Construction and use of concepts in organization studies: towards a social and historical perspective/Construcao e uso de conceitos em estudos organizacionais: por uma perspectiva social e historica

The aim of this paper is to discuss the problem of conceptual definition in the organizational studies field, under the social and historical viewpoints. To this end, we start from broader reflections about the act of conceptualizing the scientific work studying the formation of the specialized vocabulary of the sociology of language and the description of aspects concerning the historicity of concepts. Accordingly, the concept is simultaneously considered a phenomenon socially related and historically (re) constructed, capable of revealing different social structures and their relationship to the lexicon of meanings that was constituted throughout time. In order to support our arguments, we exemplar ily argue about the concept of organization, as it was socially and historically composed by American sociologists and founders of the "theory of organizations" field. For final remarks, we point out practical problems that involve the way researchers define organizational concepts that articulate the scientific practice in the field.