Marginalization and recovery: The emergence of Aristotelian themes in organization studies

The past decade has witnessed a number of interesting shifts in the way people think about organizations. One of the most curious is the way in which much of the 'new thinking' is antithetical to mechanistic and rationalistic theories that have historically dominated organization and management studies. This paper investigates this shift, and argues that this new antithetical thinking can be interpreted as the re-surfacing, or recovery, of certain strands of Aristotelian philosophy, strands that were marginalized with the rise of scientific rationalism in the 17th century, before management and organization studies, as we tend to conceive of them, began. The discussion presented here demonstrates the traditional dominance of a disciplinary, mechanistic self-image in management studies, whereby the field drew its boundaries in such a way as to exclude anything 'other' than this. We argue that reconnecting organizational and management research with systems of thought other than those traditionally associated with the 'discipline', and adopting a 'kaleidoscopic' view of history, can enable researchers to think differently about key issues and inform future development. Key aspects of Aristotle's thinking are considered as a case in point.