Subjectivity

Conceptual Overview

The foundation of the modern view of subjectivity was laid out by the philosopher René Descartes, who set out to establish what is essential to the human being. After stripping away all aspects of the human he thought were not essential (such as the body), he came to the conclusion that it was the fact that a person was thinking that made that person human. This led Descartes to suggest a sharp split between the thinking subject and an external world of objects that subject thinks about. Following Descartes, subjectivity is defined as how an actor who thinks about and perceives an objective world. This approach often leads researchers to make a clear split between subjective perceptions or interpretations and objective facts. It has also influenced cognitive approaches to organization studies, which seek to study subjectivity by investigating an individual's perceptions and experiences as manifest in thinking patterns and brain activity.

This sharp split between the thinking subject and the world of objects was called into question by phenomenology. The pioneer of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, argued that it was impossible to make a split between the thinking subject and the world of objects. This was because the thinking subject is always involved in the production and reproduction of the world of objects. This insight led phenomenologists to focus on the subject acting in the world. Phenomenology had a major impact on the seminal social scientific work of Alfred Schutz, as well as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. For Berger and Luckmann, social reality is not something that is just out there waiting to be discovered by a thinking subject. Rather, social reality is something that must be actively constructed by interested and knowledgeable actors. This means social reality is the product of our subjective perception, understanding, and interaction. Drawing on phenomenology, David Silverman argues that organizations are the product of the ongoing meaning making and interaction of actors in the world. This inspired countless subsequent studies demonstrating how many aspects of organizations, including technology, strategy, structure, and culture, are the product of the ongoing subjective understandings and interpretations of a range of actors. Subsequent work inspired by phenomenology examined how organizations are the product of ongoing subjective performances. In his study, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman shows how individuals act out identities through a whole range of small-scale dramas of social life. The work of Goffman has inspired a broad swath of studies of subjectivity in the workplace. For instance, David Collinson shows how workers actively engage with and perform an imposed corporate culture regime and through this performance can transform this culture.

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