Ocularcentrism and its others: A framework for metatheoretical analysis

There is a contemporary scepticism towards vision-based metaphors in management and organization studies that reflects a more general pattern across the social sciences. In short, there has been a shift away from ocularcentrism. This shift provides a useful basis for metatheoretical analysis of the philosophical discourse that informs organizational analysis. The article begins by briefly discussing the vision-generated, vision-centred interpretation of knowledge, truth, and reality that has characterized the western philosophical tradition. Taking late 18th-century rationalism as the high-point of ocularcentrism, the article then presents a metatheoretical framework based on three trajectories that critiques of ocularcentrism have subsequently taken. The first exposes the limits of the metaphor by, paradoxically, taking it to its limits. The second trajectory seeks to displace the primordial position of the ocular metaphor and replace it with an alternative lexicon based on other human senses. Last, the third trajectory describes how the Enlightenment ocular characterization of the visual and mental worlds has effectively been inverted in the postmodern moment.

Children: their place in organization studies

This paper argues that children and childhood constitute a ‘white space’ in organization studies, which should now be explored, mapped and analysed. Rather than being separate, children and organization are deeply implicated in one another, which provides a rich basis for theoretical inquiry. The paper draws on Spivak’s concept of the subaltern and on actor-network theory to articulate how and where organization studies might critically engage with, and find a place for, children and childhood. It frames such an inquiry around six potential research trajectories: epistemological, methodological, ontological, temporal, political and reflexive.

The lost experiment in exploration and exploitation

This paper focuses on James March’s 1991 article on ‘Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning’, which is now the seventh most highly cited paper in management and organisation studies. March’s paper is based on a computer program that simulates the collective and individual learning of a group of fifty individuals. The largely forgotten story that this paper re-calls is the real-life experiment that March, in large part, designed and conducted when he was the new ‘boy Dean’ of the School of Social Sciences in the University of California at Irvine between 1964 and 1969. Taken together, both stories illuminate important moments in the history of organisation studies. The comparison suggests that March’s model, which was probably the first simulation of an organisation learning, also worked to constitute rather than model the phenomenon.