Organizational Hope: Reaffirming the Constructive Task of Social and Organizational Inquiry

Abstract

This paper develops the construct of organizational hope as a methodological imperative for studying and strengthening organizations. It calls on organizational scholars and practitioners to move beyond the critical impulse by advancing "textured vocabularies of hope" that affirm the best and most promising dimensions of social and organizational life and provide a moral image of the future to guide collective action. This can be accomplished by defining hopeful research agendas and choosing methods of inquiry that explore and illuminate the hopes and aspirations of a broad range of organizational members. After clarifying the concept of textured vocabularies of hope, this paper undertakes a thorough analysis of hope by tracing the construct throughout the Western intellectual tradition, highlighting four of hope's enduring qualities, and offering a set of propositions that extends the implications of organizational hope to our task as scholars and practitioners.