Making Organization Research

Matter: Power, Values and Phronesis

If we want to empower and re-enchant organization research, we need to do three things. First, we must drop all pretence, however indirect, at emulating the success of the natural sciences in producing cumulative and predictive theory, for their approach simply does not work in organization research or any of the social sciences (for the full argument, see Flyvbjerg 2001). Second, we must address problems that matter to groups in the local, national, and global communities in which we live, and we must do it in ways that matter; we must focus on issues of context, values, and power, as advocated by great social scientists from Aristotle and Machiavelli to Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu. Finally, we must effectively and dialogically communicate the results of our research to our fellow citizens and carefully listen to their feedback. If we do this - focus on specific values and interests in the context of particular power relations - we may successfully transform organization research into an activity performed in public for organizational publics, sometimes to clarify, sometimes to intervene, sometimes to generate new perspectives, and always to serve as eyes and ears in ongoing efforts to understand the present and to deliberate about the future. We may, in short, arrive at organization research that matters.

What I describe below as ‘phronetic organization research’ is an attempt to arrive at such organization research. I would like to emphasize at the outset, however, that this effort should be considered as one among many possible, as a first approximation that will undoubtedly require further theoretical and methodological refinement, just as it will need to be developed through further practical employment in actual organizational studies. Despite such qualifications, I hope the reader will agree that given what is at stake - organization research that matters - the attempt at reforming such research is worthwhile.

What is Phronetic Organization Research?

Phronetic organization research is an approach to the study of organizations based on a contemporary interpretation of the classical Greek concept phronesis. Following this approach, phronetic organization researchers study organizations and organizing with an emphasis on values and power. In this paper I will first clarify what phronesis and phronetic organization research is. Second, I will attempt to tease out the methodological implications of this research approach.1

Aristotle is the philosopher of phronesis par excellence. In Aristotle's words phronesis is an intellectual virtue that is ‘reasoned, and capable of action with regard to things that are good or bad for man’ (Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, hereafter abbreviated as N.E., 1976: 1140a24–b12, 1144b33–1145a11). Phronesis concerns values and goes beyond analytical, scientific knowledge (episteme) and technical knowledge or know how (techne) and it involves judgements and decisions made in the manner of a virtuoso social actor. I will argue that phronesis is commonly involved in practices of organization and, therefore, that any attempts to reduce organization research to episteme or techne or to comprehend them in those terms are misguided.

Aristotle was explicit in his regard of phronesis as the most important of the three intellectual virtues: episteme, techne, and phronesis. Phronesis is most important because it is that activity by which instrumental rationality is balanced by value-rationality, to use the terms of German sociologist Max Weber; and because, according to Aristotle and Weber, such balancing is crucial to the viability of any organization, from the family to the state. A curious fact can be observed, however. Whereas episteme is found in [Page 371]the modern words ‘epistemology’ and ‘epistemic’, and techne in ‘technology’ and ‘technical’, it is indicative of the degree to which scientific and instrumental rationality dominate modern thinking and language that we no longer have a word for the one intellectual virtue, phronesis, which Aristotle and other founders of the Western tradition saw as a necessary condition of successful social organization, and the most important prerequisite to such organization.

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