Editorial: Humbug, Ba and Human Experience

Abstract

As thos e who have r e ad Vol. 9.1 will be aware, Philosophy of Management is at the beginning of a new phase in its existence. The Founding Editor, Nigel Laurie, has long argued that rather than being on the periphery of management, philosophy is central to all management worthy of the name; management is about “reason in practice”. And, by the way, this is not just a matter for business ethics, as some might assume. Unfortunately, as Tom Donaldson recently pointed out at the journal’s Oxford conference in July this year, if you were to place even as well-established a journal as the Academy of Management Review in front of a boardroom, you’d probably be “hooted down or, worse, people would vote with their feet”. The same would be true of many other academic management journals, which have an assumed underlying premise that management should be studied as a science. We can of course see the benefits of some work that attempts to treat management phenomena in this way, though we do worry that the difficulties of this approach are underestimated and not well reflected in the literature. However, in our view the approach can easily become overly exaggerated – one might almost call this “science envy”. A problem with science envy, in this sense, is that it fails to appreciate something that practicing natural scientists themselves are mostly aware of. To quote the Cambridge mathematician and Harvard philosopher A.N. Whitehead, “The final outlook of philosophic thought cannot be based upon the exact statements that form the basis of the special sciences. The exactness is a fake.”1 In other words, the “accuracy” that the sciences ostensibly aspire to requires them to make key assumptions that it is the job of philosophy to explore. Once you have made your first step towards “accuracy”, you have in effect already finished the journey. You are left, unwittingly as Whitehead argues, with a delusion and a deception – a humbug.