Organizational theories: from scepticism to a critical conscience

Abstract

In a critical perspective of rationality, science and technology are understood as the foundation of an ideology of progress that disseminates the belief in the infinitude of possibilities of qualitative growth of the societies. Conceiving Nature as a machine, it would then be the task of man, its inventor, to make it better and ever more perfect. In the cost accounting of this kind of progressism, it is not taken into consideration, for instance, neither the social exclusion or the workers, brought about by the division of labour, nor the devastating effects of industrialization on the quality of life. And it is based on these assumptions of modern science that, paradoxically, organizational theories have been trying, since Taylorism/Fordism up to our days, marked by flexible automation and the participative management of production, to explain and prescribe organizational models on the basis of a "subjective reason", inserted in a social reality whose paradigm is the "instrumental reason", or the reason "functional/technical". However, antiparadigmatic hypotheses, derived from the scepticism as regards "rationalisms" and, therefore, envolving the so-called changes of "flexibilization"of the world of labour, are suggesting a discussion on alternatives for man in face of the
instrumentalization of human relations or of the productivist paradigm of these organizational theories.