Our purpose is not to define a particular philosophy of management but rather to demonstrate some of the ways in which philosophy — ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, logic and æsthetics — contributes to the practice of management. We identify a number of contemporary management questions, procedures or issues where the application of philosophical approaches is relevant and show how philosophical skills, an understanding of philosophical principles or exposure to philosophical discussion can contribute to improved management practice. In some ways the paper (...) is a report on progress in the quest begun by Nigel Laurie and Christopher Cherry in the first issue of Philosophy of Management, then entitled Reason in Practice (2001), when they asked why philosophers have interested themselves so little in the entire field of management. We include some examples where philosophers have written about management, some where managers have shown the direct impact of philosophy on management effectiveness and somewhere potential remains. In much, we see links to process philosophy and to the need for conversation and reflection by and between managers and philosophers. This does not of itself show how philosophy can contribute to management education. A brief final section discusses the way in which moral creativity skills can be developed through reflection and describes how this has been done in the Manufacturing Leaders’ Programme at the Institute for Manufacturing at Cambridge and in the International Management Ethics & Values course taught to undergraduate management students in Adelaide, Singapore and Hong Kong. This will be taken up in a subsequent paper. (shrink)

We attempt in this paper to define a new field of study for philosophy: philosophy of management. We briefly speculate why the interest some managers and management writers take in philosophy has been so little reciprocated and why it needs to be. Then we suggest the scope of this new branch of philosophy and how it relates to and overlaps with other branches. We summarise some key matters philosophers of management should concern themselves with and pursue one in some detail. (...) We conclude with an invitation. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

The body of work pre s ented in this issue and the next (Volume 12, Issue 1) arose from a question both editors had separately harboured for some years, namely: what role can philosophy play in the practice and conceptualisation of management? Contemporary discourses within the academic discipline of management have tended to err on the side of science, either in the striving for replicative and iterative advancement in the proof-laden establishment of ‘facts’ or, what is worse perhaps, the iterative (...) and replicative containment of knowledge within languages or discourse that force the writer and the reader into narrow confines of thought â€" and thus narrow lanes by which to survey the field of enquiry. Indeed the extent of one’s vision itself becomes constrained such that only those fields readily open to view from the confines of the discourse’s perspective are ever regarded as legitimate; science has a remarkable degree of parochialism built into its very axiology. Unfortunately so too has logic, the ultimate science of philosophy. As the Cambridge mathematician and Harvard metaphysician A.N. Whitehead concluded, “the final outlook of Philosophic thought cannot be based upon the exact statements that form the basis of the special sciences. The exactness is a fake”. (1941: 700) Never has Whitehead’s assertion been more true and yet more disregarded. (shrink)