Genealogical Analysis

Conceptual Overview

Michel Foucault borrowed the original idea of GA from Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy. GA is a meticulous and patient documentary in the sense that it is concerned with a highly detailed and concrete exploration of history through locating words, actions, artifacts, and so on in their proper chronological order and contexts. In this way, GA seeks to obtain alternative understandings of how and why present-day organizational phenomena emerged. The researcher in GA is akin to a detective who traces the various clues that lead to the emergence of various projects, decisions, innovations, or other events. From this perspective, people are perceived as morally imprisoned by their own tacit and taken-for-granted ways of talking, acting, knowing, and being. By reconstructing history, GA seeks to make people conscious of who they are, where they come from, and why things are the way they are. This form of critical analysis provides researchers with the opportunity and means of reflecting on the self by using history to make the unconscious conscious, as noted by Mark Haugaard in 1997.

Genealogy relies on five basic concepts that are central to applying this method: contingency, descent, emergence, power, and archaeology. Contingency describes how events should be perceived, as noted by Gavin Kendall and Gary Wickham in 1999. Events are contingent on what came before; thus, events are always only a possible outcome of history—not the necessary or only outcome.

One must further distinguish between the concepts of descent and emergence in describing these contingencies, as noted by Foucault in 1984. Descent is linked to identity in the sense that values and perceptions of the self are historical constructs shaped in specific historical circumstances. The values behind choice and assessment are, in other words, not given; people are taught and socialized into how to behave[Page 548] and make value judgments in specific ways. Emergence, on the other hand, is a relation between forces that emphasizes that people's words and actions must always be viewed in relation to other actors and circumstances. In emergence, different identities and circumstances are in play. It follows that emergence is never finished or complete, as it moves through new relations, producing new objects, new actions, and new ways of speaking.

By describing the circumstances in which certain phenomena emerged, GA seeks to overcome, if only in part, the problem of moral imprisonment noted above, as it allows one to question the values embedded and embodied in societies, institutions, and organizations, as noted by Bent Flyvbjerg in 2001. This kind of knowledge is of critical importance because GA presumes that history is driven by unequal relations of power that are inscribed in ways of talking, acting, and being. They are also inscribed in the writing of history where contesting arguments, viewpoints, meanings, and actions are too often marginalized; it is most often the winners who write history.

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