Teoria de la organizacion como una ciencia interpretativa

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chapter 2
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O R G A N I Z AT I O N T H E O RY AS A N INTERPRETIVE SCIENCE
mary johatch and dvora yanow

Interpretive approaches to science are found in many social sciences, including organizational studies. They trace their antecedents, sometimes consciously, sometimes by implication, to a set of philosophical arguments that developed largely in the ®rst part of the twentieth century in Europe (initially in Germany, at midcentury in France, with the occasional involvement ofEnglish philosophers). These arguments have even earlier rootsÐin the eighteenth-century work of Kant, in the ancient Greek philosophers, and in 1,500-year-old Jewish textual practices. To talk about `science' is to ask certain kinds of questions, involving claimsmaking about the subject(s) of study. A colleague, student, or client can reasonably inquire about the bases for these claims, `How do youknow that which you are claiming about this organization? What is the foundation (or ``truth value'', in philosophical language) for your claim(s)?' Answers to such epistemological questions themselves rest on ontological claims about the reality status of the subject of study: How does its character, as an entity in the social world, affect our ability to know it? Is an organization real in thesame way that a table is real? The answers also

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mary jo hatch and dvora yanow

entail methodological matters: claims about the character of an organization's reality and about the knowability of that reality implicate certain procedures of discovery, which themselves establish and undergird truth value claims. As interpretive philosophies developed in dialogue with other nineteenth-and twentieth-century philosophical arguments about similar questions and claims, we begin this essay with a brief overview of the context out of which they grew, touch on their central ideas, and then turn to their manifestations in organizational studies..........................................................................................................................................................................................

2.1 Historical Background

Imagine: you are sitting under a tree and an apple falls on your head. How do you explain that event? In Rome in 239 you might have answered, `Zeus and Hera were throwing thunderbolts; one hit the tree and it knocked the apple off.' In 1739 in London, thanks to Newton, you would likely no longer appeal to suchmetaphysical explanations, offering instead a `scienti®c law'ÐgravityÐfor your explanation. Newton's observations and those of other late ®fteenth to early eighteenth-century thinkers, such as Copernicus and Galileo, laid the foundation for a conception of `science' that replaced religion as the source of certain knowledge. That conception still holds today. It rests, ®rst, on the understanding that humanspossess powers of reasoning that they can apply systematically to the world surrounding them: they need not rely on the authority of tradition (or charisma, in a Weberian view) vested in religious or monarchic leaders. Second, the application of that reasoning yields a set of `laws' or principles that are considered to be universalÐthat is, holding at all places at all times for all persons (i.e.regardless of class or religion, race or gender, paving the way for non-Protestants, non-Europeans, and women to be understood as having personhood). Third, this universality means that a certain regularity or order inheres in natural and physical events (discoverable through the application of human reason, point one above). This, in turn, means that these events can be predictedÐand, hence,...