Beyond Knowing in Organizational Inquiry
批判现代主义知识观在组织研究中的主导地位，指出语言并非反映现实而是建构现实，组织是共同创造的产物，学术与实践知识无高低之分，挑战客观知识主张。
Organizational study is largely a child of modernist conceptions of knowledge, which include visions of an independent subject matter, specific methods of study, and ideal organizational functioning (Gergen and Thatchenkery, 1996). Of pivotal significance is the assumption that organizational inquiry can yield potentially valid insights into organizational functioning. Or, more pointedly, empirical research on organizations should yield valid knowledge of its subject matter. Such assumptions are also prevalent among scholars deeply invested in organizational critique. The critics typically presume that their portrayals of organizational life are objective rather than subjective, and derive from a more or less accurate assay of the world. Yet, the past several decades of dialogue—variously termed poststructural, postmodern, post foundational and social constructionist— have left the modernist conceptions of knowledge in shambles. As suggested by these dialogues, our languages of description and explanation do not so much map an independent reality, as they create the very sense of its existence as such. Organizations are not ‘there in nature’, their functioning to be revealed through systematic research; rather, we create together the very idea of ‘an organization’, and whatever characteristics we attribute to it. Our assumptions about organizations (including our values) are ultimately written into our accounts, and in this way what passes as knowledge essentially reflects the views and visions of those who inquire. As these dialogues also suggest, the hierarchical arrangement by which the academic discipline is situated as the generative source of knowledge, and the practitioner as the potentially enlightened user, is deeply flawed. Both professions—scholarly and practical—generate a myriad of conceptions, varyingly linked to practices and ideals. There is no means of determining the objectively superior view, save through recourse to some particular construction of the real and the good. Claims to socially uninflected knowledge are not only unwarranted, but remove from the Volume 10(3): 453–455 Copyright © 2003 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)