What Theory Is and Can Be: Forms of Theorizing in Organizational Scholarship

Theory is at the very heart of organizational scholarship and a key criterion for evaluating the quality and contribution of our research. Focusing on conceptual rather than empirical work, this editorial essay highlights the wide range of forms that theorizing might take – and how it, in consequence, materializes in different types of theory papers. Next to the propositional form of theory building, which has so far dominated reflections in the literature, we discuss the particularities of process, configurational, perspectival, and meta-theorizing, as well as various forms of critique. We demonstrate how these forms of theorizing differ in terms of their aims, style of reasoning, their contributions, and the way in which they are written up as papers. In view of the rather different roles that each of these forms of theorizing serve, we propagate, in line with the ethos of Organization Theory, a pluralistic stance when it comes to advancing theory in organization studies.

Why do informal markets remain informal: the role of tacit knowledge in an Indian footwear cluster

Why do informal markets resist formalizing, even when the gains of doing so outweigh its costs in the long run? While a number of responses to this question have been advanced, we discover that part of the reason could be located in the tacit knowledge (attributed to Polanyi, Hayek) embedded in the marketplace, on which market institutions run. This factor is not fully explored yet. Tacit (idiosyncratic, inarticulate, nonconscious) knowledge is acquired personally through experience and cannot be transferred or conveyed to anyone. This is the knowledge we use to act without knowing it in a propositional form. We present the case of one of India’s largest informal footwear cluster, located in the city of Agra. We show that informal markets, hinged on tacit knowledge, cannot evolve easily and therefore may remain locked-in, despite external pressures or incentives to formalize. The study shows that efforts to overcome informality and reaping the benefits of formalized market structures cannot be done without taking cognizance of the sticky intangible knowledge on which these markets rest.

We Teach Art, but Can Art Teaches Us? John Dewey on the Significance of Art

Those who pursue a teaching career in art and design are most likely aware of one of its pressing dilemmas. On the one hand, as a subject situated in the postindustrial higher education setting where the progressive accumulation of knowledge – mostly in propositional form and explaining how things work in physical or social reality – constitutes its main purpose, art are unavoidably driven to adopt the same objective. On the other hand, most artistic activities are not aimed to produce and derived from replicable research propositions but conducted to generate novel artifacts, performances, narratives or experiences in order to enhance artistic universe. Regarding their being as artifactual, non-propositional and idiosyncratic, artworks are unfortunately regarded as mere products of subjective emotions, where it’s appropriate roles are nothing more than spectacles, entertainments or ornaments, which at the same time testify its marginal relationship with knowledge. However, this predicament is not as self-evident as it looks since it is in fact resulted from a particular philosophical outlook, namely, an outlook that bifurcates mind and body, rational and emotional, subject and object, and so forth that comes down to us from the Platonic and Cartesian tradition. It is precisely the thought of John Dewey that profitably conceives art prior to Platonic/Cartesian bifurcation which will be discussed in this paper. Art, for Dewey, is not a product of a mere subjectivity, but instead emerges from “experience,” understood as primary, pre-linguistic (hence pre-dualism) and embodied human-environment “transactions.” Located in such a primary domain, art regains its utmost significance. AbstrakMereka yang mengejar karir dosen di bidang seni dan desain kemungkinan besar menyadari salah satu dilemanya yang mendesak. Di satu sisi, sebagai bidang yang berada dalam lingkungan pendidikan tinggi pasca-industri di mana akumulasi pengetahuan progresif - kebanyakan dalam bentuk proposisional dan menjelaskan bagaimana hal-hal bekerja dalam realitas fisik ataupun sosial - merupakan tujuan utamanya, seni secara tidak terhindarkan didorong untuk mengadopsi tujuan yang sama. Di sisi lain, sebagian besar kegiatan artistik tidak bertujuan untuk menghasilkan, dan berasal dari proposisi penelitian yang dapat direplikasi namun dilakukan untuk menghasilkan artefak, performa, narasi atau pengalaman baru dalam rangka mengembangkan semesta artistik. Melihat keberadaan seni yang serba artifaktual, non-proposisional dan unik, karya seni dianggap sebagai semata-mata produk dari emosi subjektif, di mana perannya dianggap tidak lebih dari tontonan, hiburan atau ornamen, yang pada saat yang sama menyiratkan hubungannya yang marginal dengan pengetahuan. Namun, dilema ini bukan sesuatu yang sudah jelas dengan sendirinya, karena nyatanya dihasilkan dari pandangan filosofis tertentu, yaitu, pandangan yang membelah tajam antara pikiran dan tubuh, rasional dan emosional, subjek dan objek, dan sebagainya yang diturunkan pada kita dari tradisi Platonis dan Cartesian. Adalah pemikiran proseni dari John Dewey yang bergerak sebelum bifurkasi Platonis/Cartesian yang akan dibahas dalam makalah ini. Seni, bagi Dewey, bukan produk dari subjektivitas belaka, melainkan muncul dari "pengalaman," dipahami sebagai "transaksi" manusia-lingkungan yang bersifat primer, pra-linguistik (oleh karena itu pra-dualisme) dan menubuh (artifaktual). Diletakkan di ranah semendasar ini, seni mendapatkan kembali signifikansi terpentingnya.

Undoing the Psychologizing of the Psychological

In “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” first published in 1965, and later collected in Must We Mean What We Say?, Stanley Cavell wrote: We know the efforts of such philosophers as Frege and Husserl to undo the “psychologizing” of logic (like Kant’s undoing Hume’s psychologizing of knowledge): now, the shortest way I might describe such a book as the Philosophical Investigations is to say that it attempts to undo the psychologizing of psychology, to show the necessity controlling our application of psychological and behavioral categories; even, one could say, show the necessities in human action and passion themselves. And at the same time it seems to turn all of philosophy into psychology—matters of what we call things, how we treat them, what their role is in our lives. Frege, of course, insisted on distinguishing between what is thought in any act of thinking, the content of thought, which he conceived of as having a propositional form, and the thinking of it. A thought is what can be common to different acts of thinking, whether of one’s own or of another. It is thus essentially public, essentially shareable, unowned. By contrast the thinking of a thought is necessarily someone’s, necessarily owned, and so in that sense private. Frege depsychologized logic, by excluding the psychological from it. The logical must bear no trace of the psychological, for if that were not so, there would be nothing that could be true or false—and so no judgment, no belief, no propositional attitude, as thoughts have subsequently come to be called. There would be in Thomas Rickett’s memorable words, merely “mooing.” The first person is consequently banished from the logical order, for a first person thought is constituted by the thinking of it. But in depsychologizing logic as he did, Frege seemed to have psychologized psychology. Thus, in speaking of the Investigations as undoing the psychologizing of psychology, I take it, Stanley meant that it seeks to undo what Frege did. However, this doesn’t mean undoing what Frege undid, that is, erasing the sharp boundary between the logical and the psychological, but rather to not cede the psychological to psychology: what the PI calls for is to further what Frege began, but, as it were, against Frege. In other words, Stanley saw Wittgenstein as reintroducing the first person as essential to the logical order, the order of what we think.

Skeptizismus und negative Theologie

Scepticism and negative theology are best understood not as theoretical positions, but rather as forms of philosophical practice that performatively undermine our knowledge claims or our seeming understanding of God. In particular, I am arguing that both scepticism and negative theology invoke the failure of the attempt to understand the absolute, be it God or the notion of absolute objectivity. However, with reference to L. A. Paul’s notion of epistemically transformative experience, I am arguing that we still understand something about the absolute through the experience of failing to think it. This, of course, is a non-propositional form of understanding, and I am arguing that there is something about the finitude of the human condition that can only be understood through a transformative philosophical experience with respect to the absolute.

In the Mood for Paradox? Das Verhältnis von Fiktion, Stimmung und Welterschließung aus mentalistischer und phänomenologischer Perspektive

It is widely acknowledged that responses to fiction can be divided into two categories: emotions or moods. Research on the paradox of fiction, however, solely focused on emotional responses to fiction. This paper analyses the different potentials of the mood concept with regard to the paradox of fiction: its potential to avoid the paradox on the one hand and its potential to rise a new paradox of fiction, a paradox of fiction for moods, on the other. To this end, the paper distinguishes two different meanings of the everyday concept of mood and two different paradigms in the research on moods. The mood concept can designate not only affective states of an individual (moods1), but elusive, nuanced atmospheres of objects, places or situations (moods2). The mentalistic paradigm, widespread in psychology and analytic philosophy, generally assumes that moods are mental states with a certain quality of feeling (and physical symptoms). Moods2 are regarded by such approaches, if they discuss them, as a secondary phenomenon based on subjective perception. In contrast, the phenomenological paradigm focuses on moods2 and, if it accommodates moods1 as well, often postulates a characteristic connection between the two: moods1 reveal extra-individual atmospheres (moods2) that are assumed to exist in some ontologically robust sense. Therefore, moods1 can be said to have a world-disclosing function within the phenomenological paradigm. Researchers in the mentalistic paradigm deal, among other issues, with the difference of emotions and moods1. One way in which moods1 differ from emotions is that they lack an intentional object and it is for that reason that the concept of mood1, at first glance, seems to offer a solution to the paradox of fiction. The paradox of fiction presumes that we have emotions with regard to fictional objects. If it were possible to redescribe the alleged emotions as more subtle mood1 responses without clear intentional objects, this would undermine a central premise of the paradox and dissolve it. However, such a redescription seems not equally plausible for all cases discussed in the debate (e. g. the green slime case). Therefore, moods1 can only be one element of a more subtle ›phenomenology‹ of affective reactions towards fiction and the »paradox avoiding potential« of the mood concept is limited. The paradox creating potential of the mood concept emerges if one takes into account the outlined complex semantics of the concept »mood« and the postulated world-disclosing function of moods1. It seems possible to construct a new paradox, the paradox of fiction for moods: (a) Only real entities or representations of real entities can evoke moods1 with world-disclosing function (because this mood1 evocation is actually immersion in an atmosphere). (b) Many entities in fictions are not real. (c) Nevertheless, fictions can evoke moods1 with world-disclosing functions (e. g. with regard to places, situations) in the recipient. The paper argues that the outlined paradox can be dissolved by pointing out that the expression »moods1 with world-disclosing function« in sentence (a) means something different than in (c). While the expression in (a) relates to the idea of grasping an atmosphere (mood2) that somehow is »in the world«, it means acquiring a non-propositional form of knowledge, namely knowledge of what-it-is-like to be in a certain situation, in (c). The idea that it is possible to acquire knowledge of what-it-is-like by means of fiction has often been postulated in the research literature, but rarely been spelled out in greater detail. The paper argues that such an acquisition can occur, among other possibilities, on the basis of mood1 evocation, but that the conditions for the acquisition of knowledge of what-it-is-like by means of fiction are more demanding than under usual circumstances: A recipient of fiction can reasonably be said to acquire knowledge of what-it-is-like to be in a certain situation if the fictional representation evokes a mood1 which is characteristic of a situation S and the recipient understands this mood1 as an affective reaction to a situation of the type S. Please note that moods2 play no explanatory role in the second interpretation of »world-disclosing function«. Since assumption (a) and assumption (c) concern different world-disclosing functions or, in other words, different mechanisms of world-disclosure, there is no paradox. Although moods1 evoked by fictional representations (with some limitations pointed out in section 4) do not possess a world-disclosing function in the sense the phenomenological tradition postulated, it is possible to ascribe these moods1 a world-disclosing function, even within a non-phenomenological framework: They allow the recipient the acquisition of a knowledge of what-it-is-like to be in a certain situation or in a certain place. Ultimately, for the paradox of fiction for moods seems to hold what could be said about the classical paradox of fiction as well: Even if the paradox ultimately dissolves, its analysis can be instructive for related research fields like the debate on knowledge from fiction which takes moods rarely into account until now.

Belief-That and Belief-In

Let propositionalism be the thesis that all mental attitudes are propositional. Anti-propositionalists have focused on trying to resist reductive analyses of apparently non-propositional attitudes, such as fearing a dog and loving a spouse, into propositional form. This chapter explores the anti-propositionalist’s prospects for going on the offensive, trying to show that some apparently propositional attitudes, notably belief and judgment, can be given a reductive analysis in terms of non-propositional attitudes. Although the notion that belief is a non-propositional attitude may seem ludicrous at first, it has been given an admirable defense by Franz Brentano, a defense which this chapter expounds and deepens.

Habit, Practice, Grace

Traditional philosophy of religion is shaped by its focus on the cognitive aspects of religious life—beliefs and doctrines—which can easily be articulated in propositional form. But “lived religion” encompasses more than belief, and if philosophers of religion are to do justice to our subject-matter, we need to learn to think philosophically about practice in general, and about religious practices in particular. This chapter considers some of the methodological questions and challenges that come with this task, and looks at two recent attempts to develop a philosophy of religious practice. It then outlines a concept of practice which tries to take account of two features of religious practice: how practice uses repetition to generate change, or even transformation; and how practice gives form to desire.

Social imaginaries and the theory of the normative utterance

From Charles Taylor to Marcel Gauchet, theorists of the social imaginary have given us new ways to talk about the shared structures of meanings and practices of the West. Theorists of this group have argued against the narrow horizons of meaning that are deployed by deliberative political theories in developing their basic normative concepts and principles, providing an alternative to the oscillation between the constructivism and the realism. Theorists of the imaginary have enabled us to think about normatively charged collective imaginaries as logically prior to the construction of normative principles. What theorists of the imaginary have not done is make specific connections between the ontological background of social imaginaries and the normative utterance. This lacuna has left them vulnerable to the charges of ‘normative deficit’ and vagueness that Habermas and others famously make against philosophies of ‘world disclosure’. This article develops a conception of the normative utterance that enables us to reason through social imaginaries. In such reasoning, claims are not expressed in the propositional form of the Rawlsian or Habermasian justification, but through a complex engagement with the worldhood that informs normative judgements.

THE SNAKE AND THE ROUNDABOUT: ETHICAL PARTICULARISM AND THE PATTERNS OF NORMATIVE INDUCTIONA SERPENTE E A ROTUNDA: PARTICULARISMO ÉTICO E OS PADRÕES DA INDUÇÃO NORMATIVA

Using two examples of ethical choice, Philippa Foot’s snake and the traffic roundabout, this paper offers an account of normative induction that characterizes particularism and generalism as stages of normative inquiry, rather than rival accounts of moral knowledge and motivation. Ethical particularism holds that the evaluative cannot be “cashed out” in propositional form, and that it is descriptively “shapeless.” Drawing on examples from law, this paper claims that, while individual normative inquiry may be viewed as encountering a shapeless particularist context of seem-ingly unlimited nonmoral properties, normativity is driven by repe-tition of similar situations toward shared practices and descriptive predication. Rather than retention of epistemic status by defeated reasons, this illustrates retirement of relevant properties and ac-companying reasons, transformation of the reasons environment, and a pluralist normative ontology.