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Some Reflections on a Phenomenology of Organizations

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Abstract

Husserl argued that the crisis of modern sciences was caused by the fact that they had taken their idealizations and abstractions, their mathematical and geometrical formulae, for bare truth, and had forgotten that they originated in the lifeworld. Phenomenology therefore asks how phenomena in everyday life are experienced. How phenomena in the immediate environment such as things or human others are experienced has been well studied. But how are macro phenomena experienced? To explore this question, I choose the meso level of organizations. How are organizations experienced? First, Husserls eidetic analyses or ‘personalities of a higher order’ is considered. Second, Alfred Schutz’s alternative approach and the two poles of his lifeworld analysis are examined. On this basis, I ponder, third, the question of how a phenomenology of organizations can be developed: How is an organization experienced, and how is it interactionally constituted? Finally, I summarize and discuss my reflections and make some suggestions.

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Eberle, T.S. (2023). Some Reflections on a Phenomenology of Organizations. In: Belvedere, C., Gros, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Macrophenomenology and Social Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34712-2_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34712-2_7

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