Revisiting Organisational Personality: Organisations as Functional and Metaphysical Entities

Abstract

This article reflects aspects of the debate between constructivism and rationalism by suggesting that rationalist accounts of the nature of organization may be limited, and that recent events around the crisis in world financial systems demonstrate the failure of the latter to provide adequate explanatory theory. The paradigms of mythos and logos reflect the dichotomy, where the former represents meaning and sense making as opposed to the rational pragmatic science of logos thinking. In the context of organization theory it is proposed that people create their worlds through language and that to propose an organization possesses a type of personhood in the metaphysical sense, a trope familiar to the literary scholars but not always appreciated by management writers. However, some scholars are now attempting to link the two worlds: an example is the use of the organic metaphors favoured by the Romantic poets to understand the nature of economic turbulence. The paper argues that such attempts to employ mythos-type thinking are a helpful counterweight to rational attempts to explain apparently non-rational organizational actions.