Where has everyone gone? Re-integrating people into accounts of organisational practice (working paper)

Abstract

This essay seeks to draw attention to the near invisibility of subjective epistemology within organizational research, particularly within accounts of practice. The result can be an incomplete, depersonalised analysis that engages well with physical and social dimensions of organizational life, but which remains mute about this epistemological ‘missing third’: qualities such as tacit skill, personality, motivation, intention, and emotion. In response, the essay offers a detailed explanation of the objective and subjective components of practice, focusing in particular on the way in which these fuse together in the reflexive intentionality of motivated people. Building on this insight, the essay calls for a much closer integration of traditional sociological accounts of social generation that involve notions of ‘structure’ and ‘agency’, with social psychological accounts of personal generation involving notions of subjective and objective, and builds an initial framework for linking the two fields of enquiry at the level of practice.