Speaker: Philippe Lorino (ESSEC)
Time: Friday, 8 November at 9 am EST / 2 pm London. This webinar is scheduled for 90 minutes, including Q&A.
Registration: Please register using Zoom link here to receive a personalized link and a reminder prior to the event.
Western culture is founded on rationalist idealism, according to which rational representations can have a status of truth to which "simple" experience cannot lay claim. The more complex and uncertain situations become, particularly when facing grand challenges, the more this dogma leads to serious setbacks. We'll be looking at alternative approaches, inspired by American pragmatism... and by the experience of the many disasters to which the rationalist blind assurance leads our societies. Summarizing, the pragmatist approach favours research on organizations that is pluralistic, exploratory, experimental and falsifiable, and committed to social and ecological transformation. It assigns a humble status to theories, seen as "simple" tools, aiming for practical effectiveness in the pursuit of social transformation rather than established truth. We'll see how key pragmatist concepts may be used to build critical and performative analyses of some organizational issues.
Recommended reading:
- Lowe, A., Nama, Y., Bryer, A., Chabrak, N., Dambrin, C., Jeacle, I., Lind, J., Lorino, P., Robson, K., Bottausci, C., Spence, C., Carter, C. and Svetlova, E. (2020), "Problematizing profit and profitability: discussions", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 1233(4), 753-793
- Lorino, P. (2022). A pragmatist critique of the economic theory of the commons. Journal of Openness, Commons & Organizing, 1(1), 11-15
About the speaker
Philippe Lorino is Emeritus Distinguished Professor at ESSEC Business School and adviser to the French Nuclear Safety Authority. He has served as a senior civil servant in the French Government and as a manager in an international company. He draws from pragmatist philosophy to study organizations as organizing processes, exploring uncertain futures, involving meaning-making pluralist inquiries, adopting semiotic approaches to managerial instruments. He has published articles in top-ranking journals (Accounting, Organizations and Society; Organization Studies; Scandinavian Journal of Management; Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal). His book "Pragmatism and Organization Studies" (Oxford University Press) won the 2019 EGOS Book Award.
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Ibrat Djabbarov
Imperial College London
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