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.