The expertise of managers, as with other professionals, consists in what they know and their particular knowledge base is knowledge that is embedded in practice. In spite of what some practice assumes, management expertise is situated, experiential and cannot be codified. We lack, however, a clear philosophical model of what it means to say of knowledge that it is embedded in practice. This paper seeks to address this need, presents a theory of expertise and explores a key element of the theory concerning the role of judgement in perception. The theory articulates a number of key concepts and gives explanatory power to talk of situated knowledge. It also provides sufficient theoretical structure to bear upon practical policy issues such as how to teach, develop and assess expertise and how to deploy knowledge in setting management goals.

This article presents an overview of systems thinking from the mid-20th Century to the present. Systems thinking is presented as an interdisciplinary approach to managing complexity in organisations. It is characterised as holistic, dialogical and pluralistic. The philosophical interpretation of the practice of systemicintervention is increasingly important to understanding the reflexive and ethical nature of this approach to management. The article assesses the prospects of systems thinking becoming a mature philosophy of management by focusing on the quality of relationships that it facilitates. A number of outstanding philosophical questions requiring further research are identified in conclusion.

According to neo-classical economic theory, free markets should eventually settle at the most efficient equilibrium. Critics of the view have claimed, however, that even if the idealised conditions demanded by the theory were met (such that the markets in question were completely fee) one would still not find those markets settling at the optimally efficient equilibrium because of the path dependent' nature of economic decision-making. Essentially, the claim is that economic decision-making is always informed by the historical setting in such a way as to prevent those decisions from generally tending towards an optimally efficientequilibrium.It is argued that this debate has been hampered by the fact that the usual three-tiered way of understanding path dependence offered by Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis fails to capture what proponents of the view have in mind. By examining the way in which the notion of path dependence is often described interms borrowed from the philosophy of science, this paper contends that we can gain a more accurate understanding of this notion by recasting it in the light of the Wittgensteinian conception of a 'hinge' proposition. This new account has the advantage of being clearer about the kind of empirical data that is relevant to the issue of whether path dependence is a genuine and economically significant phenomenon. Furthermore, it is argued that this modified account of path dependence may be able to resist some of the key objections that have been levelled against this notion.

Much NGO (Non-Governmental Organisation) fund-raising and publicity concern disasters, emergencies and the immediate relief of suffering. Donations and support may follow but they are prompted all too often by a superficially informed compassion or guilt with donors having little understanding of the results of their action. For all their impact, such campaigns can amount to demagogic sentimentalism leading to ‘compassion fatigue’ and lack of sustained support once media attention moves elsewhere. They thus undermine the unique mission of NGOs themselves. This paper urges a different and more strategic approach to communication by NGOs, one which takes account of their unique status and their mission to promote solidarity. It argues that as well as solving problems of underdevelopment, NGOs need to remain independent and to shape public opinion if they are to flourish. And for this they need stable funding from informeddonors giving in a spirit of solidarity to support development carried out explicitly in the name of human solidarity. The paper sets out guidelines for NGOs to communicate in ways likely to gain the support of such donors. And it describes the la Florida project in Columbia as an example of how the beneficiary can - in the spirit of solidarity - be brought to the centre of NGO action and communication.

This paper explores corporate governance failure by drawing upon contemporary perspectives in the philosophy of the social sciences to identify four contending perceptions of corporate governance. Each posits a set of corporate governance 'certainties that derive from incompatible contentions about what is knowable and can exist in the social world in which corporations conduct their affairs. The broad conclusion drawn is that corporate governance processes must be seen as environments where failures of governance lead to one of two possible outcomes. Either trench warfare takes place between the corporate governors and those they seek to govern and with whom they disagreey resulting inevitably in victory of one over the other; or competing governance interests and desires are confronted and integrated. The latter requires tolerance on the part of both corporate governors and the gov ernedy and a willingness to settle competing governance truth-claims with consistency and without self deception and self-delusion.

The phenomenon of global warming, the anthropogenic theory of its genesis and some of the implications of that theory are introduced as a case-study of a global environmental problem involving issues of equity between peoples, generations and species. In particular, recognition of the view that the absorptive capacities of the atmosphere comprise an instance of the Common Heritage of Humankind would have a key bearing on negotiations downstream from the Kyoto Protocol, suggesting the proportioning of emission quotas to population, and also limits to the inter-state trading of quotas. This view and these possible implications are discussed; international regimes with such a basis are argued to have a firmer foundation than ones based on historical emission levels (such as the Kyoto agreement), and to escape the charge of anthropocentrism to which stress on the Common Heritage of Humankind appears to expose them. The anthropogenic theory might be held, instead, to favour tying emissions quotas to aggregate historical emissions of the last two centuries. But intergenerational equity requires a sustainable international regime, based on universal principles rather than history.

Martha Nussbaum is one of the most prolific and distinguished philosophers in the English-speaking world. Since 1995 she has been Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago appointed in the Law School, Philosophy Department and Divinity School. She is an Associate in the Classics Department and the Political Science Department, an Affiliate of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, a Board Member of the Human Rights Program and founder and Coordinator of a new Center for Comparative Constitutionalism. The Center aims to study the social forces that affect theimplementation of constitutional rights, especially for disadvantaged groups. She visits feminists in India each year to research the activities of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the problems of poor women in different countries. In Delhi she has worked with the UN Development Programme on a project on gender and governance, and has also worked with The Lawyer’s Collective, an activist group in Delhi working on women’s rights.Born in 1947, she has taught at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford Universities and from 1986 to 1993 was a research advisor at the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) in Helsinki, a part of the United Nations University. At WIDER she worked with Amartya Sen on defining ways of measuring the quality of life, a project which combined philosophy with development economics. She has chaired the Committee on International Cooperation and the Committee on the Status of Women of the American Philosophical Association, been a member of the Association’s National Board, and (in 2000) President ofits Central Division; she has also been a member of the Council of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies. She received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award in Non-Fiction for 1990, and the PEN Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for the best collection of essays in 1991. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997) won the Ness Book Award of the Association of American Colleges and Universities in 1998 and the Grawemeyer Prize for Education in 2002, and Sex and Social Justice (1998) won the book award of the North American Society for Social Philosophy in 2000. Her other books are: Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium (1978), The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986), Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990), The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994), Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination in Public Life (1996), For Love of Country (1996), Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (2000) and Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001). Among her ten edited volumes are The Quality of Life (with Amartya Sen) 1993; Women, Culture, and Development (with Jonathan Glover) 1995; Sex, Preference, and Family (with David Estlund) 1997, and Sexual Orientation and Human Rights in American Religious Traditions (with Saul Olyan) 1998. A dialogue called Emotions as Judgments of Value was staged as a play in Stockholm in 1999 and she has a contract to write a book on the genre of the philosophical dialogue for Harvard University Press.Her current work in progress includes Hiding From Humanity: Disgust and Shame in the Law (the Remarque Lectures delivered at New York University in 2001) and The Cosmopolitan Tradition (the Castle Lectures delivered at Yale University in 2000). In 2002 she delivered the Tanner Lectures at Australian National University in Canberra, under the title Beyond the Social Contract: Toward Global Justice; she also gave Tanner lectures on the same theme in Cambridge, England, in March, 2003. She has received numerous honorary degrees and is an Academician in the Academy of Finland.

How can free and equal people cooperate to solve conflicts and common problems in a rational and legitimate way? In this article I deduce principles for doing so from the requirements of rational communication set out in the discourse theory of Jürgen Habermas. I apply them in defining a process of efficient decisionmaking. What I call ‘communicative design’ denotes the design of a reason giving process in which the practice of proposing and assessing claims with regard to rulemaking and problem solving is undertaken on an equal and autonomous basis. Two sets of prescriptions are given: organisational principles for the composition of groups and argumentative principles for deliberation. However, any procedure aimed at achieving a rational consensus in decision making in organisations has to deal in practice with limitations of time, participation and the information available. Communicative design may not guarantee strictly rational decisions, then, but the procedure it constructs does promise relatively ‘more valid’ decisions than might be expected if another procedure had been adopted.

Understanding just what it is to he a business is a vital though neglected topic in business ethics. The account given here makes the possession of customers the defining feature. This excludes obvious non-businesses while allowing the widest possible range of options for deciding on the morally preferable form or forms which businesses should take.

This instalment is a reworking of the paper I gave at the meeting in Oxford in 2002 to a very small audience who I thank heartily for their patience and comments. I tried there to muse upon some ideas precipitated by reading two books by Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher whose work I find succeeds in being interesting and accessible without sacrificing technical content. I first came across his work whilst working on my PhD and was fascinated by his approach and learning — even when I did not understand or agree with him. In one paper he made a point that struck a very important chord with me in relation to questions of participation within development:Philosophers who talk about rights should pay much more attention than they do to the processes by which decisions are taken in a community under circumstances of disagreement. Theories of rights need to be complemented by theories of authority, whose function it is to determine how decisions are to be taken when the members of a community disagree about what decision is right.I would like to suggest that within the Development Industry it is not only philosophers who need to pay more attention to these issues, but also development professionals who work with issues of governance as well as participation at the grass roots. This is not an obvious linkage, I admit, but one which I hope thisdiary entry will make clear.I will try to show that acknowledging disagreement within the legislative and judicial fields might actually be a positive move. And, as Waldron also indicates, that there is something dynamic and positive about the participation of people in processes. I will examine some current thinking on participation in development projects and ask whether current practices may be hindering the 'freedom to disagree'. I conclude that the failure to address some aspects of development practice relating to power and the possibility of disagreement is an issue. I highlight some factors which inhibit participation and suggest they flow from failures to develop strategies that foster local participation in contexts where local people often lack the formal' knowledge they need if they are to negotiate successfully with what James C Scott has called 'institutional privilege.'

Fundamental to Sir Karl Poppers oeuvre was the insight that humans err - and that we can learn from our mistakes. Critique is therefore valuable in all human endeavours. Although this stance is most famously seen in Poppers claim that to be scientific a theory or hypothesis has to be falsifiable. Popper adopted a critical approach extensively in his work towards whatever crossed his path. Yet he never developed or suggested a general method of criticism. In this paper we present and explain a method of criticism consistent with Poppers approach and applicable to every rationally accessible part of human life including management theory and practice.Managers of course already know the importance of learning from mistakes. But what we propose here in our Model of Rational Criticism places the emphasis on learning before we actually make the mistakes by seeking to eradicate errors of reasoning, thus reducing the chance of costly errors in implementation. Weconclude by exploring some of the implications of our model for managers.

Controversy surrounds the 'intrusion of the discourse of rights into workplace relationships. This is explored by examining the nature of rights through the analysis of the idea of a 'right to manage'. Purported justifications of the right to manage in terms of either property or contract are shown to be inadequate, thus illustrating the need to incorporate a degree of consequentialism in the articulation and justification of rights. The value of a rights-approach is argued to lie in the identification of the morally relevant interests ajfected by management decisions and the correlative obligations of those involved in the workplace, rather than in the introduction of a special set of moral considerations distinctively connected with the idea of rights.

The UK launch of the Science Enterprise Challenge in 1999 has stimulated interest in the evolutions of science-based firms and this paper argues that Poppers seminal diverse contributions to philosophy are directly relevant to them. It begins by commenting on the applications of both Kuhns and Poppers concepts to technological (as against) scientific evolutions. It then suggests how Poppers approaches are applicable to the development and assessment of new technology within the framework of Freemans stakeholders approach. Monsanto s development of GMOs is used as an illustrative case.

Power is one of the key ideas in management, and so is the concept of authority. However, most studies on power are rather instrumental, dealing with the place of power in management, and how to achieve it. Less attention has been paid to the essential concepts of power and authority themselves in managementthought and how they have evolved. To clarify these concepts, and to better understand the notions of power and authority in management and their proper use in organisations, this paper goes back to one of the pioneers in management thought: Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933). She had an original vision of power, holding that genuine power is not 'power-over, but 'power-with'. At the same time, she defended an authority based on function and responsibility. We explain what her account implies for management in theory and practice.

What would Karl Popper have made of today’s management and organisation theories? He would surely have approved of the openness of debate in some quarters, but the ease with which many managers accept the generalisations of some academics, gurus and consultants might well have troubled him. Popperhimself argued that processes of induction alone were unlikely to lead to developments in knowledge and considered processes of justification to be more important. He claimed that it was not through verifying theories from experiment that knowledge actually developed but through the invention of bold and innovative theories that experimenters then tried to falsify. If new theories did not agree with the results of experiment, then they were considered false. If they passed testing then they were considered unfalsified and worthy of further testing rather than true. Objective knowledge was to be obtained through ensuringcritical debate and learning, rather than adhering to some objective scientific method.In this paper, Popper’s notion of falsificationism is explored through stressing the importance of the predictive content and testability of theories. A number of theories from the fields of management and organisation theory are examined and it is argued that many of them suffer from one of three defects: fromover-reliance upon untestable elements with psychological origins; from being phrased in language so vague that they gloss over phenomena; or from making predictions that are so cautious and all-encompassing as to be practically useless. As a result, they are likely to be unfalsifiable in Popper’s terms and their epistemological status is called into question. While acknowledging that the unpredictability of social systems poses problems for an approach stressing predictability, I conclude by arguing that organisation theory and management knowledge might well benefit from the openness and critical nature of Popper’s approach.

This paper examines the dynamics of thought-language interactions within the organisational context of business. Based on an assessment of the cognition-voice debate within the cognitive sciences and related areas of philosophical enquiry, the paper proposes that thought and language are distinct systems. This notion of modularity is developed into a framework within which the two systems interact and, in doing so, influence and shape each other. These interactions form multiple thought and voiced drafts, reflecting the ‘multiple drafts’ model developed by Daniel Dennett to examine the phenomenon of consciousness. The drafting and re-drafting of thought and language are analysed via critical consideration of two transcripts of interviews with owner-managers. The overall theoretical approach suggests that the dynamics of voice-cognition drafting offer insights into: the development of expert cognitive frameworks;patterns in group development - in particular the emergence of shared values and concepts within the business; and processes of experiential learning within organizations.

This is a book that we would enthusiastically recommend to those who unconditionally believe in the epistemologically or politically unproblematic character of organisational research. Carl Rhodes, once an employee of the Boston Consulting Group, now researcher at the University of Technology, Sydney, has written a small yet important book about academic writing on organisation. It has appeared in a small but interesting collection called Advances in Organization Studies that is edited by Stewart Clegg and Alfred Kieser and published by John Benjamins.Rhodes’ book resonates well with developed traditions in narrative and storytelling approaches to management and organisation studies. Such traditions have approached organisational knowledge from a narrative perspective and used narrative and literary methods to understand organisations. More specifically, Rhodes both draws on and contributes to an understanding of the relationship between narrative and power and to using multiple interpretations and representations in research.However, although we would argue that it is possible to identify Rhodes’ position in the field, ‘summing up’ in his own terms what he has to say is not easy. His central point seems to be that conclusively singular representations, perhaps including the one that we give here, are problematical from both an ethical and political perspective. One may be tempted to discard this as yet another postmodernist frivolity, but we would suggest that what writers and researchers in organisation studies, and the social sciences more generally, might get from this work is an increased sensitivity to the ethics of their writing practices.