Structuralism, structural anthropology, and social theory

Abstract

This chapter presents French structuralism and its implications for business ethics and philosophy of management. The chapter focuses on Ferdinand de Saussure and his followers, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan. The structuralist movement in French philosophy and in the human- and social sciences emerged during the 1950s and 1960s. The structuralist anthropology approach is based on a generalization of the structuralist analysis of language to all the human and social sciences. Indeed, it may also be possible to use these kinds of analysis in the theory of organization and business ethics. Structuralist analysis of organizations is about uncovering the symbolic meanings and dimensions of discourses in systemic connections. The foundation of structuralism is the recognition of a social order of structures, symbolic orders, and unconscious representations of meaning in symbolic and imaginary systems. We can say that structuralism offers a theoretical basis for the analysis of belief systems and myth in organizations that constitute the necessary ideological basis for the work of organizations. Accordingly, structuralism proposes a general methodology for the study of meaning and form of organizational systems.