THE CRITICAL EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE CONCRETE AND THE MOMENTS OF THE RESEARCH: A PROPOSITION FOR ORGANIZATIONAL STUDIES

ABSTRACT

The aim of this study is to propose, from a critical epistemology of concrete – CEC approach, a methodological procedure that explicitly states the three fundamental phases of all research conducted within this epistemology. This is not a blueprint to be followed, but a reflection of researchers’ procedural actions, guiding them in their practice towards understanding it. The research does not take shape in an automatic, simple and direct manner. All the research involves distinct moments, although integrated in its process of accomplishment. Such moments can not to be reduced to the contacts or on the amount of times the researcher establishes relations with the object of his investigation. They also take into account the ways in which these relationships develop and are changed. They are, in fact, characteristically distinct and integrated moments of appropriation of the concrete by integrated thinking from the real. Every moment of the research consists of a set of interactive actions between the researcher and his/her object. There is no predefined succession of events in such a way that, from one moment to another, there is a natural, automatic and linear passage between those moments. The researcher evolves from one moment to another when he/she overcomes the limitations of each previous moment, but not in a linear manner,once there is no guarantee that, from the interactive actions between the researcher and his/her object, going back to the understanding of certain constituent elements of the previous phase is not needed. The proposition of these three research phases in a CEC approach for organizational studies suggests that all research, in this dimension, is a process that has the concrete as primacy and that the researchers’ relationships with the concrete is not direct, immediate, simple and definitive. It is necessary a two-way procedure between the researchers and the phenomenon that they are studying, so that they may learn it in its knowable totality and, therefore, in its dynamic and contradictory essence, and not only in its phenomenal appearance.

KEYWORDS
Critical epistemology of concrete; Moments of research; Organizational studies; Primacy of the real; Methodology