(EBOOK)Haridimos tsoukas, robert chia philosophy organization theory

PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATION THEORY RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS Series Editor: Michael Lounsbury Recent Volumes: Volume 15: Volume 16: Deviance in and of Organizations Networks in and around Organizations Volume 17: Organizational Politics Volume 18: Volume 19: Social Capital of Organizations Social Structure and Organizations Revisited Volume 20: The Governance of Relations in Markets and Organizations Postmodernism and Management: Pros, Cons and the Alternative Volume 21: Volume 22: Volume 23: Legitimacy Processes in Organizations Transformation in Cultural Industries Volume 24: Volume 25: Professional Service Firms The Sociology of Entrepreneurship Volume 26: Studying Difference between Organizations: Comparative Approaches to Organizational Research Volume 27: Volume 28: Institutions and Ideology Stanford’s Organization Theory Renaissance, 1970–2000 Volume 29: Technology and Organization: Essays in Honour of Joan Woodward Volume 30A: Markets on Trial: The Economic Sociology of the U.S Financial Crisis: Part A Volume 30B: Markets on Trial: The Economic Sociology of the U.S Financial Crisis: Part B Volume 31: Categories in Markets: Origins and Evolution RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS VOLUME 32 PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATION THEORY EDITED BY HARIDIMOS TSOUKAS University of Cyprus, Cyprus & Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK ROBERT CHIA University of Strathclyde Business School, Glasgow, UK United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China Emerald Group Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2011 Copyright r 2011 Emerald Group Publishing Limited Reprints and permission service Contact: booksandseries@emeraldinsight.com No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the text, illustrations or advertisements The opinions expressed in these chapters are not necessarily those of the Editor or the publisher British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-85724-595-3 ISSN: 0733-558X (Series) Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Howard House, Environmental Management System has been certified by ISOQAR to ISO 14001:2004 standards Awarded in recognition of Emerald’s production department’s adherence to quality systems and processes when preparing scholarly journals for print CONTENTS LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS vii ADVISORY BOARD ix INTRODUCTION: WHY PHILOSOPHY MATTERS TO ORGANIZATION THEORY Haridimos Tsoukas and Robert Chia ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATION THEORY: PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS AND SCIENTIFIC SOLUTIONS Gabriele Lakomski and Colin W Evers 23 PRAGMATISM: A LIVED AND LIVING PHILOSOPHY WHAT CAN IT OFFER TO CONTEMPORARY ORGANIZATION THEORY? Bente Elkjaer and Barbara Simpson 55 MACINTYRE, NEO-ARISTOTELIANISM AND ORGANIZATION THEORY Ron Beadle and Geoff Moore 85 MARXIST PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATION STUDIES: MARXIST CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF SOME IMPORTANT ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS Paul S Adler v 123 vi CONTENTS BEYOND UNIVERSALISM AND RELATIVISM: HABERMAS’S CONTRIBUTION TO DISCOURSE ETHICS AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERCULTURAL ETHICS AND ORGANIZATION THEORY Andreas Georg Scherer and Moritz Patzer HERMENEUTIC PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATIONAL THEORY Frank J Barrett, Edward H Powley and Barnett Pearce 155 181 PHENOMENOLOGY AND ORGANIZATION THEORY Robin Holt and Jo¨rgen Sandberg 215 ORGANIZING DERRIDA ORGANIZING: DECONSTRUCTION AND ORGANIZATION THEORY Andreas Rasche 251 THINKING BECOMING AND EMERGENCE: PROCESS PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATION STUDIES Ajit Nayak and Robert Chia 281 THEORY AS THERAPY: WITTGENSTEINIAN REMINDERS FOR REFLECTIVE THEORIZING IN ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT THEORY John Shotter and Haridimos Tsoukas 311 TRIANGULATING PHILOSOPHIES OF SCIENCE TO UNDERSTAND COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONAL AND MANAGERIAL PROBLEMS John Bechara and Andrew H Van de Ven 343 RICHARD RORTY, WOMEN, AND THE NEW PRAGMATISM Barbara Czarniawska 365 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Paul S Adler Department of Management and Organization, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA Frank J Barrett Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, USA Ron Beadle Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK John Bechara Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA Robert Chia Department of Management, Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK Barbara Czarniawska GRI, School of Business, Economics and Law, The University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden Bente Elkjaer School of Education, University of Aarhus, Copenhagen, Denmark Colin W Evers University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Robin Holt University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK Gabriele Lakomski University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Geoff Moore Durham Business School, Durham University, Durham, UK Ajit Nayak University of Exeter Business School, Exeter, UK vii viii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Moritz Patzer Institute of Organization and Administrative Science (IOU), University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland Barnett Pearce Fielding Graduate University, Santa Barbara, CA, USA Edward H Powley Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, USA Andreas Rasche Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK Jo¨rgen Sandberg University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia Andreas Georg Scherer Institute of Organization and Administrative Science (IOU), University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland John Shotter KCC Foundation, London, UK Barbara Simpson Department of Management, University of Strathclyde Business School, Glasgow, UK Haridimos Tsoukas University of Cyprus, Cyprus; and Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK Andrew H Van de Ven Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA ADVISORY BOARD SERIES EDITOR Michael Lounsbury Alex Hamilton Professor of Business, University of Alberta School of Business, and National Institute for Nanotechnology, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada ADVISORY BOARD Howard E Aldrich University of North Carolina, USA Paul M Hirsch Northwestern University, USA Stephen R Barley Stanford University, USA Renate Meyer Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Austria Nicole Biggart University of California at Davis, USA Elisabeth S Clemens University of Chicago, USA Mark Mizruchi University of Michigan, USA Walter W Powell Stanford University, USA Barbara Czarniawska Go¨teborg University, Sweden Gerald F Davis University of Michigan, USA Hayagreeva Rao Stanford University, USA Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson Uppsala University, Sweden Marie-Laure Djelic ESSEC Business School, France Frank R Dobbin Harvard University, USA W Richard Scott Stanford University, USA Robin Stryker University of Minnesota, USA Royston Greenwood University of Alberta, Canada Mauro Guillen The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, USA Haridimos Tsoukas University of Cyprus, Cyprus and University of Warwick, UK Richard Whitley University of Manchester, UK ix Richard Rorty, Women, and the New Pragmatism 369 Words can be compared only to other words, so instead of wasting time on attempting the impossible – finding words that will mirror reality – philosophers should try to understand how language is acquired and how it is possible that people can communicate with one another The idea that a language can exist that more or less ‘‘corresponds’’ to reality (an ancient obsession, see Eco, 1995) is, according to Rorty, not only superfluous but also harmful As he put it, ironically: y nature has no preferred way of being represented, and thus no interest in a canonical notation (1979, p 300) y objectivity should be seen as conformity to the norms of justification we find about us (1979, p 361) (y) the community as source of epistemic authority (1979, p 188, italics mine, BC) The division between ‘‘objective representations’’ and ‘‘subjective opinions’’ that makes part of the correspondence theory of truth has always been problematic An object, by definition, cannot have opinions; only a subject can A subject can have opinions about herself or another subject, but in such cases they will be objects of her opinions Here Rorty, like the STS scholars after him (see, e.g., Latour, 2005), recoursed to grammar: what is a subject and what is an object depends on their placement in the sentence and on the context of the utterance No recourse to grammar can abolish a common usage, and ‘‘objective representations’’ belong to such common usage in most languages So, asked Rorty, ‘‘What is usually meant by that?’’ In his opinion, an adjective ‘‘objective’’ is ascribed to opinions that raise few protests This is because: y words take their meaning from other words rather than by virtue of their representative character, and (y) vocabularies acquire their privileges from the men who use them rather than from their transparency to the real (1979, p 368, gender not accidental, BC) Words and expressions in common usage – a certain vocabulary – are taken for granted because in most cases they were coined by people with authority or power, and not because they have a direct relationship to reality Ferdinand de Saussure and Michel Foucault were of the same opinion Saussure’s theory of language (1933/1983) claims that words have significance only to the extent they can be related to other words: they refer to, not relate to Foucault (1979) pointed out that people believe in one thing rather than another not because it corresponds to reality, but because it has been formulated by an authority voice 370 BARBARA CZARNIAWSKA Other concepts that Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature criticizes are ‘‘mental processes’’ and the very concept of ‘‘mind,’’ as a mediator between ‘‘things’’ and ‘‘words.’’ Ironically as usual, Rorty said that ‘‘y if the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind’’ (1979, p 239) Indeed, the functioning of the body and its organs, brain included, still remains, for the most part, a mystery Thus the invention of the ‘‘mind,’’ with the result that instead of one thing to explain, there are now two: body and mind Thus, there can be no principal opposition to the use of such terms as ‘‘mind’’ and ‘‘mental processes’’; they can be used by anybody who wishes to use them The pragmatist’s question, however, is: Do they work? In this context, it means: Do they help us to understand anything, or they complicate the complexity of the world even further? What are ‘‘mental processes’’? Rorty called them bits of ghostly stuff, something that is neither language nor matter, but something ‘‘in between.’’ Introducing concepts such as ‘‘mental processes’’ means creating yet another mediator between ‘‘neurons’’ and ‘‘words,’’ ‘‘neural states’’ and ‘‘utterances.’’ Rorty recommended a diligent application of Ockham’s razor: take away ‘‘mental processes’’ as research objects and you are left with neural states and utterances How they relate to each other in turn? They not; they are expressions in two vocabularies used to describe the same phenomenon It is just as well, therefore, not to use them in the same sentence It makes no sense in our linguistic universe to say, ‘‘His two neurons met and because of that he felt agitated.’’ In contrast, the utterance ‘‘I felt pain – I cried – I apologized for it’’ can be convincingly presented as a cause–effect chain The same chain can be described as a series of connected neural states In principle, it should be possible to translate all utterances (and other actions) into series of neural states, but such a project seems relatively impractical It would be possible to show the difference in neural states between the use of different words, between idiosyncratic and common expressions, but it is doubtful what use could one make of such knowledge Rather, it would be yet another case of science replacing complexity with complication (Latour, 2005) It was Rorty’s belief that myriad tables and equations lose in competition with one sentence by a talented writer, who with this sentence makes the reader believe that she understood all of life and the whole world Consequences of such reasoning would be revolutionary for psychology (which, however, seems to go in the direction of neuropsychology), but it is philosophy that was at the center of Rorty’s interest One of his targets in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was an ahistorical, universalizing, and privileged stance ascribed to philosophy For him, philosophy must be Richard Rorty, Women, and the New Pragmatism 371 relevant – for individuals and for societies – and the road toward such a goal cannot lead through the construction of hermetic vocabularies that only trained philosophers can understand If philosophy is an attempt to see how ‘‘things, in the largest sense of the term, hang together, in the largest sense of the term’’ then it will always involve the construction of images which will have characteristic problems and will beget characteristic genres of writing (1979, p 114) For Rorty, philosophy is (or ought to be) a mixture of poetry and rhetoric, intent on creating images and circulating them Upon inspection, such creation and circulation reveal certain regularities, which can be called a genre The adherents to such genre will strive after y a pragmatic theory (view?) of truth and a therapeutic approach to ontology (in which philosophy can straighten out pointless quarrels between common sense and science, but not contribute any arguments of its own for the existence or inexistence of something) (1979, p 175) Philosophy should not be offering ontological claims Whether or not the cat sits on the mat was an empirical question for Rorty, with the answer to be given by the observers Philosophy can neither offer any absolutist ideas about what is the truth or what should be treated as truth; it can only comment upon the way different people create knowledge about the cat and why they often disagree How people acquire knowledge about the world in different lands, at different times, or even in different professions? Karin Knorr Cetina (1999) would have called this a study of epistemic cultures Finally, a therapeutic approach to ontology fits well with the idea that philosophy should offer therapy, not theory In this belief, Rorty agrees with Martha Nussbaum, the Hellenist philosopher, although she is an Aristotelian and he is anti-Aristotelian Nussbaum opted for y [t]he idea of a practical and compassionate philosophy – a philosophy that exists for the sake of human beings, in order to address their deepest needs, confront their most urgent perplexities, and bring them from misery to some greater measure of flourishing y (1994, p 3) And Rorty, in a more down-to-earth idiom, wrote: To see keeping a conversation going as a sufficient aim of philosophy, to see wisdom as consisting in the ability to sustain a conversation, is to see human beings as generators of new descriptions rather than beings one hopes to be able to describe accurately (1979, p 378) 372 BARBARA CZARNIAWSKA Sustaining a conversation is important, because it is the only way to try to avoid wars In a sense, what we were talking about is not vital, as long as we are talking to one another Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was written mainly in order to differentiate pragmatism from the analytical philosophy A more distinct formulation of the pragmatist manifesto can be found in later books PRAGMATIST MANIFESTO Consequences of Pragmatism begins with a provocative summary of the message of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: y a pragmatist theory about truth y says that truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about (1982, p xiii) Such formulations regularly provoked accusations of antirealism or relativism or both Rorty rejected those accusations as misguided Pragmatism, in Rorty’s version, is antiessentialist but not antirealist This means that there is no truth to be found in an object, which does not prevent anybody from creating realistic knowledge about it The value of such knowledge can be tested in practice; a description is ‘‘right’’ (rather than ‘‘correct’’) when it works for the purpose at hand.4 Truth is therefore a question of the beliefs that are useful in practice, and therefore is constantly tested and changed For Rorty, the main difference between nonpragmatist and pragmatist philosophers lies not in their definition of reality: The difference [between non-pragmatist and pragmatist philosophies] is not one between ‘‘correspondence’’ and ‘‘coherence’’ theories of truth – it is the difference between regarding truth, goodness and beauty as eternal objects that we are trying to locate and revel and regarding them as artifacts whose fundamental design we often have to alter (1982, p 92) This can be treated as an admission of social constructivism, but in its original sense, given to it by the movement of Soviet artists and poets (Chicherin and Selvinsky, 1923): words are things, and need to be treated as such.5 Thus pragmatism can come up with a truth, but not with the truth or the theory of truth It can attempt to build a theory about the way truths are created, destroyed, and recreated – the very thing we field researchers attempt to Richard Rorty, Women, and the New Pragmatism 373 Even if language and speech are important, they not deserve any privileged stance within pragmatism Speaking is a human activity among many others: ‘‘y the activity of uttering sentences is one of the things people in order to cope with their environment’’ (1982, p xviii) Or, as we say in organization theory, talk is a kind of action and there is no reason to make a dramatic difference between talk and other kinds of actions (Czarniawska & Joerges, 1988) Another division that pragmatism proposes to abolish is the one between art and science Science can be seen as a literary genre6 and, conversely, art and fiction can be seen as research activities Such differences as exist concern products: there are theories, propositions, and concepts; there are pictures and words; there are poems, novels, films, and short stories The activity, however, is the same, because ‘‘[w]e can see ourselves as never encountering reality except under a chosen description This (y) has nothing to with ‘idealism’ – with the suggestion that we can or should draw metaphysical comfort from the fact that reality is ‘spiritual in nature’’’ (1982, pp xxxix–xl) In such a world, the philosophers would be ‘‘all-purpose intellectuals who were ready to offer a view on pretty much anything, in the hope of making it hang together with everything else’’ (1982, p xxxix) The book ends with a reiteration of the statement concerning the role of philosophy in society from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: In the end, the pragmatists tell us, what matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right (1982, p 166) Philosophers freed from the obligation of seeking the truth can busy themselves with a topic of great important to themselves and others alike: solidarity SOLIDARITY IN THE CENTER OF THINGS Rorty’s conviction that solidarity is of utmost importance is visible in all his writings, beginning with Contingency, Irony and Solidarity Already in the Introduction, he specified his view on solidarity: In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen (y) as a goal to be achieved It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves y (1989, p xiv) 374 BARBARA CZARNIAWSKA What is more, he argued that greater human solidarity is the basis of moral progress: ‘‘The view that I am offering says that there is indeed such a thing as moral progress, and that this progress is indeed in the direction of greater human solidarity’’ (1989, p 192) Human solidarity means seeing others, despite their differences, as similar to ‘‘us,’’ though only in certain key aspects, such as the ability to feel ‘‘pain and humiliation’’ (1989, p 192) In ‘‘certain aspects,’’ because Rorty never claimed that all human beings share a common essence For him, solidarity is ‘‘a matter of imaginative identification with the details of others’ lives, rather than a recognition of something antecedently shared’’ (1989, p 190) How can this striving for solidarity be combined with irony? In Rorty’s edition, irony is, in the first place, a self-irony After all, an ironist has ‘‘ y radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books that she has encountered’’ (1989, p 47) An ironist has a good memory; she remembers that she has not always used the present vocabulary, and therefore is fully aware that even this one can give place to another – in time There is no final truth that will disperse all doubts once and for all Thus the present vocabulary is the best she can – at present – find to talk about things that concern her But she cannot defend that vocabulary by claiming that it is closer to reality than any other, or that an external authority exists that can legitimize it Once again, the hydra of antirealism raises its many heads, and once again Rorty has defended his argument with a statement that is among his most quoted: To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes that not include human mental states To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations (1989, pp 4–5) She who recognizes the difference between the reality out there and the truth that is born in here, in solidarity among people, can afford to be ironic She is a historian and a cultural anthropologist who remembers the rise and fall of the old truths, and who humbly expects the same to happen to her truths But there is an important difference between private and public ironic vocabularies Rorty illustrated this difference by contrasting such ‘‘private’’ ironists as Nietzsche and Derrida, and ‘‘public’’ ironists such as Foucault and himself The private ironists not seem to place a high value on solidarity In the end of Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Rorty said, perhaps overoptimistically, that the present epoch is the first in the history in which Richard Rorty, Women, and the New Pragmatism 375 many people were finally able to distinguish between the questions ‘‘Do you agree with us?’’ and ‘‘Do you suffer?.’’ This optimism seems to have vanished, or has at least been postponed by a century in the quasi-science-fiction story in Philosophy and Social Hope (1999) Nevertheless, he was always convinced that the purpose of life – for philosophers and nonphilosophers alike – is to diminish suffering, not to search for the truth ETHNOCENTRISM? Among many criticisms that new pragmatism in general and Rorty’s version in particular has encountered, the one that interested me most was the accusation of ethnocentrism, which gave rise to a debate between Clifford Geertz and Richard Rorty, reprinted in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (1991) I see this debate as significant not because of the requirement of political correctness, but because the plea for solidarity can be questioned on the grounds of ethnocentrism Geertz was worried that there are no good prescriptions for a satisfactory way of solving problems created by the current development – societies that are increasingly pluricultural In Geertz’s opinion, ‘‘[w]e are living more and more in the midst of an enormous collage (y) the world is coming at each of its local points to look more like a Kuwaiti bazaar than like an English gentlemen’s club’’ (1991, p 209) Rorty replied: These [Geertz’s] descriptions seem right to me, but I not see why Geertz thinks that we bourgeois liberals need to change our thinking about cultural diversity in order to deal with this situation For this is just the sort of situation that the Western liberal ideal of procedural justice was designed to deal with (y) The relevant point is that one does not have to accept much else from Western culture to find the Western liberal ideal of procedural justice attractive y You cannot have an old-timey Gemeinschaft unless everybody pretty well agrees on who counts as a decent human being and who does not But you can have a civil society of the bourgeois democratic sort (p 209) It is necessary to point out that Rorty was using the term ‘‘liberal’’ in its US meaning; according to him, its closest equivalent in European politics is social democracy, although Rorty would not accept its tendency to preempt the desires of other social classes – thus the addition ‘‘bourgeois.’’ His understanding of the term was, he claimed, inspired by the writings of Judith Shklar, whose definition of liberalism was as follows: Every adult should be able to make as many effective decisions without fear and favor about as many aspects of her or his life as is compatible with the like freedom of every other adult (1989/1998, p 3)7 376 BARBARA CZARNIAWSKA Is not the admission of belonging to the bourgeois class and of sharing its ideals yet another proof of ethnocentrism – more specifically, class-centrism? Rorty foresaw this criticism, too: We would rather die than be ethnocentric, but ethnocentrism is precisely the conviction that one would rather die than share certain beliefs We then find ourselves wondering whether our own bourgeois liberalism is not just one more example of cultural bias (1991, p 203) Such wondering, or reflection, indeed reveals an ethnocentrism, but also its inevitability: (y.) It urges liberals to take with full seriousness the fact that the ideals of procedural justice and human equality are parochial, recent, eccentric cultural developments, and then to recognize that this does not mean they are any less worth fighting for It urges that ideals may be local and culture-bound, and nevertheless be the best hope of the species (1991, p 208) In other words, there is no need for (and perhaps no possibility of) an external (to humanity) authority to legitimize one’s beliefs No evidence exists, and perhaps no evidence – natural or historical – can exist to demonstrate that it is better if women are treated at par with men But this is no reason to stop fighting for such equality This liberal stance is also in conflict with the metanarrative of emancipation (where Rorty expresses opinions similar to those of Latour, 1993) In another essay in the same volume, ‘‘Cosmopolitanism without emancipation A response to Lyotard,’’ he wrote: For we want narratives of increasing cosmopolitanism, though not narratives of emancipation For we think that there was nothing to emancipate (y) There is no human nature which was once, or still is, in chains (1991, p 213) It is the ambition of emancipating others – not ethnocentrism – that is arrogant Ethnocentrism is merely a reminder that all utterances come from some place, from some point in time Thus, according to Rorty, the concept of ‘‘relativism’’ makes little sense If all opinions are equally good, we will permit suffering and injustice If fighting against injustice and alleviating suffering needs a superhuman legitimation, we may wait long to find it ON METHOD Already in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty had suggested that ‘‘imaginative identification,’’ the basis of solidarity, would be best developed Richard Rorty, Women, and the New Pragmatism 377 with the help of art and literature, which have primary roles to play in fostering this imaginative ability ‘‘This is not a task for theory, but for genres such as ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel’’ (1989, p xvi) Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth contains an essay called ‘‘Inquiry as recontextualization: an anti-dualist account of interpretation,’’ which is especially relevant for social scientists In this text, Rorty suggested that the time had come to part from traditional hermeneutics, acknowledging its enormous importance in the past It is time to forget such dualisms as nature– culture, mind–body.8 Further, he expressed a doubt as to ‘‘methods that should fit the study objects,’’ and did not see as fruitful the division into ‘‘natural sciences’’ and ‘‘cultural sciences.’’ By getting rid of the idea of ‘‘different methods appropriate to the natures of different objects’’ one switches attention from the ‘‘demands of the object’’ to the demand of the purpose which a particular inquiry is supposed to serve (y) For now one is debating what purposes are worth bothering to fulfill, which are more worthwhile than others, rather than which purposes the nature of humanity or of reality obliges us to have (1991, p 110) As to ‘‘mind versus body,’’ he reiterated and developed his previous ideas: Think of human minds as webs of beliefs and desires, of sentential attitudes – webs which continuously reweave themselves so as to accomodate new sentential attitudes (y) The web of belief should be regarded not just as a self-reweaving mechanism but as one which produces movements in the organism’s muscles movements which kick the organism itself into action These actions, by shoving items in the environment around, produce new beliefs to be woven in, which in turn produce new actions, and so on for as long as the organism survives (1991, p 94) This way of thinking has obvious consequences for understanding of the ‘‘self’’ and of an individual identity: y there is no self distinct from this self-reweaving web All there is to the human self is just that web To view beliefs as habits of action is to view the self from the outside From that angle, there is no distinction between mind and bodyy (1991, p 94) Thus it makes little sense to behold the distinction between the mind and the body, but it does make sense to maintain a difference between an actor and an observer, to use Luhmannian terms (see Seidl & Becker, 2005) If I tell somebody about my beliefs, that somebody can report only what I have said – not my beliefs, which only I can report This is, of course, of crucial importance for social studies, where the mistake of taking utterances for ‘‘mental processes’’ is extremely common Much as there are no ‘‘natural’’ dichotomies, some dichotomies or classifications may be useful and therefore worth preserving Among them, 378 BARBARA CZARNIAWSKA Rorty counted the Deweyan distinction between a habit and an inquiry – between that which is taken for granted and that which is questioned or problematized (no inquiry can concern everything at once; some things must remain ‘‘as usual’’ for the time of a given inquiry) Of similar usefulness is the distinction between justification and causation – a legitimate explanation and a link between cause and effect Nevertheless, such distinctions are merely useful devices; they are not deduced from ‘‘ontological differences’’: y the pragmatist (y) recognizes relations of justification holding between beliefs and desires, and relations of causation holding between these beliefs and desires and other items in the universe, but no relations of representation (1991, p 97) We can draw a line between objects which cause you to have beliefs about them by fairly direct causal means and other objects In the case of the latter sort of objects, the relevant causal relations are either terribly indirect or simply non-existent (1991, p 106) Weather belongs among the former, whereas neutrons belong to the latter (temporarily, of course; there may be times where neutrons will cause beliefs and desires more directly than the weather does, and even now this is probably the case with theoretical physicists) What is research, then, if not a search for truth and a quest to describe essences of objects? A sheer recontextualization, believed Rorty, oftentimes a recontextualization ‘‘for the hell of it’’ (1991, p 110) This should be enough – for scientists as well as for artists DOES EVERYBODY LIKE RORTY? PRAGMATISM AND FEMINISM There have been great many protests against pragmatism (dating from the time of Dewey) and against Rorty’s views within philosophy Because I am not a philosopher, I not intend to enter those debates More fascinating to me are the protests coming from social sciences, and not least from feminist authors In general, critically minded social scientists are worried by the fact that if there are no a priori, external criteria permitting a differentiation between the good and the evil, even the Holocaust can be justified as ‘‘useful’’ for somebody’s ‘‘purpose at hand.’’ To which Rorty answered dryly in Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), a collection of essays meant for the wider public, that: [i]t is unfortunate, I think, that many people hope for a tighter link between philosophy and politics than there is or can be In particular, people on the left keep hoping for a philosophical view which cannot be used by the political right, one which will lend itself Richard Rorty, Women, and the New Pragmatism 379 only to good causes But there never will be such a view: any philosophical view is a tool which can be used by many different hands (p 23) Can pragmatism be of any use to feminists, therefore, or is it a device lying on the road, for everybody to pick it up and use as an axe or as an ornament? In Truth and Progress (1998), Rorty quoted feminist critique against pragmatism, which came from two standpoints: the essentialist feminists saw antiessentialism as a stance preventing women from realizing their special needs; and the leftist feminists saw pragmatism as reactionary, opting for the status quo in place of progress and emancipation Rorty’s line of defense is fortified by many references to Dewey, who, in Rorty’s opinion, said little about the situation of women But that little he said is worth remembering Thus in tandem, the two pragmatist philosophers presented the following offer of ‘‘a few pieces of special-purpose ammunition’’ (1998, p 212) to feminism, engaging in conversation with several feminists, but mostly with Catharine MacKinnon They claimed that ‘‘a pragmatist feminist will see herself as helping to create women rather than attempting to describe them more accurately’’ (1998, p 212) The verb ‘‘create’’ does not suggest that women not exist; it suggests creating Utopias (alternative realities) rather than attempting radical interventions (which, short of physical violence, end up either being incomprehensible, or joining the vocabulary of the adversary, thus strengthening it) If there is neither ‘‘true reality’’ nor ‘‘universal imperative’’ to count upon, one is at the mercy of one’s own imagination ‘‘[T]ry to invent a reality of your own by selecting aspects of the world that lend themselves to the support of your judgment of the worthwhile life’’ (1998, p 216) This provides moral support, however, rather than a solid fundament to rely upon; deciding what life is worthwhile will be ‘‘one of the things you will constantly change your mind about in the process of selecting a reality (y) There is no method or procedure to be followed except courageous and imaginative experimentation’’ (1998, p 217) because y assumptions become visible as assumptions only if we can make the contradictories of these assumptions sound plausible So injustices may not be perceived as injustices, even by those who suffer them, until somebody invents a previously unplayed role Only if somebody has a dream, and a voice to describe that dream, does what looked like nature begin to look like culture, what looked like fate begin to look like a moral abomination For until then only the language of the oppressor is available, and most oppressors have had the wit to teach the oppressed a language in which the oppressed will sound crazy – even to themselves – if they describe themselves as oppressed (p 203) Herein may lie the key to the surprising discoveries reported by researchers such as Joanne Martin (1986) and Barbara Ehrenreich (2001): that women 380 BARBARA CZARNIAWSKA perceived by the observers as severely oppressed did not see themselves in that light, or any way of changing this situation other than ‘‘emancipating’’ them Nevertheless, even individuals of great imagination and courage will not be able achieve semantic authority alone; their statements must become a part of a shared practice Thus we turn again to solidarity among feminists of both genders: a solidarity that does not require glossing over differences and a political unity Experimental ways are many and tortuous In this light, it is not surprising that in his last book, Philosophy and Cultural Politics, Rorty combined pragmatism and romanticism: At the heart of pragmatism is the refusal to accept the correspondence theory of truth and the idea that true beliefs are accurate representations of reality At the heart of romanticism is the thesis of the priority of imagination over reason – the claim that reason can only follows paths that the imagination has broken (2007, p 105) Reason is traveling the path of past imaginations; the reason of the future will follow the path of the new imagination that has become a shared practice Art and literature, but also social sciences, are the fields in which versions of alternative realities and new vocabularies can be tested Philosophy, and philosophers, can help in such endeavors As Giovanna Borradori (1994, p 21) rightly noted, the new pragmatism offers the dream of a new humanistic solidarity, to be shared by nations, by individuals, and by various disciplines of arts and sciences, based on nothing more than the fact of mortality and the acknowledgment of the contingency of their respective vocabularies Is it enough? Is it too little? Will truth really take care of itself when you take care of freedom (Mendieta, 2006)? The answers to these questions will have to wait until the next vocabulary emerges For the time being, the new pragmatist one can be used to exercise ‘‘imaginative identification’’ in the world that badly needs it NOTES In Polish, as in Swedish, there is a generic term for human beings of both sexes, which in Swedish has the feminine gender Pragmatism, however, is a bourgeois virtue, not appreciated by higher classes (d’Iribarne, 2008) Gordon Craig (1983) claimed that it was Hegel ‘‘who must bear responsibility for making stylistic obscurity respectable in academic and scientific writing (y) Hegel himself was capable, at least in his youth, of writing a good plain style, as his 1788 essay ‘The Constitution of Germany’ demonstrates But by the time he had begun work on The Phenomenology of the Spirit (y) he had abandoned his relative lucidity for a prose that has been the despair of legions of earnest students’’ (p 314) Richard Rorty, Women, and the New Pragmatism 381 Many of Alfred Schu¨tz’s ideas were born during his exile from a meeting between the German phenomenology and US pragmatism (see, e.g., his engagement with William James in ‘‘On multiple realities,’’ 1945/1973) The presently popular idealist variation of constructivism seems to assume the opposite: that things are words (even John Searle, 2009 ascribes to this view, probably in order to better criticize it) I tried to put this claim to work in my Writing Management Organization Theory as a Literary Genre, 1999 I not believe that either John Stuart Mill or Judith Shklar intended to force people to make choices that they were unwilling to make, which seems to be the present interpretation of this definition by the European liberals Rorty repeatedly stressed his agreement with many of Latour’s claims (see, e.g., his review of Aramis, or the Love of Technology, 1996) REFERENCES Adamiecki, K (1931) Harmonograf Przegla˛ d Organizacji (4) Polish Bibliography 1901–1939 Available at http://www.bn.org.pl/download/document/1234357030.pdf Accessed on 26 November 2010 Borradori, G (1994) The American philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, and Kuhn Chicago: The University of Chicago Press Chicherin, A., & Selvinsky, E.-K (1923) Znayem (We know Declaration of constructivist poets) Moscow: K P Craig, G A (1983) The Germans New York: Meridian Czarniawska, B (1999) Writing management Organization theory as a literary genre Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press Czarniawska, B (2002) A tale of three cities, or the glocalization of city management Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press Czarniawska, B (2009) My forgotten predecessors In: K Sahlin, L Wedlin & M Grafstro¨m (Eds.), Exploring the worlds of Mercury and Minerwa Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis (51), 101–112 Czarniawska, B., & Joerges, B (1988) How to control things with words On organizational talk and organizational control Management Communication Quarterly, 2(2), 170–193 de Saussure, F (1983) Course in general linguistic London: Duckworth d’Iribarne, P (2008) Penser la diversite´ du monde Paris: Seuil Eco, U (1995) In search for the perfect language Oxford: Blackwell Ehrenreich, B (2001) Nickel and dimed Undercover in low-wage USA London: Granta Books Foucault, M (1979) What is an author? In: J V Harrari (Ed.), Textual strategies Perspectives in post-structuralist criticism (pp 141–160) Ithaca: Methuen Geertz, C (1988) Works and lives: The anthropologist as author Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press Knorr Cetina, K (1999) Epistemic cultures: How sciences make knowledge Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Kolakowski, L (2005) The devil in history In: My correct views on everything (pp 121–138) South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press 382 BARBARA CZARNIAWSKA Kotarbinski, T (1965) Praxiology Oxford: Pergamon Press Latour, B (1993) We have never been modern Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Latour, B (1996) Aramis, or the love of technology Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Latour, B (2005) Reassembling the social An introduction to actor-network theory Oxford: Oxford University Press Martin, J (1986) The tolerance of injustice In: J M Olson, C P Herman & M P Zanna (Eds), Relative deprivation and social comparison: The Ontario symposium (Vol 4, p 242) Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Mendieta, E (2006) Take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself Interviews with Richard Rorty Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press Nussbaum, M C (1994) The therapy of desire Theory and practice in hellenistic ethics Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Rorty, R (1979) Philosophy and the mirror of nature Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Rorty, R (1982) Consequences of pragmatism Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Rorty, R (1989) Contingency, irony, and solidarity Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Rorty, R (1991) Objectivity, relativism, and truth: Philosophical papers, volume Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Rorty, R (1996) Blinded with science Voice Literary Supplement, September, 10–12 Rorty, R (1998) Truth and progress: Philosophical papers, volume Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Rorty, R (1999) Philosophy and social hope London: Penguin Rorty, R (2007) Philosophy as cultural politics Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press Schu¨tz, A (1945/1973) On multiple realities In: Collected works (Vol 1, pp 340–347) The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Searle, J (2009) Fear of knowledge: Against relativism and constructivism by Paul A Boghossian New York Review of Books, LVI(14), 88–92 Seidl, D., & Becker, K H (Eds) (2005) Niklas Luhmann and organization studies Malmo¨/ Copengahen: Liber/CBS Press Shklar, J (1998) Political thought and political thinkers Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press Barbara Czarniawska holds a chair in management studies at GRI, School of Business, Economics and Law at University of Gothenburg, Sweden Doctor honoris causa at Stockholm School of Economics, Copenhagen Business School and Helsinki School of Economics, she is a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Royal Engineering Academy, the Royal Society of Art and Sciences in Gothenburg, and Societas Scientiarum Finnica Czarniawska takes a feminist and constructionist perspective on organizing, recently exploring the connections between popular culture and practice of management, and the organization of the news production She is interested in methodology, especially in techniques of fieldwork and in the application of narratology to Richard Rorty, Women, and the New Pragmatism 383 organization studies Recent books in English: A Tale of Three Cities (2002), Narratives in Social Science Research (2004), Actor-Network Theory and Organizing (edited with Tor Hernes, 2005), Global Ideas (edited with Guje Sevo´n, 2005), Management Education and Humanities (edited with Pasquale Gagliardi, 2006), Shadowing and Other Techniques of Doing Fieldwork in Modern Societies (2007), A Theory of Organizing (2008) ... vii ADVISORY BOARD ix INTRODUCTION: WHY PHILOSOPHY MATTERS TO ORGANIZATION THEORY Haridimos Tsoukas and Robert Chia ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATION THEORY: PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS AND SCIENTIFIC... Press Tsoukas, H., & Chia, R (2002) On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change Organization Science, 13, 567–582 Tsoukas, H., & Knudsen, C (2003) The Oxford handbook of organization. .. AND ORGANIZATION THEORY Andreas Georg Scherer and Moritz Patzer HERMENEUTIC PHILOSOPHY AND ORGANIZATIONAL THEORY Frank J Barrett, Edward H Powley and Barnett Pearce 155 181 PHENOMENOLOGY AND ORGANIZATION