Critical Modernists

Conceptual Overview

Emmanuel Kant described the Enlightenment as the escape from self-inflicted tutelage. The Enlightenment project promised an autonomous subject, progressively emancipated from authority and traditional knowledge by insights acquired through rational assessments and scientific methods. Critical modernists have focused on new forms of “tutelage” that distort the Enlightenment project arising in the form of ideology, the narrowing of the concept of reason, and contemporary forms of “self-infliction.” To do this, organizational scholars have relied principally on conceptions drawn from the Frankfurt School of critical theory and especially on the work of Jürgen Habermas.

Despite the promise of the Enlightenment, various writings in critical theory have shown how modernism itself is based on myths, has acquired an arbitrary authority, subordinates social life to technological rationality and instrumental reasoning, and protects new dominant groups' interests. The writings have also shown that these are principally hidden from examination and perpetuated through “consent”—whereby others' interests are accomplished in the apparent attempt to accomplish one's own—and systematically distorted communication where certain meanings are given an arbitrary advantage in communicative processes and key conflicts are suppressed in human interaction and decision making.

Concepts from critical theory have been widely used by critical modernists to support studies of the structures, social relations, and practices in work organizations. Many studies have identified systems and practices of inappropriate control and distorted decision making and have detailed the costs of these for people, organizations, and host societies. Other studies have provided models to foster the development of wider and more democratic participation in organizational decision making, hoping to make organizations more representative of the different interests of workers and other stakeholders and more responsible to the wider community. Research has focused on understanding the relations among power, language, and social/cultural practices, and the treatment or suppression of important conflicts as they relate to the production of individual identities, social knowledge, and social and organizational decision making. Critical modernists encourage the exploration of alternative practices that allow greater democracy and more creative and productive cooperation among stakeholders through reconsidering organizational governance and decision-making processes.

Traditional analyses by critical modernists showed that work organizations have often been guilty of economic exploitation of workers and have created social and environmental harm. Various reproduced ideologies have been shown to make it difficult to see and discuss such exploitations. Consequently, much work has focused on showing how specific interests fail to be realized, owing partly to the inability of people to understand or act on these interests. Four themes reoccur in the numerous and varied writings about organizations working from this perspective: (1) the naturalization of social order, or the way a socially/ historically constructed world would be treated as necessary, natural, rational, and self-evident; (2) the universalization of managerial interests and suppression of conflicting interests; (3) the domination by instrumental reasoning, and the eclipse of competitive reasoning processes; and (4) exploring the nature of hegemony, focusing on the way consent becomes orchestrated.

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