Grasping the Logic of Practice

Abstract

There is an increasing concern that organizational theories are not relevant to practice. This chapter contends that the overall problem is that most organizational theories are unable to capture the logic of practice because they are developed within the framework of scientific rationality. The latter, along with the accompanying representational view of theory, are grounded on an entity-based ontology that foregrounds the subject-object separation. Drawing on Heidegger and his interpreters, existential ontology is suggested as an alternative, which is spacious enough to allow that a practice world shows up to beings who are absorbed in it, and that human beings can engage with the practice world in variously detached ways, through which its components appear to them. Accordingly, practical rationality is elaborated as an alternative framework, and shown to enable development of theories that grasp the logic of practice, and thus are more relevant to organizational practice.