Robert Cooper's contributions to the debate on organizational ontology

Abstract

This article, prepared through Robert Cooper's contributions, seek to think of an organizational ontology that moves away from the theoretical conceptions of administration linked to modern science, getting closer to a postmodern perspective. After a brief contextualization of the theme, we introduce the conceptual principles that ground modern thinking and their implications to organizational theorization, as well as their limitations. Next, we describe foundations from the postmodern viewpoint and their unfolding. Finally, we suggest that organizations are recognized as multiple inventive events, which surprise in relation to what was predicted and accentuate the emergent character of social reality. Cooper's ideas give rise to an epistemology focused on describing and interpreting the organization as a process, i.e. capturing the organizational ethnographic moment. Organizations, as empirical objects, keep living, active, hybrid, fragmented. As Bruno Latour might say, we have never been modern and our organizations were not or are not modern as well.

Keywords:
Organizational ontology; Organization/disorganization; Postmodernism; Robert Cooper; Jacques Derrida.