Chapter # 2

Interrogating concepts

Prestented by: Sara Azam

 Introduction
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This chapter will unfold in three parts…

◻ It will explore the concept of concept, the link between concepts and philosophy,
and the related link between philosophy and social science

◻ It will look at how concepts have been used in management and organization
studies

◻ It will reimagine concepts as methods qua provocation to some of our

methodological practices
 Concepts as creative and reductive: addressing the nature and purposes
of concepts
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◻ Concepts by their very nature rely on abstraction and ambivalence

◻ Concepts are derivative from past knowledge, but are also creative of new knowledge

◻ Not all concepts are created equal, some are more conceptual than others

◻ Concepts, we will argue, provide an invaluable connection between philosophical questions

and social science methods, a problem patent in management and organization studies.
 Cont...
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• Concepts are not ready-made, and do not arrive without

 history
 without genre
 and without organization

• Concepts are made and remade in their very use

• According to Foucault concepts are constructed and validated in the context of who is
speaking, from what institutional site, and from what subject position
 Cont…
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• The paradoxical nature of concepts

 as being both old and new
 as having both an origin and needing to be created

• Will be explored in order to explicate

 what makes a concept a concept,

 what work concepts do,
 and how concepts are organized and organize
 Concepts in philosophy and social science
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◻ What is philosophy?
 According to Deleuze and Guattari “philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and
fabricating concepts”

◻ So Philosophy is nothing without concepts and that concepts are nothing if not philosophical

◻ On the other hand philosophy is a creative process, the sole purpose of which is to contribute
to the solution of problems
 Cont…
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◻ Philosophy should invent new ways of thinking and, hence, the role of the concept is to
“intervene ontologically in the world, and through this intervention create something
interesting, remarkable, or important”

◻ Philosophy then becomes the dual act of disruption and creation, leading us back to life
itself”

◻ Conclusion is in philosophy Concepts should never be considered “ready-made,” rather they

must be constructed afresh in ever use and be specific to every field
 Cont…
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◻ According to Alfred Schutz social science has traditionally seen concepts as

 derivative from our experience of the world

 articulated an understanding of concepts as second order constructs,

 an idea that seems to have been both forgotten and appropriated by management
studies
 Cont…
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◻ Management studies has generally followed social science in its understanding of concepts

◻ more or less emphasizing their derivation from observed social phenomenon

◻ and bracketing questions of absolute validity

 Cont…
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10
 Concepts as abstraction and classification
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◻ From its conception, the word concept displays the seemingly contradicting ideas of
 ‘creating in the mind’
 and ‘taking from the world’

◻ Concept
 An idea of a class of objects, general notion. Concepts are merely the results, rendered
permanent by language, or a previous process of comparison
◻ Conception
 The action or faculty of forming a concept. That which is conceived in the mind; an
idea, notion
 Cont…
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◻ Concepts live and die through abstraction

◻ it is through abstraction that concepts tell both the truth and the lies
◻ Nietzsche taking a broad view of concepts, tells that every word is a concept as it is a signifie
of a larger category, which is, in turn, a reminder of an infinite number of more or less similar
cases
◻ Zygmunt Bauman suggests that the very act of naming, that is the function of language, is an
act of classification and ordering
◻ When using words as representation for the purposes of description or communication, we
abstract from unique individual instances to a generic denotation of the same class
 Cont…
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◻ Classification is fundamental not only to

 how we know the world
 but also to how we control and shape it

◻ To classify, in other words

 is to give the world a structure
 to manipulate its probabilities
 to make some events more likely than some others
 to behave as if events were not random
 or to limit or eliminate randomness of events
 Cont…
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◻ Whether an act of classification or an act of creation, concepts are second order or meta-
discourses

 i.e. constructs of constructs or meanings of meanings

 and, therefore, performative at several level

◻ According to Nietzsche our drive to form concepts is not to understand the world but rather
to organize it.
 Concepts as thick and thin
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◻ Concepts have also be described as varying, for want of a better word, in quality

 as extensive or intensive

 and as thick or thin

 Cont…
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◻ Extensive concepts are generic ideas that can be defined by their use as a label or
category
◻ for examplethe term ‘research’ might be a label applied to that which is published in a
refereed journal or that which falls under the categories required by university metrics

◻ Intensive concepts do something new, they think beyond the actual, and they require us
to think or act differently
◻ for example the term ‘research’ may be used to reframe seemingly unrelated data as a
body of knowledge or reframe a particular communication as inquiry
 Cont…
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◻ Thin concepts
 tend2 to be either descriptive (e.g. length) or evaluative (e.g. bad) in nature
 Thin concepts tend to oversimplify and generalize
 thin concept to refer to its inferior counterpart, refer to the process of weakening a
concept, that is destroying its intensity and thickness, as thinning, a topic
 Cont…
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◻ Thick concepts
 are both descriptive and evaluative (e.g. kindness)
 Thick concepts are more situationally specific and multifaceted
 thick concept to refer to a concept that is both extensive and intensive and
that both describes and evaluates
 thick concept is one that is both richly descriptive and evaluative (thick),
creates something new in its deep situatedness (intensive), and has
conceptual generalizability (extensive)
 The politics of thickening and thinning of concepts
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◻ The thickening of concepts, akin to the search for meaning in text, must be undertaken
through a restoration of meaning based on a critical trust

◻ Ricoeur referred to as a hermeneutics of faith and through a demystification of illusion

and an opposition to the sacred i.e. a hermeneutics of suspicion, ibid(the same source)
 Cont…
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◻ Nietzsche cautioned against the trusting of concepts and claimed “what is

needed above all is an absolute skepticism toward all inherited concepts”

◻ Indeed, wonder seems an appropriate response to an object that surprises us,

and organization can be both glorious and grotesque, and which invokes all
kinds of affects Hence, “if we claim that organizations should be a
philosophical subject, then it is because organization makes us anxious, curious,
angry, hopeful doubtful and confused”
 Cont…
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◻ a thinning of concepts is undertaken through faith without suspicion or suspicion without

faith. In absence of belief in or care for the object, meaning is not enhanced but reduced.
This reduction can occur by demarcating concepts in terms of their causes (e.g.
psychological or social antecedents), their function (e.g. affective, ideological,
technical), or their genesis (e.g. individual, historical)

◻ For instance, a critical reading of the traditional histories of concepts would have us
understanding these histories as ‘legitimating’ what is already known and closing down
of alternatives

◻ The history of concepts is not the “stone-by-stone construction of an edifice,” but rather
“a field of statements where they appeared
 Concepts as commodities: addressing the thinning of concepts in
management studies
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◻ From the vantage point of the last decade of the millennium Deleuze and Guattari were
deeply concerned about the commodification of concepts
◻ According to Deleuze and Guattari (1994) philosophy has moved through three phases
in relation to the use of concepts:
 A first age as an encyclopedia of concepts, the cataloguing and perfecting of
universal abstract concepts
 A second age as a pedagogy of concepts, the training in the practice of concepts,
how concepts are formed, organized, and legitimized in situ
 A third age of the concept, that of commercial professional training, in which
concepts are commodified by ‘experts’ and traded in markets.
 Concepts as fashion in management science
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◻ The concepts originate and terminate in such away they are labeled as fashion and fads
and dismissed as being the chattels of management consultants and gurus.
◻ Bortand Shiller-Merkins tracked how many and which kind of concepts have been
successful in the field of organizational studies and concludes that concepts that allow
scholars to:
 Balance a demand for both novelty and continuity
 Align with dominant logic of positivism because they reduce uncertainty within
research and publishing institutions
◻ Bort and Kieser raised questions as to whether fashion is negative or positive, whether it
is unavoidable, and whether it is affected by institutional technologies e.g. journal
ranking. The answer to all these questions isyes.
 Cont…
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◻ Academic knowledge is driven by “fashion” and “concepts are carriers of

fashion”.

◻ Concepts are not only carriers of knowledge; they are carriers of and constitute
knowledge, ideologies, subjects, and subject positions.
 Two examples of concept use in management studies
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◻ From an Aristotelian lens

 justice is a virtue that is distinguished from other virtues as being concerned, not
only with individual character and capacity but also with the condition of other
persons and fairness and equality within communities
◻ In management studies, the ancient distinction of justice as fairness has been reduced to
two concepts
 the concept of distributive justice (fairness of outcomes)
 and procedural justice (fairness of process that lead to outcomes)
 However, a third concept was later included, that of interpersonal justice (fairness
of interpersonal treatment and provision of information)
 Cont…
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◻ social scientists need to merely describe and analyze individual’s perceptual cognition of
justice. This allowing for two salutary observations
◻ first, that the thinning of the concept of justice is premised on the spurious distinction
between facts and values.
◻ As noted by Ricoeur any word, indeed “voiced sound endowed with significance,” can
be understood as an act of interpretation (i.e. “to say something of something”) and
therefore ripe with contextually embedded meanings and values. In the world as we
experience it, facts and values cannot be fully separated
 Cont…
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◻ Second the organizational justice, formed as it is a descriptive social science concept, is

presented as agnostic as the service to which it is put

◻ It is hard to imagine the scientist who, according to Ricoeur unlike the philosopher who
cannot avoid the question of absolute validity of the object,

◻ “can and must practice this method of bracketing … of absolute reality and or every question
concerning the absolute.”
 Whose culture is it anyway?
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 In Culture’s Consequences, according to Hofstede

 culture is “collective programming of the mind”
 and explicitly identifies this as resembling Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus

 He presents a figure in the form of a triangle that depicts how collective mental
programming relates to three levels of human mental programming
 universal
 collective
 and individual
 Conclusion
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◻ Concepts are fundamental to our understanding of the world

◻ concepts are simultaneously educative and articulative but also organizing and
limiting
◻ Concepts emerge as epistemology; they become a way in which we know and
formulate the world
◻ Concepts also emerge as method; indeed methods are what stabilizes concepts
and make them appear as real
◻ Concepts not only emerge as ontology; according to Deleuze, their role is to
“intervene ontologically in the world, and through this intervention create
something interesting, remarkable, or important”