Abstract
Chapter 1 suggested that organizational change – or its failure – might be illuminated by Levinas’s thoughts on the problematic nature of rationality and on radical resistance against encapsulation. In order to justify that illumination it should be clear that in both areas, that is in organizations studies and in philosophy, scholars treat those topics in a comparable way. Chapter 2 examines that question. This is done however only with regard to the issue of problematic rationality and – at this stage – not with regard to the topic of the radical resistance. The reason is that management authors do not explicitly discuss the topic of the radical resistance. The Chapter therefore intends to determine, for each of both mentioned areas, whether rationality is experienced there as a problem indeed and, if so, whether the problematic aspects of both areas have similarities. The conclusions with regard to both questions are in the affirmative: both in organization studies and in philosophy people talk about problematic aspects of rationality. These manifest themselves at the cognitive level as deception and at the social level as exclusion. Furthermore a congruence appears between the two areas as to the way these issues are discussed, namely through the crucial role both disciplines attribute to the mechanism of representation. And through the finding that within both disciplines people seek for concepts of science which are freed from representationalism.
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Notes
- 1.
I understand thing-ontology , based on the writings of De Boer (1976 and 1989), as follows. Thing-ontology assumes that material and immaterial things have a definable identity. In this point of departure reification (i.e. the attributing of a thing-like character to what exists) is linked to the postulate of a reality outside us which can be known by us. That connection is triggered by the finding that things are not always empirically distinct, so that for defining of the assumed identities recourse has to be taken to a knowable order which exists independently of us (and therefore is reliable) in which those identities are established.
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Van der Ven, N. (2011). Rationality: A Problem?. In: The Shame of Reason in Organizational Change. Issues in Business Ethics, vol 32. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9373-8_2
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