The Revenge of Gagliardi on Utilitarianism

Abstract

Pasquale Gagliardi’s essay presents ideas of immeasurable importance to ongoing debates about interpretivism and its role in organization studies. In particular, I celebrate his paradoxical rendering of the utilitarian and the gratuitous, which reveals his always aesthetic sensitivities as well as describing some of the ways that paradigms interact. Gagliardi’s choice of the term gratuitous, I suggest, is an application of Rorty’s method of redescription, an intriguing strategy for paradigmatic interaction in its own right. In the end, however, I complain that Gagliardi may go too far when he employs one of the tactics he describes (disguising gratuitousness as useful) to produce a typology of gratuitous things. Ironic or not, typologies frighten me.