The Concept of Perception

The purpose of this book is to discuss the concept of perception as an organizational resource being mobilized in many organizational activities and processes. The concept of perception is undertheorized in organization theory and management studies for a number of reasons. In the recent research interests derived from the so-called linguistic turn in the social sciences, organizations and companies are essentially portrayed as products of the use of various forms of language in written and spoken form. Even though this stream of research — positioned into a number of theoretical frameworks such as discourse analysis, narrative studies, organizational storytelling and conversation analysis — has provided new and in many cases interesting views of organization, it envisages organization as a cognitively founded entity, derived from the use of linguistic and symbolic resources. Such a view to some extent downplays or even overlooks the material and embodied features of organization. The concept of perception is, similar to the use of language, a human faculty that is bordering between the self and the other, inner and outer, the body and the environment. Perception is embodied, yet it is grounded in cognition that in itself is socially embedded. Theorizing perception then does not imply a flight into the interiority of the body or a denial of the socially embedded constitution of organization but is instead an attempt at bridging ready-made binary terms such as self and other, mind and body, individual and society.