Robin Holt

Editorial by Sverre Raffnsøe, Alain Beaulieu, Barbara Cruikshank, Bregham Dalgliesh, Knut Ove Eliassen, Verena Erlenbusch, Alex Feldman, Marius Gudmand-Høyer, Thomas Götselius, Robert Harvey, Robin Holt, Leonard Richard Lawlor, Daniele Lorenzini, Edward McGushin, Hernan Camilo Pulido Martinez, Giovanni Mascaretti, Johanna Oksala, Clare O’Farrell, Rodrigo Castro Orellana, Eva Bendix Petersen, Alan Rosenberg, Annika Skoglund, Dianna Taylor, Thomas Lin, Mathias Mollerup Jørgensen & Rachel Raffnsøe.

Process philosophy originally referred to a small group of philosophers including Henri Bergson, William James, and Alfred North Whitehead as well as Heraclitus. These thinkers view the world processually, working from within things and reversing the relationship between ideas and life. This Handbook explores process philosophy’s relationships to organisation studies by focusing on five aspects: temporality, wholeness, openness and the open self, force, and potentiality. Each article considers the life and work of a specific philosopher, such as Jacques Derrida, Charles Sanders Peirce, George Herbert Mead, Mikhail Bakhtin, Hannah Arendt, and Jacquese Lacan, and how their work could potentially be used to think processually in organization and management studies.

Baruch Spinoza is rarely read in organization studies and figures in discussions on process philosophy or process thinking only occasionally. However, he becomes a most apposite thinker of organization and process in the context of ethics. Spinoza’s philosophy emphasizes both agency and structure as the active or passive modulation of nature, rather than individual agents in their status as subjects, or on structures as determining constraints. This chapter examines Spinoza’s philosophy based on three basic concepts: substance, mode, and attribute. It also discusses his ideas about God, Nature, ethics of coping, conatus, affect and affective capacity, actorship, and organization.

In The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, Friedrich Nietzsche refined and intensified his thoughts on the profound problem of pessimism and the tragic. Nearly all of Nietzsche’s work can be read as an evocation and exemplification of Prometheus, a tragic figure in The Birth of Tragedy that breaches the world of humans and gods. This chapter examines the sense of tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy, along with genealogy, the concept of ressentiment, happiness of the last man, eternal return and will to power, creation and negation, and organization.

Based on an empirical illustration of Onta pottery and more broadly a discussion of the Japanese Mingei movement, we study the intimacy between craft work, ethics and time. We conceptualize craft work through the temporal structure of tradition, to which we find three aspects: generational rhythms of making; cycles of use and re-use amongst consumers and a commitment to historically and naturally attuned communities. We argue these temporal structures of tradition in craftwork are animated by two contrasting but co-existing ideas of the good: the moral and the ethical. By developing the work of Elizabeth Grosz, we conceptualize this distinction between moral and ethical as a temporal phenomenon, specifically in differing relations to ideas of the future. Moral aspects of craft work understand the future as a progression from past, whether in preserving practices and norms, or improving upon them in relation to ideals. Ethical aspects understand the future as inherently open to chance and divergence, valuing difference, accident and the possibilities for creativity these entail. Empirically, we show evidence of both aspects in the case of Mingei—a organized movement dedicated to preserving and promoting traditional Japanese craft work. We contribute to studies of craft work by revealing and classifying its temporal aspects. We contribute to studies in business ethics by conceptualising a generative distinction between morals and ethics configured through differing understandings of time.

Drawing from Michel Foucault’s reading of Immanuel Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?,” and specifically his definition ofascesis, we associate maturity with a capacity for, and interest in, forming the self. On the basis of an empirical study of making vinyl records following the successful commercialization of digital media, we identify micro-disciplinary techniques of self-forming that emerge as enthusiasts steadily learn the craft of vinyl record manufacturing. It is, we argue, through technology, rather than against it, that organizational immaturity can be resisted. Craftwork involves testing and transforming, rather than just acquiring, traditional skills. Maturity involves an ongoing struggle of selectively and reflectively engaging with technologies via attempts to be the subject of one’s own subjection. The former contributes to the latter.

Recently, the ethical rather than just the economic resonance of entrepreneurship has attracted attention with researchers highlighting entrepreneurship and ethics as interwoven processes of value creation and management. Recognising that traditional normative perspectives on ethics are limited in application in entrepreneurial contexts, this stream of research has theorised entrepreneurship and ethics as the pragmatic production of useful effects through the alignment of public—private values. In this article, we critique this view and use Kant's concept of reflective judgement as discussed in his Critique of the Power of Judgement to theorise ethical entrepreneurial practice as the capacity to routinely break free from current conventions through the imaginative creation and use of self-legislating maxims. Through an analysis of the narratives of 12 entrepreneurs, we suggest there are three dimensions to reflective judgement in entrepreneurial contexts: (1) Social Performance; (2) Public Challenge and; (3) Personal Autonomy. Whilst the entrepreneurs were alive to the importance of commercial return, their narratives demonstrated further concern for, and commitment to, standards that they rationally and imaginatively felt as being appropriate. In our discussion, we integrate the findings into existing theoretical categories from entrepreneurship studies to better appreciate ethics within the context of value creation.

Do human rights make sense? They have been central to post-war political life, and our picture of moral self. But this is being eroded, Holt argues, and with it the viability of human rights discourse. The pre-social individual and its mental armoury is being challenged by an increasing awareness of genealogical forces in which the self is less a lone claimant than an exponent or rebel. Using Wittgenstein's philosophy, this book considers the liberal position on human rights, along with the communitarian and pragmatic attacks, and challenges the intelligibility of each from the perspective of what it is to be a language user. _Wittgenstein, Politics and Human Rights_ argues that moral relations are not dead; but that their life resides with the on-going relations of selves governed by universal principles.