Sapere Aude

Organization Studies34(11) 1587 –1600

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Sapere Aude

Robin HoltUniversity of Liverpool Management School, UK

Frank den HondHanken School of Economics, Finland, and VU University, The Netherlands

Borrowing from the Latin poet Horace, Immanuel Kant framed the European Enlightenment with the motto: Sapere aude (‘dare to know’) (Kant, 1784). What impressed itself upon him was not the content of the knowledge claims being made by the Philosophes whose work had sought to trans-form economic, social, religious and intellectual life through the application of reason, but the attitude or spirit by which enquiry was being undertaken. Whether knowledge was added to or supplanted was secondary to the process by which the world, and oneself as part of it, was continu-ally opening up. Sapere means to understand, but also to taste, and enthusiastically so, such that the Spanish have the expression con sabor, ‘with gusto’. What configures enlightenment is the experi-ence of knowledge being created and savoured, especially when daring to push at the edges of convention, to enquire along the limits of common sense. To taste and to dare are far from meta-physical experiences, they are rooted in one’s empirical awareness; enlightened knowledge remains with life and the things of life.

For Kant, any prospect of an end point, an enlightened age, was a distraction; enlightenment is experienced in the undertaking of study rather than in its completion. This undertaking finds com-plicity between what is being claimed as truthful and the endeavour of enquiry. Kant stresses that it comes through assays, speculation and experiment, and in full awareness of two things. Firstly, the researcher must rely in the undertaking upon other people and events; enlightenment is a col-lective experience. Secondly, the undertaking demands flexibility as the making of knowledge-claims occurs in an awareness of this involvement with others and otherness, as well as of the inscrutable nature of things. ‘Daring to know’ is the experience of respecting and upending the world into which we are thrown through enquiry that occupies the space between ordinary, every-day understandings and distant, generalized assertions.

We believe that since its inception Organization Studies has been a journal that in many ways subscribes to such an enlightened attitude to and perspective on the study of organizations, organ-izing and the organized. This is clear from re-reading the editorial introduction to the first issue of the journal (Hickson et al., 1980). Since then, technologies, economies and societies have obvi-ously changed, but the underlying spirit and ideas expressed in that editorial continue to resonate. They serve us well as broad prompts for how we view and intend to animate Organization Studies.

Hickson and his colleagues (1980, p. 1) asserted:

The contemporary significance of organization and organizations as subjects for academic study and practical concern does not need to be stressed to anyone who reads these pages.

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There is a sense that such subjects for study matter in everyday life. Yet, whilst it might not need stressing, thinking about what we are claiming to be of significance, and why, remains the role of an editorial, a place to take stock and evoke what we consider might fall within the journal’s horizons of concern; just what is ‘it’ for which the writers and readers of Organization Studies have a taste?

Organization is the condition by which we find ourselves being arranged towards some pur-pose, or within a purposive pattern, conscious or otherwise (Drori, Meyer, & Hwang, 2006; Perrow, 1991). Often such purpose is economic, but it may equally well be of a political, cul-tural, ritualistic, psychological, physiological or even biological nature. All aspects of life seem to be prone, first to organization (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011), then, in its human expression, to potential rationalization (Meyer & Rowan, 1977) and subsequently to commercialization (Ritzer, 2004). It is to all three aspects that Organization Studies attends. There is no fixation in the jour-nal on questions of economic efficiency and effectiveness. Rather, its concern is with the condi-tion of organization, how and why it occurs and how we might make sense of lives being continually organized.

Thus, in taking up such questions, Organization Studies does not limit itself to the study of business firms – whether family owned or stock listed; operating locally or in diverse, interna-tional markets – but extends its analysis to many different forms and conditions of organization and being organized, as even a cursory look into some past issues may reveal. It includes an interest in the study of voluntary association, collective action, professions, and public sector organization; it explores how organization is bound up in various ways with time and space; it bridges multiple levels of analysis, from individuals and social networks to institutions and organizational networks, etc. In acknowledging the sheer variety of organization, complete or partial (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011), the journal is equally alive to how organization is as much a process and an activity, too, as it is a thing. Understanding organization as an activity finds stud-ies examining the relationship (sentient or material) between actors and institutional form (Levy & Scully, 2007; Mutch, 2007; Reay & Hinings, 2009), and more broadly how organized activity becomes both an expression and a structuring of phenomena such as: time (Hassard, 2002) and space (Haug, 2013); communication (Spee & Jarzabkowski, 2011); and identity (Driver, 2009). Understanding organization as a process finds researchers with divergent views of it: as a funda-mental assumption about its ontology (Bakken & Hernes, 2006; Chia, 2002; Cooper, 2007), or as a way to understand how organizational phenomena and outcomes come about (Langley, 1999; Schreyögg & Sydow, 2011).1

The study of organization is thus a broad field. Over time, it has been informed by insights and theories from many other fields of enquiry. It is widely acknowledged that, among these, three intertwined disciplinary debates stand out: economic theory, business and management studies and sociology.2 Within each of these, questions of organization as entity, process, and activity have persisted (Fligstein, 2001). For example, Ronald Coase’s conceptualization of transaction costs inspired many to investigate the ‘problematic’ existence of business firms in particular, and other types of organizations in general, animated by wider debates on human nature, the nature of reason and organizational form. Similarly, both Frederic Taylor and Elton Mayo’s work formed the roots of business and management studies investigating how management might best control work pro-cesses to serve a set of particular interests. It gave rise to critical readings of power and domination within organized settings. Last but not least, Max Weber has been foundational for many investiga-tions in organizational sociology, in which organization is considered both a tool of efficient order-ing and a system of self-reproducing power that is animated by a currency of legitimacy (Lounsbury & Carberry, 2005).



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These three debates have come a long way, all the while winding into one another, and pulling away. For example, debates on the nature of human behaviour find economists talking of firms as stable networks of open contracts and acknowledging the need for governance to avoid agency costs associated with opportunism; they find management scholars discussing human capabilities and needs in association with esteem, reward and sources of innovatory capacity; and sociologists iden-tifying prevailing discourses by which norms are created, perpetuated or changed through symbols or group activity. Debates on structural conditions also broach all three debates. Students of techno-logical change, for example, present organizational actors as adaptive in relation to problems and opportunities; technology provides means to fundamentally alter hierarchies and procedures of communication and exchange; and it can alter the balance of power across different communities of practice. Throughout, questions of organization have remained: either in the efficiency or efficacy by which roles and tasks are ordered into sequenced hierarchies that are governed (ideally) by logics of cost calculus and goal attainment, or in the persistence of organization as a system of power that is sustained or altered through struggles in securing legitimacy from within and without. The upshot has been a plethora of theoretical approaches: too many to meaningfully list them.

Should this breadth of empirical concern – for surely there is little of life untouched by the phe-nomenon of organization – and the associated proliferation of organization theories be regarded as problematic? Well, perhaps not. Indeed this breadth might need fuller attention and expression, given that many scholars are currently questioning the capacity of organization theory to engage with the phenomena it purports to describe and explain. Indeed, in too many research projects there is a tendency to view organizations of all sorts as embodiments of one archetype – the internally diversified and internationally operating stock-listed corporation that heeds the financial interests of its shareholders – at the expense of an appreciation of their differentiation, as well as changes in their size, complexity, and influence (Perrow, 1991; Barley, 2010). This tendency may be a root cause for the alleged inability of organization theory to ‘keep pace with changes in the size, com-plexity, and influence of modern organizations’ (Suddaby, Hardy, & Huy, 2011, p. 237), because the assumption of similarity, of belonging to the same category (Hannan, Polós, & Carroll, 2007), allows for large-N comparison and statistical analysis. To highlight similarity comes at the cost of neglecting diversity and change.

Perhaps it is timely to revisit the basic ground of the subject, to recover a sense of how organiza-tion studies has emerged and continues to draw inspiration from other fields of enquiry, without privileging one or another. Thus the significance of Organization Studies rests with what Hickson et al. (1980, p. 2) go on to call an ambition for being:

… flexible in content and style, open to a diversity of paradigms, and to any and all of the disciplines which contribute to organization theory.

This ambition of encouraging flexibility and diversity remains strongly felt, even if we might be wary of the term ‘paradigm’. Yet, the ‘flexibility’ and ‘diversity’ that Hickson et al. sought to pro-mote have ever since been in need of encouragement. Ten years ago, Tsoukas, Garud and Hardy (2003) formulated a critique of organization studies as working to limited conceptions of rational-ity and restricted ideas of research practice, and as underestimating the complexity of organiza-tional processes, contexts and histories. Two years ago, Suddaby et al. (2011) proposed a similar critique.

In between, Baum (2007) used arguments derived from socio-cultural evolution theory to ground his expectation of an ever-increasing dominance of North American-style scholarship in the field, while noting that such evolution may not have outcomes that are equally favourable to different




locales and communities. It may well be the case that there is just a little bit of exaggeration in these assessments of the current status of organization studies,3 but let us assume for the sake of the argu-ment that these analyses are not too far off the mark, that something can be done about it, and that journal editors are in a position to do something about it. What might our position be?

One response to this perception of the withering status of organization studies has been the proposal to discontinue the currently prevalent practice of borrowing theories from other fields of enquiry, and rather to start generating theory from within, to develop ‘indigenous theories of organ-ization’ (Suddaby et al., 2011). We understand this as a call for the study of organization to be a discipline, to become a discipline, or to finally accept the consequences of aspiring to be one. Yet has this not already occurred, indeed might it not be part of the problem?

A field of enquiry is a discipline insofar as there is closure around two questions: ‘in what way’ are knowledge projects and research endeavours executed, and ‘by what right’ are they legitimated (cf. Butler, 2009)? In the case of organization studies, there appears to be increasing closure around both questions. Some of the reasons why there has been increased closure around the ‘in what way’ question might be explained through Alasdair MacIntyre’s (2007 [1981], pp. 187–191) discussion of external goods (status, influence, valuable resources). In the face of a vast, diverse, and rapidly growing body of relevant literature, and of increasing pressure to get published, researchers tend to choose topics and to write in styles that are acceptable and legitimated through external goods such as career advancement and peer-reviewed publications. Thereby the formulation of ‘exciting, dis-ruptive, and challenging new theories’ (Suddaby et al., 2011) may well be discouraged. The rough ground of outliers, agitation, speculative critique, curiosity and counterblasts remains liminal, is perhaps even expunged. The obligation that new theorizing demonstrates continuity with past the-orizing would further limit the possibility for developing novel and different theories, and hence stifle theoretical innovation (cf. McKinley, Mone, & Moon, 1999).

All this is enhanced by how journals go about publishing. There is a smoothing effect as sys-tems of peer review, journal ranking and citation, tenure and promotion, journal proliferation and all manner of nuanced institutional forces in between find the knowledge project to be one of securing or gently extending established theories (Raelin, 2008). In these ways, our academic community has gradually become an ever more institutionalized field of scholarly practice in which concern with the external goods of academia (tenure, ranking, impact, citation factors, circulation, etc.) has led to concentrated attention on increasingly standardized knowledge ques-tions and orthodox research designs. If a scholar wanted to quickly develop her career, she would be ill advised to leave the trodden paths. There seems to be little leeway, little ‘daring’, few degrees of freedom, in which topics to choose, how to collect and analyse data, how to write down the results, and how to relate to the classics. The institutionalization of a limited numbers of answers to the ‘in what way?’ question is a sign of organization studies becoming disciplined, if not of already being a discipline.

The prevalence of a particular set of answers to the question ‘by what right?’ is the study of organization legitimated also seems to point at organization studies already having gone a long way to becoming a discipline. There is apparent acceptance that it is its relevance for managers and contemporary managerial practices that should justify it. For example, Suddaby et al. (2011) ask for new organization theory because of the failure of existing organization theory to exhibit rele-vance in this sense. This echoes earlier calls, such as Vermeulin’s (2005), on researchers to address compelling practical managerial issues. Similarly, Hodgkinson and Rousseau (2009, p. 541) sug-gest a turn toward the more conditional scientific knowledge claims sustained in critical realist theorizing, thereby ‘propelling the movement towards management practice informed by robust theory and research’. The normative grounding of organization studies seems to be managerial



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relevance, deriving its legitimacy from speaking to managers and contemporary management prac-tices. The assertion might also be based on the recurrent argument that methodological or theoreti-cal ‘rigour’ limits its ‘relevance’ for managers and managerial practices (Hambrick, 2007), and the many proposals on how this ‘relevance’ might be assured while not compromising on ‘rigour’ (e.g. Gulati, 2007; Van de Ven, 1989; Corley & Gioia, 2011).

Closure around these two questions favours incremental expansion of knowledge along the lines of mainstream research and reduces the possibility of critique, the questioning of doxa, and thereby significantly limits the possibility of theoretical innovation. This holds for many fields of enquiry, but for the study of organization in particular. By becoming a ‘discipline’, by reinforcing its disciplinary character, organization theory would create ‘blind spots’ of its own and merely substitute these for the ‘blind spots’ associated with the theories from fields of enquiry on which it builds. But now, being autonomous, independent from other fields, the possibility is gone to dis-cover, critique and challenge the blind spots associated with particular theories from the different premises of another theory (cf. Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011; Boxenbaum & Rouleau, 2011). It would risk intellectual lock-in. The benefit of not being a discipline is a capacity to tolerate differ-ent knowledge questions and embrace different methods.

In this light, the ‘big questions’ spoken of in the editorial statement of the previous editorial team (Courpasson et al., 2008) focus on how we live in societies and how societies – and hence we – are governed and shaped organizationally. These questions remain pressing, but responses are inevitably historically circumscribed; our contemporary answers are not necessarily the same as those proposed by – say – Simmel, Tönnies, or Veblen. It was not until well into the 20th century, for example, that those associated with churches, sports clubs and firms found themselves part of a general category: organization. As Starbuck (2007) suggests, it is beholden on us to keep on thinking about the continued usefulness of a term such as organization that we employ to pose and respond to big questions. As March (2007) argues, the study of organization has been historically imprinted, and as history is an experience that differs among people in different times and places, the study of organization has followed a somewhat meandering path. Which questions are deemed pressing and what answers pertinent has changed over time; varying answers have been proposed to questions that continue to be pressing.

After the Second World War, organization research evolved differently in various regions, as they varied in their experience of major historical markers, such as the postwar recovery, the protests in the 1960s and 1970s, and the triumph of markets after the collapse of the Soviet Empire; and history moves on. We can only speculate about which contemporary events and trends will, in the future, with the wisdom of hindsight, be considered major historical markers for organization studies. They may include: the various crises of capitalism (moral, financial, social, environmental); popular movements for economic, social, and political reform in various parts of the world; self-organization aided by technology; state-run capitalism; the rise of reli-gions and spirituality; but also maintenance work by capitalism and its elites in the light of its crises, risks, alternatives and opportunities. And there will be others (e.g. March, 2007; Gabriel, 2010).

Such pressing and emerging topics for the study of organizations, organizing and the organized should find ‘organization’ too broad a category to be meaningfully disciplined by the idea of mana-gerial relevance. Organization contains choice and constraint, agency and structure, subjectivity and objectivity as well as inter-subjectivity, individual and group as well as collective, change and stability, contestation and collaboration, conflict and consent, verb and noun, process and state, power and interest, domination and resistance, etcetera and etcetera. Organization is as much a ‘decided order’ (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011) that is closely linked to and intertwined with networks




and institutions as it is a social structure, for example when it obtains a life of its own (Selznick, 1957). Organization defines relationships; inequalities are never far away (Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997), and the questions germane to the field include those ‘which are crucial for the organiza-tional world and the people who inhabit it’ (Courpasson et al., 2008, p. 1385). Such a world is ever changing, and for multiple reasons: because of decision-making; because of adaptation to and experimentation with changing circumstances; because of reflexivity and the ability of human beings to make choices; and even because of the possibility that the researcher and the act of doing research in itself influence the social entity that is being studied, due to positionality on the part of the researcher and reflexivity on the part of the entity studied (e.g. Schwartz-Shea & Yanow, 2012).4 As, thus, its object of study – organization, organizing, the organized – is ever-changing, it can be accessed in many different ways (e.g. Kilduff, Mehra, & Dunn, 2011), being as much proces-sual as entitative, and always providing partial rather than full theories (Merton, 1968).

Horace’s full line from which Kant borrowed Sapere aude reads: ‘To begin is already to be halfway. Dare to know, begin’ (Dimidium facti, qui coepit habet. Sapere aude, incipe). Being underway, starting in the first place, is what matters. It is precisely the possibility to compare, con-trast, and challenge across different possible ways of being underway that makes the field interest-ing and vivid, and again which exposes those working in the field to sources of new theorizing. Therefore, in our view, organization studies should not become a discipline but remain a field of study with loose and permeable boundaries, with multiple sources of legitimacy and a plurality of methods, fluid and heterodox, able to escape time and again from the hegemony of being one dis-cipline. Indeed, Organization Studies has a role to play in maintaining and advancing a space for work that starts from these premises. As Hickson et al. (1980, p. 1) say, the journal “can reduce academic ethnocentricism”. We feel it should continue to play that role.

This is in line with the intentions of Abbott (2004), Kilduff et al. (2011), and others, who seek to stimulate researchers to be more ‘playful’ with the ‘heuristics’ and ‘logics of action’ of various approaches of doing research, and with the suggestions to challenge underlying assumptions (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011), to engage in bricolage (Boxenbaum & Rouleau, 2011) and to blend (Cornelissen & Durand, 2012; Oswick, Fleming, & Hanlon, 2011) theories in order to find new, interesting and salient ways of studying puzzles and phenomena. However, in calling for and defending the relevance of multiple approaches to studying organizations, organizing and the organized, there is an implicit suggestion of tolerating alternatives. ‘Tolerance’ of such diversity should refer to engagement with ‘the other’, to vetting the other’s view, to the possibility of stances being based on argument, rather than to its degeneration into competing assertion on one side and indifference on the other (Furedi, 2011). But the latter seems to have happened, as the furious debates about ontological and epistemological ‘positions’ and premises have waned and disap-peared. Gone, the argument that the logical empiricist ‘position’ – as well as related positions – are inappropriate for the ‘sciences of man’ (Taylor, 1971). Gone, too, the sharp distinction between ‘explanation’ and ‘understanding’ and the argument that the latter is more appropriate to study ‘behaviour-as-action’ (Von Wright, 1971). Relegated to history are the good old days of ‘paradig-matic controversies’ and ‘contradictions’ (Lincoln & Guba, 2000; Guba & Lincoln, 2005).

With the demise of such controversy and debate we run the risks of exaggeration in the opposite direction. Rather than scorching one another for being associated with a particular epistemic com-munity – which was a bad thing, indeed – we risk ending up in a form of epistemological choice set, each bottled neatly on the shelf, awaiting our choosing or rejection, as though we were buying sweets from jars or scoops of ice cream from a parlour. We choose whatever we like, but more often the choice is embedded in habit rather than in curiosity. In a way, anything seems to go; the distinctions of commitment and the passions entrained seem no longer relevant. Do we care what



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we are researching, and why, anymore? Is there still room for Weber’s morally passionate researcher to be allowed back in?

So we look for Organization Studies to help recover the commitments of distinction without wanting this to collapse back into paradigm wars; Sapere aude is a form of middle way. We need not review the methods disputes in the social sciences in general, nor those in organization studies in particular. Suffice to say – whatever its historical roots and its subsequent development – that it is grounded in differences between ‘explanation’, insofar as this is meant to mean causal explana-tion, and ‘understanding’, insofar as this emphasizes the importance of subjective meaning for the understanding of social action and structure (Von Wright, 1971; Schwartz-Shea & Yanow, 2012). We agree with the argument made by Abbott (2004) that the rift between the former, more positiv-ist inclined researchers and the latter, who have a more interpretive disposition, is unproductive and up to a point false. Their respective epistemological and ontological premises are different, but not necessarily opposites, just as knives and forks (and spoons, and chop sticks) are different in lending themselves for particular ways of enjoying a meal. But they are not mutually exclusive.

In relation to the existence of various and varying epistemological and ontological positions, theory – organization theory – can thus be many things (Corvellec, 2013).5 However, if one accepts that theory can be many things and that such diversity is a good thing for its advancement, or per-haps even for the advancement of society (Popper, 1971 [1945]), it does not follow that exchange of ideas across epistemic communities may, or will, occur. March (2007) speaks of a ‘myth’ of organization studies, of a field that ‘retains substantial intellectual, geographic and linguistic paro-chialism, with separate enclaves persisting in their own worlds of discourse and forming a common field only by a definition that overlooks the diversity’ (p. 10). Yet, there is awareness among many involved – James March, foremost; ourselves, to be sure; and, we trust, many amid EGOS and beyond – that we are, nevertheless and ‘however uncomfortably’, still ‘united in a common endeavor’ (March, 2007, p. 10). In order to be ‘common’, the endeavour requires common ground and recognition across diverse epistemic communities. It is something to be recovered against a legacy of reified incommensurability between epistemologies and ontologies. If the study of organization is to be a field in the institutional sense of the word then ‘meaningful interaction’ (Scott, 1995) between its constituting parts is to be promoted, at the risk of its fractures causing it to scatter apart in a thousand and one pieces. We find two conditions for realizing such common ground.

First, there may be common ground to each of the various epistemological and ontological posi-tions that one can assume: the act of doing research is to seek answers to research questions that are of interest to at least some scholarly community, and more broadly questions that matter socially and economically.6 Answers that are of interest advance theory by complementing existing theory in minor or major ways, and even more so by refuting existing theory and proposing alternative theory (Davis, 1971; Locke & Golden-Biddle, 1997). The purpose, or the consequence, of finding answers is to enhance the ‘common pool of explicit knowledge’ (Konrad, 2008) by making knowledge claims regarding some phenomenon, or puzzle, as it is usually formulated in a research question. Thus, a first element of common ground can be a shared interest in some puzzle or phenomenon by which researchers are intrigued. Similar questions form common ground across the various epis-temic communities, a ground which, as Cavell (1987, p. 36) notes, requires a maturity of poise, enabling us to analyse the mundane and apparent without becoming contemptuous of them, whilst also to enquire beyond the assertions of the powerful and the opinions sedimented as common sense.

Second, and extending the previous point, there can be common ground in theory as it is about understanding, explaining, interpreting, and similar expressions. Theory is an account or an argument, not in the sense of being part of a monologue, but in the sense of being part of a




conversation (Abbott, 2004). By virtue thereof it enhances or changes the ‘common pool of explicit knowledge’, because and to the extent by which it is found to be plausible, credible, convincing, compelling. Revisiting Kant’s term sapere here, we aim to defend and advance what we believe to be a distinctive trait of Organization Studies: that it remains free from the urge to bracket off the world of organization in order to arrive at smoother theorizations of it. Necessarily and simultaneously, theory is both a simplification and an abstraction of the concrete, specific puzzle at hand, but it is thereby partial, incomplete, provisional (e.g. Schwartz-Shea & Yanow, 2012; Zundel & Kokkalis, 2010). By remaining aware of this, theory moves away from the abstractions versed in what Starbuck (2004) calls the passive-retrospective conventions of some social sciences, and demonstrates awareness of how understanding arises in use, in effects, in and across different practices. At best, we develop theories on puzzles and phenomena that are bounded in space and time, as well as by all sorts of assumptions, i.e. we develop theories of the middle range (Merton, 1968).

Hence, discussion, exchange and communication between different epistemic communities is possible to the extent that they share an interest in some puzzle or phenomenon, and that it is acknowledged that their answers are situational, bounded in space and time, limited due to underlying assumptions, and hence open to challenge and debate. Von Wright (1972, p. 56) calls such common ground a Weltbild, a community agreement we nurture and share if we are to understand others in their actions and judgements; irrespective of whether we concur with the nature of such, we recognize them as such. The Weltbild does not act as an arbiter, but provides the ground upon which it is possible for scholarly practice to unfold and the means by which the external and internal goods of scholarly practice make sense. We therefore propose that it might be worth making the effort to clarify why one’s epistemological and ontological position is appropriate for a particular argument or study. In our view this is too little done in organization studies, and because it is so rarely done there is relatively little discussion, exchange and com-munication between the different epistemic communities that make up the field. We realize there is another trend, as arguably many scholars may find comfort in adhering to one particular epis-temic community, if only because the distinction of specialization makes it easier to advance an academic career. Our call is that we make an effort to broach across communities – precisely because the conceptual breadth of organization theory, its being ‘pluri-paradigmatique’, allows for ways of comparative theorizing and analysis that few other ‘disciplines’ are able to match. It is not our desire to see all papers, authors and reviewers stretching outside of well-established ‘positions’; but it is our desire that the journal should encourage attempts at stretching, and always be mindful of myriad such positions.

It is in this light, as a Weltbild, that we understand to be of continuing relevance Hickson et al.’s (1980, p. 1) intent “to offer a supranational forum for ideas in the understanding of organizations”, not only between epistemic communities but also across national and cultural boundaries. Thus, Hickson et al. (1980, p. 1) proclaim:

… OS unmistakably originates in Europe and expresses much that is European, [but] it is not solely for Europe.

Sapere aude is to experience the world opening out, well beyond the confines of this legacy. On many different accounts, Organization Studies has become an international journal, rather than a narrowly ‘global’ one (Grey, 2010). For example, its readers, authors, reviewers, and editors can no longer be viewed as strictly ‘European’ (Baum, 2007; Battilana, Anteby, & Sengul, 2010; Meyer & Boxenbaum, 2010).



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In this context it strikes us that a lot of discussion around Organization Studies is cast in an opposition between ‘Europe’ and ‘North America’, almost reifying an ‘Atlantic divide’. We feel that this opposition is no longer productive, nor that it is any longer empirically correct; it is imma-ture. As Baum (2011, p. 1664) phrases it: ‘The field is … divided – but not by the Atlantic Ocean’. We understand the European-American opposition as an awkward and increasingly misplaced shorthand or pointer for styles of reading, writing and thinking. Being ‘European’ or being ‘American’ goes with many qualities, some of which are worthy to maintain and to cultivate, while others are less so. At its worst, a ‘European’ style may refer to short-sighted parochialism. At its best, an ‘American’ style may be shorthand for clarity of expression, and a healthy scepticism of tradition. At its worst, an ‘American’ style is characterized by unfounded simplification, manage-rialism, commercialism. At its best, a ‘European’ style acknowledges nuance, diversity. Whatever the alleged qualities associated with these geographical and cultural labels of ‘European’ and ‘North-American’, most organization scholars from these two areas share the similar features of having their base in WEIRD countries (cf. Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010).7 It is in this light that we need to expand on the second part of the journal’s subtitle – deliberately suppressed so far – that it is devoted to the study of organizations, organizing and the organized … in and between societies.

Against this backdrop, a journal publishing studies that enquire into such a grounding human phenomenon as organization would take it upon itself to promote papers that are less parochial in this sense. It would require involvement and disciplined curiosity from readers and authors alike. To work at a paper, then, is also to make explicit what is the contribution to a debate, and to seek to convince an increasingly diverse, international audience thereof. This may bring with it other traditions from which Organization Studies can learn. For example, if we want to develop constitu-encies from non-WEIRD parts of the world we can no longer be ‘European’ in a narrow way, nor do we need to become in a decontextualized way ‘American’. The journal is, and has to be, inter-national while being or perhaps needing to re-establish its sensitivity to context (Üskiden, 2010). Perhaps we need to develop our genres, such that they become more accessible to a diverse, inter-national readership, but without reverting to simplification. The empirical settings of studies may well be different from those commonly encountered in pages of the major journals, or they may specifically address these, but always the authors should be aware of the geographical, historical, cultural, institutional, and other brackets put around their analyses. Doing so may also help to counter any sort of postcolonial bias that the study of organization still may have, precisely by providing perspectives on some of the problems and challenges that our globalizing world faces from a different vantage point. These problems are pressing, and our journal has and should con-tinue to encounter them: the organization of human and environmental ‘health’; the e/affects of technological change; absorbing global expressions of belief, revenge and resistance; reconciling political systems, communities and commercial activity; understanding differing experiences of wealth and happiness; ascribing responsibility.

Therefore, the journal will continue to be plural in its awareness of what constitutes a ‘contribu-tion’, while acknowledging that contributions are generally considered to be more substantial when they challenge or refute received wisdom and prior conclusions (Davis, 1971), or when they succeed in proposing a new perspective, e.g. by creating or shifting consensus (Hollenbeck, 2008). Such papers are ‘different’ in subject matter, method or theory (Barley, 2006). We would add that good scholarly work, especially when published in Organization Studies, brings the researchers into the study. Methodologically this finds researchers communicating their research practice by discussing the manner in which data were ‘gathered/co-created’, analysed and subsequently theo-rized. Whilst a forensic capacity for dis-interested involvement remains important, good scholarly




work can also evaluate and argue for a change; it can bring researchers into wider social settings, addressing questions that matter to people in their lives (Flyvbjerg, 2001).

Sapere aude might serve this journal well as a motto. It is neither grandiose nor condescending in ambition, and it does not favour some set of settled interests, yet it is highly ambitious in setting a community spirit of Weltbild, encouraging studies to take positions and explore novelty. It invites methodological ecumenism yet demands salience in the specific choice of methods; it seeks to speak to those who wish to work in a field, rather than in a discipline, and whose manuscripts reveal the engagement, enthusiasm, insight and persistence of their crafting. The journal can act as such a setting where the routines of enquiry are woven with the risks of action, commitment and concern. To create such a setting is our editorial ambition for the journal. Yet, this is not and cannot be the project of two editors whose own common ground happens to be an affection for trying to grow chilli peppers in cold and damp climates; it must, of course, be a collective endeavour. As Gabriel (2010) reminds us, journal editors have a surprisingly limited influence on the journals that they steward. It is what authors submit and what readers read and use that provides the ground from which we and the team to which we belong can work to generate our journal’s identity, feel, and appeal. We therefore wish to end this beginning by extending an invitation to all – authors, review-ers, board members, readers, publishers – to work with us along these lines, to use the journal, in order to keep our journal ‘one of the best in the field’.

Let us dare to know.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank various colleagues who have helped us to develop our thoughts, and in particular Andrew Brown, Mike Lounsbury, Renate Meyer, Eero Vaara, and David Wilson.

Notes

1. We refrain from further specifying and extending such a list. Nevertheless, we kept wondering about what might be off the radar screen of scholarship in organization studies in general and Organization Studies in particular. There seems, for example, to be little interest in studying the organization of labour, the organization of war, peace and security (Lammers, 1995, 2003), or in forms of local, autonomous self-organization.

2. For work published in Organization Studies it should be added that also political science, public admin-istration, anthropology, psychology, history, and other fields from the humanities (e.g. Hinings, 2010; Phillips, 1995; Rowlinson et al., 2010; Strati, 2000) are fields of enquiry from which it may draw inspiration.

3. Editorials need to make a point; some provocation and exaggeration should therefore be tolerated.4. Abbott (2004, p. 63) refers to the work of the Canadian historian Douglas Cole. In Captured Heritage,

Cole studied how early anthropologists studied traditional societies. He found that some of the myths and artefacts that the anthropologists collected “were produced for, and therefore determined by, the demands of anthropologists … [They] may have been produced ‘for the anthropological trade’ as much as for the primitive societies themselves.” While this case is evocative in its image and extremeness, we believe that this co-construction of social reality through the very research process itself is not unique for (early) anthropologists, nor that it signifies low quality research. We believe it is a basic phenomenon that is inherent in the study of social entities. For example, by interpreting past events, the historian shapes present understandings of societies; by asking employees about their work – even in a survey – the researcher may make them aware of dimensions of their work that they may not have considered before, and thereby change their perception of the work; by asking consumers about their opinion of a new prod-uct, the marketer primes them to buy the new product. Further, Alvesson (2003) notes a long list of ways



Editorial 1597

in which the interviewer and the interviewee co-construct data. Participative action research (PAR) can be interpreted as making use of – or abusing, depending on one’s interests or political convictions – this performative nature of research. In a strict positivist methodological stance, such reactivity on the part of the observed should be avoided and controlled for at all cost, at the penalty of loss of validity.

5. Another source of variety among theories is related to researchers pursuing varying purposes in develop-ing or using them, including prescription based on moral or instrumental considerations, emancipation, and critique, in addition to the academically more mainstream or traditional purposes of seeking and enhancing explanation and understanding.

6. Or communities of practitioners, policy-makers, decision-makers, managers, workers, etc. We believe that our argument does not change in a fundamental way if we considered all the potential parties that may have an interest in research, or for whose interest research might be done.

7. WEIRD: western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.

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