The contributions of dialogue between critical realism and social constructionism to organizational studies

• Autor(a) principal: Borges, Alex Fernando
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Outros Autores: Brito, Mozar José de, Brito, Valéria da Glória Pereira, Enoque, Alessandro Gomes
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Cadernos EBAPE.BR
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.fgv.br/cadernosebape/article/view/22299
• topic: Ontology. Epistemology. Methodology. Organizational Theory.; Ontología. Epistemología. Metodología. Teoría de la Organización.; Ontologia. Epistemologia. Metodologia. Teoria das Organizações.

In this paper, we aim to present some reflections about the ontological and epistemological nature of Management research. More precisely, we expose the foundations of a possible dialogue between critical realism and social constructionism, constituting a reference framework for the development of organizational studies. In order to do so, a brief and non-exhausting discussion of these conceptions’ main formulations and elaborations was made, positioning its particularities and its central ontological, epistemological, and methodological issues. In addition, some contributions of this approach to organizational studies were pointed out, emphasizing its philosophical potential for the definition of multi-referential researches. We observe that this dialogue can contribute to the development of organizational studies that incorporate the ontological assumptions of the critical realism and the philosophical foundations of the social constructionist epistemology. Thus, we conclude that the convergences and complementarities between these conceptions may, ultimately, contribute to the configuration of a approach, marked by a realist ontology and a constructionist epistemology that does not reject reality and society as being, at the same time, socially constructed and real, in a dialectical relation between agency and structure that overcomes dichotomies that are still present in both social theory and organizational studies.