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PARADIGMS AND ORGANIZATIONAL
ANALYSIS
Vedran Omanović, PhD
(Senior Lecturer and Researcher)
September 2014
Department of Business Administration at the School of Business, Economics
and Law,
Gothenburg University
E-mail address:
[email protected]
The Plan


A Discussion about Paradigms and Organizational Analysis
Instructions for the literature seminar(s)
The end of 1960s and the 1970s
Questions about the “knowledge interests”
• What is “knowledge”?
•Knowledge, for whom?
•And, for what purposes?
The end of 1960s and the 1970s
The characteristics of the field of organization studies:
… strong influences of a positivist thinking (paradigm)
Providing
explanations of the status quo, consensus
It seeks to provide rational explanations of social affairs
Knowledge, which can be put in use
Problem-oriented in approach (practical solution)
The social world is composed of relatively concrete empirical artefacts
and relationships, which can be identified, studied and measured.
(social) world is not something, which the individual create – it
exists out there!
The
• Thomas Kuhn / philosopher, natural scientist and
historian of science/ “… the researchers view the world
in a new way, whether the world has changed or not.”
• Clifford Geertz /an interpretative anthropologist/
• Berger and Luckmann /sociologists/ (1967)
• Burrell and Morgan (1979)
• Morgan (1980)
Berger and Luckmann
(1967:61)
• Society is a human product
• Society is an objective reality
• Man is a social product.
Why should (should not) we talk about
different
paradigms/perspectives/methodological
approaches?
Why/Why not/ is it important to understand
alternative point of views?
***
•… being aware of the assumptions upon which our
own perspective(s) are based…
•… it provides a tool for establishing where you are,
where you have been and where it is possible to go
in the future.
•Also, the paradigm idea is useful because it allows
us to understand why research is done the way it
is…
***
• … the paradigms offer alternative views of social
reality, and to understand the nature of all four is
to understand four different views of society.
• The paradigm idea applies equally well to the
practical world of managing. Managers hold
different assumptions about human nature and
about how organizations function. These
assumptions, often implicit, underlie the
managers’ decisions.
(Possible) Aims of our (continuous)
discussion(s):

One aim of our discussion is to development your/our
capabilities for understanding and critiquing theorizing from
the standpoints of alternative approaches.

Another aim is to develop understanding of the changing
historical and institutional context in which knowledge
about organizations is being produced.
Burrell and Morgan´s paradigms

… all theories of organization are based upon a philosophy
of science and a theory of society (B&M, 1979).
A PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
A PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE – conceptualizing social
science in terms of four sets of assumptions related to:
Ontology
Epistemology
Human
nature and
Methodology
A Philosophy of Science
A Theory of Society
Instructions for the literature seminars

An instruction material

Groups
The purpose of the practice/task
For all groups (Due to the literature seminar on September 29)
to
read the four articles carefully (Rosen, 1985; Gibson, 1992; Watson, et al., 1993;
West & Zimmerman, 1987)
to
to
get inside of different ways of conceptualizing,
understand how the authors think about the studied phenomena and what are
consequences of such thinking
The purpose of the practice/task
For each of the articles – you should think about the following:
What
is the article about? - Or What did the author(s) study?
How
is the studied phenomena/concept conceptualized?
How
are, according your interpretations, they thinking? Why?
What
assumptions guide their work (e.g. the assumptions about the nature of the
studied phenomena/the objective-subjective/; the assumptions about human
nature/determinist-voluntarist/?
How
do they understand the purpose(s) of what they are doing/studying (e.g. for
prediction and control, to produce generalizable laws, to describe phenomena, for
emancipation, for fundamental changes …)?
A SPECIFIC TASK TO EACH GROUP…
Thanks for your attention!