epistemology. Contributions to Management Science. Physica, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34194-6_11

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