Abstract
This chapter contains some concluding thoughts. In the first section it is argued that the contribution that Levinas can make to organization studies and to thinking about organizational change is located in the new language he provides. This new language offers opportunities for new thinking, and enables us to better understand problems and barriers that are marked by a somewhat enigmatic character. Subsequently in the second section I will discuss three remarkable aspects of this new language: the coincidence of critical knowledge and ethics, the urge to concretization and the ambivalence toward rationality. The third section performs the comparison which was announced already in Chapter 3 in presenting the two alternatives for representational thinking. Levinas’ new language is compared with the language which organization studies scholars derive on the one hand from postmodernism and on the other hand from the work of Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Finally I conclude with an assessment of the chances of acceptance of Levinas’ new language within organization studies.
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Notes
- 1.
Also Derrida himself, with whom the concept of deconstruction is usually associated, has always considered the methodization of deconstruction as impossible (Richmond 1995: 180). Weiskopf and Willmott (1999: 567) point out in their discussion of Chia’s position, that postmodernist constructions are as untenable as modernist constructions.
- 2.
On p. 134 (footnote), I indicated that in this book I do not deal with the question whether certain conditions are required for the confrontation to occur. But it is clear that in the absence of interaction that occurrence certainly can not take place.
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Van der Ven, N. (2011). Conclusion. 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_6
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