Critical Approach in Organizational Studies: Conception of individual from the emancipatory perspective

Abstract

This theoretical essay aims to debate the need for considering alternative rationalities with regard to the instrumental one in Organizational Studies, favoring the citizenship exercise of the individual as a social actor, with an active role and not as a subject of science and the world. Theoretical assumptions of the critical Organizational Studies are resumed, in the paradigmatic context of radical humanism, in order to say the reason why a critical analysis has to be performed. The justification is that the established Social Science has become a legitimate way for controlling natural world and human behavior. Based on naive theoretical assumptions, according to Alberto Guerreiro Ramos’ view, the Administration Science has evolved on the basis of the instrumental rationality inherent to the Social Science predominant in the West, not criticized until 1970 because it worked until then. More recent criticism was not enough to break the mainstream, perhaps because reason detached from human psyche has become an attribute of society. However, there are alternative epistemological conceptions with regard to functionalism and the critical approach is a possible pathway, being able to bring advances to Organizational Studies, constituting one of the possible pathways in the search for human emancipation towards a better and fairer society.