Philosophy and science in business

Arun Kumar Sharma

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Is the business research linear and
accumulative?
• Paradigms shift in research
• The end of the paradigm of rationality (Max Weber)
• Taylor to discourse (Foucault)
• Greater reliance on local solutions, self-learning and
participatory methods, focus groups, brainstorming, and
participatory methods
• A feeling that all findings are ad hoc and those who are
part of the system can guide the system better
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Management and management thought?
 An activity whose purpose is “to achieve desired results through the efficient
allocation and utilization of human and material resources.”
(Management theory is required for all sectors of activities: economic,
defence, social sector, state departments …, and only in the industrial
sector)
 Management thought is about the functions, purpose and scope of management as
an academic activity.
 That cannot be separated from other social and philosophical ideas
 Research and management thought are reciprocally related
 As the environment has changed the nature of business has also changed

From: Daniel A. Wren, Arthur G. Bedeian (2020), The Evolution of Management Thought, John Wiley & Sons.
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An array of management thoughts
• Aristotle – the work of a manager is to get the desired work from
subordinates
• Fredrick Taylor: Industrial workers are underworking – “soldiering”,
“hanging it out”; through training a man can do highest class of work with
highest efficiency and at a fast pace
• Elton Mayo – Social relations school: draws attention to groups and their
norms
• John Urry – Postmodernism: strategies to attain goals interact with the goals;
undermines the whole concept of experts
• S. K. Chakraborty, IIM Calcutta, draws heavily from Gita
• Subhash Sharma, Indus Business Academy, Bangalore and IIMA – Corporate
Rishi Model 4
Where do they focus?
• Relationships based on social structure (institutions)
• Virtues as defined by the community
• Scientific management departed from virtues tradition
• Leadership research
• Social relations
• Postmodern conditions
• Spiritual response and human values

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 Plato and Aristotle
• Plato (c. 428–c. 348 BCE) worked through dialogues, i.e., by
asking philosophical questions
• His theory was abstract and utopian
• Four Cardinal Virtues (Plato)—wisdom, justice, fortitude, and
temperance (in Hindi gyan, nyaay, drirhtaa aur aatm sanyam)
• Aristotle, his student, reversed the ideas of Plato
• Aristotle (384–322 BCE) developed empirical/mathematical
theories
• Plato looked upwards to the heavens, attempted to explore mind,
but Aristotle looked towards the world (I equate them to Hegel
and Marx) 6
To quote Raimo Nurmi:
• “For Aristotle the work of a manager is to contemplate,
participate in politics, get wealth, acquire, own and direct slaves,
and delegate execution to his subordinate”
(Ponder on how different is the situation and management of today.)
• Marx was the first intellectual and researcher to assert that man
and his consciousness (knowledge) are related
• What is real, scientific and ethical in feudal epoch is not so in a
capitalist society
• Can Polyhydron Pvt. Ltd., Belgaum be run with slaves rather that
empowered employees (IIMB Management Review, 2013?)
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Organization of economic-political activities based
on collective consciousness in ancient India
• Patriarchy and family model
• Values and norms internalized by all
• The Jajmani model – a theory of interdependence
• Rights and justice
• Visible deviance (slackness) to be defined and controlled collectively
• Virtues and dharma
•

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Fayol and Weber

A. K. Sharma

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Scientific management
• Early part of 20th century in Europe - faith in science
• Empirical and experimental methods
• Taylorism and Fordism – speed and productivity
• Training
• Further studies of science developed the human relations
school, needs perspectives and perspectives on leadership, but
with the same focus on productivity/profit; self reflection of
science leads to postmodernization

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Modern management theory, Principles of
Management, p.77

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Henry Ford and Model T (From History of
Management Thought)

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Present day relevance
• As late as 1982 in a paper published in the Academy of Management Journal,
Edwin A. Locke established the importance of Taylor’s philosophy of scientific
management
• Scientific management covers:
• Time and motion study;
• Standardized (and not the worker’s own tool kit) tools and procedures in the
organization;
• The task (the goal-setting, amount of work one worker has to do in a day);
• The money bonus (30-100% higher wages);
• Individualized work;
• Management responsibility for training;
• Scientific selection (of men); and
• Shorter working hours and rest pauses
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Natural and systematic soldiering
“The greater part of systematic soldiering ... is done by the men with the
deliberate object of keeping their employers ignorant of how fast work
can be done. So universal is soldiering for this purpose, that hardly a
competent workman can be found in a large establishment, whether he
works by the day or on piecework, contract work or under any of the
ordinary systems of compensating labor, who does not devote a
considerable part of his time to studying just how slowly he can work and
still convince his employer that he is going at a good pace. The causes for
this are, briefly, that practically all employers determine upon a
maximum sum which they feel it is right for each of their classes of
employees to earn per day, whether their men work by the day or piece.”
Features of SM: Organization of labor

• Taylor dealt with the fundamentals of the organization of the labor

process and of control over it.
• The later schools of Hugo Munsterberg, Elton Mayo, and others of
this type dealt primarily with the adjustment of the worker to the
ongoing production process as that process was designed by the
industrial engineer.
• The successors to Taylor are to be found in engineering and work
design, and in top management; the successors to Munsterberg and
Mayo are to be found in personnel departments and schools of
industrial psychology and sociology.

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Ontology, epistemology and axiology in SM
• Realism rather than idealism
• Positivism: observations and
counting/calculations
• Collective interests of capitalists and workers,
(though contested by workers’ unions)

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Henry Fayol
Five functions of management 1916 publication General and
Industrial Administration
1. Planning
2. Organizing
3. Staffing
4. Controlling
5. Directing

Governed by theory and pragmatism. Axiology:

efficiency and business profit 17
Leadership approaches

1. Traits approach 7. Transformational

2. Skills approach leadership
3. Behavioral approach 8. Authentic leadership
4. Situational approach 9. Servant leadership
5. Path-goal theory 10.Adaptive leadership
6. Leader-member 11.Psychodynamic approach
exchange theory (LMX) 12.Other/new approaches
There is good amount of literature on each
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Ontology, epistemology and axiology
• Ontology: Realism rather than idealism
• Epistemology: Positivism rather than
interpretivism; scale construction, path analysis etc.
• Axiology: Organization theorists/psychologists are
there to serve the interest of the business, and
interests of society and people only secondarily

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In qualitative turn, OB moved towards
phronetic theory
“to clarify and deliberate about the problems and risks
we face and to outline how things may be done
differently, in full knowledge that we cannot find
multiple answers to these questions or even a single
version of what the questions are.” Flyvbjerg, quoted in
Sarah J. Tracy, p. 4.

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Maslow has a rampant influence on
psychology of motivation
• Positive psychology
• Evaluative D (deficiency)-cognition (first four of the needs
hierarchy)
• B (or being)-cognition of self actualization – deficiency
cognition or being cognition
• He first gave the Theory Z in response to McGregor’s Theory
X and Theory Y, before William Ouchi’s Theory Z to show how
American business can meet the Japanese challenge, 1981
• Accorded due importance to social conditions of freedom,
transparency, justice etc.
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Maslow’s B-values (Being cognition)

• Truth (honesty; reality; nakedness; simplicity; richness; oughtness;

beauty; pure, clean and unadulterated; completeness; essentiality).
• Goodness (rightness; desirability; oughtness; justice; benevolence;
honesty);
• Beauty (rightness; form; aliveness; simplicity; richness; wholeness;
perfection; completion; uniqueness; honesty);
• Wholeness (unity; integration; tendency to one-ness;
interconnectedness; simplicity; organization; structure; dichotomy-
transcendence; order);
• Aliveness (process; non-deadness; spontaneity; self-regulation; full-
functioning);
• Uniqueness (idiosyncrasy; individuality; non-comparability; novelty);
• Perfection (necessity; just-right-ness; just-so-ness; inevitability;
suitability; justice; completeness; "oughtness"); 22
Cont.
• Completion (ending; finality; justice; "it's finished"; fulfillment; finis and
telos; destiny; fate);
• Justice (fairness; orderliness; lawfulness; "oughtness");
• Simplicity (honesty; nakedness; essentiality; abstract, essential, skeletal
structure);
• Richness (differentiation, complexity; intricacy);
• Effortlessness (ease; lack of strain, striving or difficulty; grace; perfect,
beautiful functioning);
• Playfulness (fun; joy; amusement; gaiety; humor; exuberance;
effortlessness);
• Self-sufficiency (autonomy; independence; not-needing-other-than-itself-
in-order-to-be-itself; self-determining; environment-transcendence;
separateness; living by its own laws). 23
From:
Principles of Management,
Chapter 14
Ontology, epistemology and axiology
• Ontology: Realism though critical of Freud’s scientific
approach and influenced by Indian Yoga theory
• Epistemology: Perspectivism or discourse
• Axiology: Human happiness, not profit; not even limited to
welfare of workers

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Elton Mayo: with his focus on human
relations
• Ontology: Realism
• Epistemology: Positivism - experimental
method – experiments on lighting, leave
and concession (Western Electrical
Company)
• Axiology: Profit/efficiency/effectiveness
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Frederick Herzberg: hygiene and motivators

Ontology: Realism
Epistemology: Positivism –
survey/questionnaire – asking when did
the workers feel most happy and
unhappy and why
Axiology: Interests of the company
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Is Douglas
McGregor
Correct?
What are
O,E, and A?

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Postmodern conditions
• Post-industrial society
• Globalization
• Mobility and scapes
• Declining importance of social structure – in a way,
end of sociology
• State under attack from both top and bottom
• Uncertainty and risks

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Implications for researchers
• You are dealing with a complex situation
• There are multiple factors to be taken into consideration – as the
nature of capitalism, state and society have changed
• Globalization
• Complex interactions
• Values are more important than seeking truth
• This means you have to take sides
• There are unpredictable consequences of your interventions/actions
• Lenses/perspectives

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Thus business research has constantly
changed the research approaches
• Time and motion study
• Videos used
• Models – CPM and PERT
• Experiments
• Surveys – cross-sectional, longitudinal, focused
• Telephonic interviews
• Herzberg – asked very few questions to develop his popular theory
• Google monkey
• Digitalization of surveys and increasing role of mobile phones
• Computer simulation and 4- D designs in which design determines the next approach to
design in construction business

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What did Postmodernization produce?
• Ontology: Idealism/discourses
• Epistemology: Interpretivism, proteanism
• Axiology: Interests of the subaltern – your choice
groups – rather than truth

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Uses of statistics – simple to complex; logic to
fuzzy logic
• Descriptive, exploratory and diagnostic studies
• Scale construction
• Hypotheses testing
• Univariate and multivariate statistical methods
• Determining sample size and confidence intervals
• Significance tests
• Regression and ANOVA
• Discriminant analysis
• Differences and slopes/ log odds
• Model fit statistics
• Non-parametric statistics
• Computer applications 33
Research is also getting more and more
qualitativized
• Etic and emic perspectives (i.e., outsiders’ and insiders’
perspectives)
• Qualitative researchers work with words while quantitative
researchers work with numbers
• Qualitative methodology
• Experience/heuristic/intuitive
• Narrative analysis (with or without computers)
• Grounded theory approach
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Now suggest some research problems
• Which we can be used to explain what we have learnt
• To be used as illustrations to what we are going to do
in this course
• Are the following good business research problems?
How do we promote Avitourism in Jim Corbett National Park without
violating the environmental norms?
How can India promote the Just Energy transition?
Does a spiritual turn of a business organization has a money value?
Argue in favour of building a spiritual climate.

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Illustration of the quantitative: Commercial
Battle of the Sexes
• Ontological realism, positivism, with an aim to remove gender
• A study of gender (Problem)
• Study of sex roles in advertising (Objective)
• Sex of persons appearing in the Ad, separately for products used by men
and women (Research questions)
• Three countries – Australia, Mexico, and the United States
• Data
• Percentages
• Chi-square: 19.73; p<.001
• Australia reveals fewer sex-roles differences and the Mexican more
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An example from Malhotra and Dash
Product advertised used by Persons appearing in the Ad (%)
Women Men
Females 25.0 4.0
Males 6.8 11.8
Either 68.2 84.2

How do we calculate chi-square?

Can we do some other thing also?
Basic ideas of inferential statistics
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Evaluation
• Average of two quizzes – 20, one at the end of the 6th and second at
the end of the 12th lecture
• End of the course – 40
• Project – 40 (last two days)

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Thank you!

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