Epistemology and Praxis in Organizational Studies in Brazil

Abstract

The aim of this reflection is, from an ontological and epistemological perspective, to question the absence of the concrete materiality of the object in Organizational Studies, either on account of descriptive empiricism or on account of mystical abstraction. This is because the conception of Organization that guides these studies is not only abstract, but mystical.
The argument developed here, although this is too complex a topic to be debated in such a short time, is that there is a prevalence in Organizational Studies of two exclusive modes of research in which the materiality of the object is suppressed: (i) the empiricist-descriptive one, which exhausts itself in the immediacy of the object, without theoretical depth; (ii) the idealist, who replaces the object with the movement of thought and concepts.