Perception and Organizing: Beyond the Text

In this final chapter some lingering questions will be brought back into discussion and some concluding remarks will be articulated. The dominant idea pursued in this book is that instead of following what has been called the linguistic turn in philosophy and the social sciences to the bitter end and conceiving of social reality, including organization, organizing and managerial practices, as being exclusively linguistic in nature, one should take into account and recognize the concept of perception, that is, humans’ sensual relationship with the external world — most notably vision and audible capacities — and emphasize that perception also plays a central role for organization. Human beings not only rely on their cognitive capacities to orient themselves in everyday life; they also see, hear, smell, touch and taste their way through social life and this human condition is, it is argued here, not sufficiently attended to in the organization literature. The other main idea discussed is that human perception is a situated and contingent capacity, embedded in new orientations in philosophy and scientific research interests in the nineteenth century. This fascinating period of time — the formative years of modern, urban life, if you will — was also the period where organization theory and managerial concerns was first clearly articulated. In a number of places in this text, an unambiguous causal linearity between these two events has been rejected or at least rendered problematic.