Critical Issues in Organization Science: A Dialogue

A lengthy interview with Stewart Clegg explored several philosophical and theoretical issues relevant to developing alternative approaches to organization science. What Stewart found interesting in Foucault was the nonessentialism in his analysis of power. Stewart thinks it is an empirical matter what the structure of domination might be in organizations. However, it is difficult not to see the significance of class relations, defined through relations of production. Realistically, in concrete empirical settings, people will put up with a great deal as they try to better their life-chances, not because they do not know any better, or are deluded, but because they see no more agreeable alternative under the prevailing structural conditions and see no realistic way of transforming those conditions. Stewart says that a world organization theory does not exist. What is available is an organization theory that is principally, but not wholly rooted in the soil, the institutions, the culture, the rhetoric, the vocabulary, the discourse, of the US as the dominant English language nation.