Reason in practice: A unique role for a ˜Philosophy of Management'

The body of work pre s ented in this issue and the next (Volume 12, Issue 1) arose from a question both editors had separately harboured for some years, namely: what role can philosophy play in the practice and conceptualisation of management? Contemporary discourses within the academic discipline of management have tended to err on the side of science, either in the striving for replicative and iterative advancement in the proof-laden establishment of ‘facts’ or, what is worse perhaps, the iterative and replicative containment of knowledge within languages or discourse that force the writer and the reader into narrow confines of thought – and thus narrow lanes by which to survey the field of enquiry. Indeed the extent of one’s vision itself becomes constrained such that only those fields readily open to view from the confines of the discourse’s perspective are ever regarded as legitimate; science has a remarkable degree of parochialism built into its very axiology. Unfortunately so too has logic, the ultimate science of philosophy. As the Cambridge mathematician and Harvard metaphysician A.N. Whitehead concluded, “the final outlook of Philosophic thought cannot be based upon the exact statements that form the basis of the special sciences. The exactness is a fake”. (1941: 700) Never has Whitehead’s assertion been more true and yet more disregarded.