Disconnections in management theory and practice: poetry, numbers and postmodernism

摘要

This essay is concerned with what Abbinnett described as fundamental to the discourses of social\udscience: truth and its construction. The central problem around which the narrative is built is a\udgrowing disconnection in one area of social science, management research, between how truth is\udfrequently defined and used and the approaches taken to constructing that truth. The result of this is\udan intellectual impurity whereby management research occupies an incoherent intellectual space\udsomewhere between modernism and postmodernism. Our argument is that, for a host of probable\udreasons, management research in many areas is dominated by the search for rational and scientific\udtruth through the use of quantitative methodologies underpinned by a positivist philosophy. The result\udof this is frequently truth diluted rather than truth distilled. The essay discusses different routes to\udestablishing a type of truth, the location of management research within a modern-postmodern\udcontinuum and the implications of this for management researchers. We begin, however, with a brief\uddiscussion of the nature of truth in social science.