Abstract
During the first semester of 2021, I had the opportunity to deliver a 6-hour workshop for PhD students entitled Emancipation and After—Critical Perspectives. In the days leading up to the workshop, I became anxious as I have held the longstanding, stubborn belief that I am not a well-trained scholar. Feelings of inadequacy were likely only compounded by the ongoing conditions of a global pandemic under which I, like everyone else, was living. Among the questions in my mind were: How can we adopt a research lens to discuss our experiences with the pandemic—which are idiosyncratically informed by gender, race, caste, and class and driven by economic, technological, cultural, and ecological crises—when we all occupy such different social realities. It was in this backdrop that the book, Philosophy and Management Studies: A Research Overview by Raza Mir and Michelle Greenwood came to me as a guiding light. Its underlying argument offered me the analytical tools to understand that our research is not simply a set of ideas or analyses bereft of moral considerations. Rather, it must be informed by—and, concomitantly, it must inform—the moral orders of knowledge construction in management and organization studies (MOS).
The book explores how philosophy and praxis are (or at least ought to be) inseparable when engaging in research pursuits. As Mir and Greenwood observe, research is an intellectual engagement. It is critical to account for how research intersects with and relates to practice. From this observation, the authors ask: How should we make sense of our social, political, and ethical forms of existence in relation to our research. Building on works of other critical scholars, Mir and Greenwood illustrate alternative ways of interrogating, conceptualizing, and theorizing in MOS. They offer a guide to help philosophically structure our research and navigate the knowledge terrain of the discipline. To deliver their argument, Mir and Greenwood’s discussion draws on efficiency-centric arguments, social theory, and cultural studies as well as borrowing ideas from postcolonial and subaltern studies and, as a special focus, the political society. They highlight the relevance of how we represent subalterns and the political society in our research, and thus they outline how we can address the crisis of representation of the disadvantaged category of actors in the case of MOS. The book provides a meaningful critique of how neoliberalism and transnational capitalism regimes reconfigure lives and identities and thus organize work. While the richness of the book will certainly make it relevant to a wide-ranging group of scholars, I consider Philosophy and Managements Studies to offer six critical insights for MOS in particular.
First, there has been a call for decolonizing MOS. This call was initiated when the adverse impacts of globalization had already taken hold. With these adverse effects of globalization in the background, the book offers us modalities for our research by helping us to internalize the broader social, economic, political, historical, and cultural institutional mechanisms that shape organizational realities. Thus, the book advances our understanding of how our identity and work activities are organized and the implications that emerge as a result.
Second, Mir and Greenwood suggest that we should increase our focus on assumptions that underpin our research. The possibilities for the meaningful impact of our research are predicated on the assumptions upon which they lie. According to Mir and Greenwood, as MOS scholars, we must engage with the philosophy to demarcate research assumptions, concepts, categorizations, and interpretations. They outline how we should develop our framework of analyses. They encourage neither assimilationism nor binarism as the method of enquiry and analysis because both ways are problematic and could be ideologically driven. The takeaway from the argument offered is that research is a conscious journey insofar as the assumptions we hold have a critical impact on how what is studied is interpreted (Harcourt, 2020). Further developing this point, they emphasize the idea of relationality—that is, our relational engagement with the research process. As researchers, we ought to keep front and center questions pertaining to: What is being inquired about? How is it being inquired? And, whom does it impact?
Third, the book highlights the importance of conceptualizing politics as shared and unending labor. Mir and Greenwood offer two related critiques on politics and ethics in MOS research. The first critique is that we should demonstrate that our research has communicative capacity across regions, disciplines, and social categories to navigate the highly uneven terrain of the discipline. To demonstrate this point, in the second chapter, Investigating Concepts, they bring in the idea of justice and emphasize its relevance in studying organizing, organization, and organization and society. The notion of justice reminds us that our responsibility is to ground the value of recognition into our research. As scholars, such an understanding of justice denotes that we have the ability to learn how to theorize inequality in organizations and, as importantly, to identify ways to disrupt it. The second critique is in the call for the idea of synchronization relativism as a distinctive philosophical movement (as Wolfe also argued, 1999) in our research, which incorporates the data, concepts, categories, and particularity relating to the context. They articulate this critique by injecting discourses from philosophy, cultural anthropology, and development studies into MOS. Drawing on these multidisciplinary insights, Mir and Greenwood observe: “Management is both a discipline and a mindset, and provides many avenues for philosophical analysis” (p. 99). Therefore, they emphasize that we should be aware of the politics of our research—what topic we investigate, who is involved, and the relevance of the location in which it is operationalized.
Fourth, Mir and Greenwood ask us to engage with “context.” In MOS, relatively little progress has been made in how we account for a study’s context. Meaningfully accounting for context is critical for making sense of how the location in which an organizational phenomenon occurs matters in shaping how that phenomenon is understood and its effects. A situated understanding of context is essential for it creates an urge in us to look for other ways of representation and demonstrates our commitment as researchers to the representation of others (Nagar, 2014). Mir and Greenwood remind us to be persistent when investigating concepts and its relations with the contextual condition by suggesting we investigate both the material and structural conditions in order to have a complete understanding of these relations. Hence the task is to devote time to nurturing the process and location of our inquiry.
Fifth, the book underscores the relevance of subjects’ agency-specific roles and subjectivity by illustrating how to address in MOS the myriad subalterns—those disempowered constituents lacking access to resources or even self-representation. To borrow the words of Mir and Greenwood, those who are “beyond the protection offered modern the state” (p. 90). The third chapter, Philosophy from Below, critiques how we represent subalterns in our research and offers ideas on how conscientious scholars in the field can respond to the crisis of representation when studying those who are the most socially, politically, and economically disenfranchised.
Sixth, the book reminds us that while it is crucial to focus on the individual and their agency, we must account for individual agency within the collective. The book outlines how MOS scholars should speak to “others” and of “others” and reminds us that as researchers, our theorizing process is activism and a journey. As they explain: “The philosophical foundations of political society are predicated on ontological realism, a solidarity with the under-laborer that not only informs its politics but seeps into the epistemological domain, and locates its focus on the contingent relationships between phenomena and institutional structures”. (p. 83)
The book offers challenges and possibilities requiring our engagement as scholars. There has been tension in managing knowledge in MOS between the Global North and the Global South. In regards to this tension, the question the book raises is: About whom are we inquiring? The effort to build knowledge in MOS across areas is challenging without privileging some as superior. Therefore, Mir and Greenwood ask us to unpack and acknowledge the fundamental assumptions that underpin our research.
As a reader, I am captivated by the compelling prose found in the book, and I consider it to be a quick reference tool for doctoral students and novice researchers like me. The book shows the implications of various theoretical and analytical traditions in the discipline. As MOS has increasingly become interested in raising questions about capitalism, governance, and the broadening of sites of our research, our empirical methods certainly cannot remain parochial, and the book attempts to balance that imbalance. Finally, what I find most compelling is that Mir and Greenwood suggest decentering the field by decentering the center. Thus the book raises the question of whether we can define the field of our research when what becomes a field is the land where we belong, and the center is where we are now? This idea is important for diaspora scholars like myself. I see how it deeply resonates with my positionality and creates an ambivalence in me. As I see myself as a haunted, deracinated scholar whose perpetual quest becomes defining her relation with the idea of research and the field, the center, and home, and I conclude my review with this embodied ambivalence.
