Reflexões Epistemológicas para a Pesquisa em Administração: Contribuições de Theodor W. Adorno/Epistemological Reflections on Business Administration Research: Contributions of Theodor W. Adorno

• Published in: Revista de administração contemporânea 2013-11, Vol.17 (6), p.642
• Main Authors: de Faria, José Henrique, Maranhão, Carolina Machado Saraiva de Albuquerque, Meneghetti, Francis Kanashiro
• Format: Article
• Language: Portuguese
• Subjects: Critical thinking; Epistemology; Organizational behavior; Studies
• ISSN: 1415-6555; 1982-7849

Adorno's philosophical legacy came to be considered in researches in the area of business administration, especially in organizational studies (Batista-dos-Santos, Alloufa, & Nepomuceno, 2010; Faria, 2004; Paes de Paula, 2008, 2012). This paper is intended to contribute with epistemological reflections and their implications in the use of dialectic as a method of analysis. Adorno's contributions to research in organization studies materialize in at least 6 ways: (a) the fight against totalitarian philosophical systems; (b) when ideas are elements from Praxis, these have concrete potential in the objective world; (c) the primacy of an object over a subject makes an object qualitatively distinct; (d) an object studied is nothing without a subject who will study it, because without the subject the object does not exist; (e) a subject thinks about reality principally through ideas and concepts; (f) as any reality studied cannot be fully knowable, it can only be known through what it shows, i.e. a non-concept can only be known through a concept, because a relationship of mutual existence allows us to consider the existence of a potential totality. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]