Philosophy of Management

This paper revisits some recent contributions on ‘Why Management Theory Needs Popper’ to the journal Philosophy of Management. It proposes that those discussions provided an appraisal of the relevance of Popper’s falsification schema to management theory, but that they did not thereby bring to the fore all of the issues pertinent to a balanced and well-rounded understanding of Popper’s philosophy of critical rationalism. It is argued that such an understanding requires a discussion of what Popper himself declared to be the real lynchpin of his thought: fallibilism and a critical approach. It is noted that this represents a rejection of the historical problem situation of philosophy – that knowledge claims need to be positively justified as true. It is argued that this rejection implies an anti-authoritarian, non-justificational philosophy based on the use of critical reason. Its application to several different objects of criticism is demonstrated and its ethical dimensions are explored. The relevance of critical rationalism to management studies and practice is assessed and an inherent limitation on the prospects of its adoption in management practice is identified.

In this paper we examine the alleged war between Kuhn and Popper, extending the discussion to incorporate two of their lesser known, but important, protagonists, Lakatos and Feyerabend. The argument presented here is that the four can fruitfully be considered together, and that it is possible to go beyond the surface tensions and clashes between them to fashion an approach which takes advantage of the insights of all. The implications of this approach for management are then considered, using the concept of co-creation in two different contexts to illustrate this.

Process theories of leadership emphasize its relational nature but lack a substantial method of analysis. We offer an account of leadership as a language-game, employing the concepts of opaque context and propositional attitudes. Using established methods of linguistic analysis, we reformulate Weber’s understanding of charismatic leadership. A by-product of this approach is to limit the epistemological role of individual psychology in leadership studies, and to increase the relevance of linguistic and semantic conventions.

Within the Configuration school the management author Henry Mintzberg contributed a strong criticism of a normative conception of strategic planning, arguing that this is too narrow. The philosopher Henri Bergson embraced the totality of life as a creative evolution which transcends the fullness of a preconceived idea. While Mintzberg attempts to rethink the concept of strategy and Bergson to renew philosophical thought, together they share a vision of a changing and unpredictable world that enables them to discover – above and beyond the systematic data they are able to assemble – another mode of knowledge formed by intuition. Intuition holds a central place in the work of both thinkers, invigorating Mintzberg’s work on strategy and Bergson’s thought on metaphysics through a grasp of the substantiality of change. In this paper, we explore the implications of the concept of intuition for their ideas, then discuss some of its limitations, before investigating its possible applications for management research.

Denunciations, disclosures and reporting: why do whistleblowing procedures create an ethical dilemma in French corporations? Since July 2006, the requirement that foreign multinationals listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) implement this practice has been met with stiff resistance in many French companies. French labor unions see this controversy as a clash between the French and Anglo-Saxon models of transparency. To understand the moral reticence of French companies towards whistleblowing, we investigate five distinct perspectives: legal, economic, historical, philosophical and sociological. 1/ We first probe into the legal contradictions in French regulations and find in these paradoxes the symptoms of a national taboo. 2/ We report on an economic survey, that gathers empirical data from 82 large French corporations, and analyzes different business sectors in France and the working population covered by a whistleblowing procedure. 3/ To elicit the etiology of this taboo, we return to the historical sources of the Dreyfus Affair and the Vichy regime, whose political traumas remain imprinted on the collective French memory. The linguistic confusion between the two French terms délation and dénonciation shows why whistleblowing is perceived in France more as an act of betrayal than of heroism. 4/ The philosophical roots of whistleblowing also shed light on the organizational behavior of French companies and the transparency they are struggling to promote. 5/ Entangled in sociological ambiguities, we discuss why French companies see whistleblowing as a risk, not as a means to prevent risk.

This paper submits that an intersubjective account of integrity is able to solve current confusion and cynicism provoked by organisations stating their integrity. First, I argue that regarding organisations as persons causes much of this confusion. Second, I assert that a useful account of integrity in an organisational context must place central importance on the notion of human interaction. With regard to this criterion I examine the meta-ethical assumptions of three accounts of integrity: objective, subjective and intersubjective. The intersubjective account of integrity is most suited for an organisational context because it recasts integrity as ‘talking the walk’ and as ‘towards integrity’.