Organisation Theory and Postmodern Thinking: The uncertain place of Human Agency

Abstract

Postmodernist formulations are increasingly being entertained throughout the social sciences—creating turbulence for those fields who traditionally draw from the social and human sciences. Fundamental ‘troths’ are being revisited and taken- for-granted assumptions are being reconsidered. Much of the postmodernist formulations leave us an image of the individual (to be read ‘subject’) whose existence and constitution is a textual creation, and whose intentionally is dissolved in the liquor that is the text. The integrated self is replaced with, at best, a fragmented self. In the postmodernists' declaration of ‘the death-of-the-subject’ putatively there is a declaration of the death of a number of fields and a need for significant reform in others. Using, as an example, the current discourse in organisation theory and administrative theory this paper highlights how postmodernist formulations brush against the grain of the existing paradigms of these fields and in so doing, draws attention to aspects of our theorising that have been neglected or obscured.