Preface

At first glance, it would appear that Management and Organization Studies (MOS) are the least likely places to attract the attention of phenomenologists—or, vice versa, to profit from and thrive on phenomenological accounts. In short, it would appear that these two fields of study are mutually deaf to each other; if not straightforwardly incompatible, then at least incommensurable. The reason for this is that in the social sciences as well in the humanities, there are, generally speaking, two paradigmatic ways of looking at processes, institutions, and events: One is from the outside, from a third person perspective, i.e. from a perspective in which the observer stands apart from what is observed and remains, as much as possible, unaffected by what she observes. The other is from the inside, from a first person perspective. Here, the observer takes the impressions, affections, and intentions that connect her with the observed phenomena precisely as the starting point for social or philosophical analysis. This analysis, then, of course needs to be intersubjectively and dialogically discussed and validated. This latter approach is called ‘phenomenology’, and as this book makes very clear from its title as well as from its contents, there are many different versions of construing and pursuing such an approach, which is why the editors aptly speak of ‘phenomenologies’ in the plural.

Now, the main thrust of MOS generally follows a third person perspective approach, frequently modelled on the natural sciences, trying to produce and analyse models and data that can stand the test of hard sciences. Yet, if we try to really understand what is going on in organizational life, in managerial action, and in the fabrication, change, and devolution of institutions, we quickly realize that we cannot simply do away with the embodied inside, with the first person perspective. Organizations would be ‘dead structures’, devoid of any action without the acting subjects as centres of experience: It is their motivational energy—it is their hopes and fears, aspirations and inclinations, perceptions and affections—that ultimately serves as the motor and fuel of institutional life. Hence, we need some sort of hermeneutical or phenomenological reconstruction of these hopes and fears, attractions and repulsions if we want to fully capture the inner logics of organizations; not just of how they work, but also of where, when, and how they fail to work properly.

Alas, as every sociologist will be quick to point out: it would be completely wrong to rely on the inside, on agents’ intentional, motivational, and affective stance and states alone, because we know by now pretty well that these states and stances are strongly influenced, shaped, and moulded by organizational rules, routines, and processes, by institutionalized expectations and temporalities, etc. Hence, what is needed is a form of ‘perspectival dualism’ (to borrow a term from Nancy Fraser¹) that allows us to go about organizations from both sides simultaneously. In this way, we can gain valid insights into the multiple, embodied, and material as well as cognitional and intellectual forms in which the inside and the outside shape, mould, and transform each other. Such insights are all the more called for in times of heightened social acceleration and progressive digitalization, when steady organizational transformation has become an institutionalized requirement.

It is important to note here that this dualism is perspectival, it does not contradict the phenomenological insight, stressed by the editors in their introduction to this volume, that the strict separation between an inside and an outside world is itself highly questionable. Quite the contrary, it is only when we realize that both perspectives ultimately need to be integrated into one account of ‘the world’, or of social life, that we become capable of reconstructing the myriad ways in which what is perceived as the inside and the outside resonate with and thus mutually co-constitute each other.

By consequence, what is dearly needed in Management and Organizational Studies are approaches that put phenomenologies to work within and for the analysis of organizational life and formation. The most difficult challenge thereby is the task to transform philosophical ideas and concepts into workable instruments to actually embark on empirical analyses; the task to develop something akin to an empirical phenomenological methodology for the social sciences. This Handbook does not claim to be a unified textbook for such empirical research. But it opens up a most impressive and most inspiring multiplicity of routes to get there; it provides ample evidence for the enormous fertility of phenomenological approaches to MOS, and for the power of phenomenological approaches to gain new insights into the ‘inner’ logics of organizational life. The book makes it beautifully clear that phenomenology as a method is not about taking subjective experience as rock bottom evidence, but as contextual evidence the validity of which can be assessed by detracting the ‘merely subjective’ from the more generalizable elements of such experience. Thus in the end, after reading through the multifaceted texts assembled here, it turns out that there could hardly be a more suitable field to explore the need and the possibility of connecting the two perspectives, the inside and the outside of social life, than the study of Management and Organization.