On the edge of social constructionism: Wittgensteinian inquiries into organizations and management

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to outline a distinctive kind of qualitative inquiry, strongly influenced by Wittgenstein's very practical philosophical investigations.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper describes how there is a very clear, but not yet fully recognized, difference between (at least some crucial forms of dialogically‐structured) qualitative research and current more quantitative forms – a difference that is not fully captured in characterizing it as more focussed on subjective experience and as context‐oriented.

Findings

Central to this approach is a kind of poetic writing that requires a special kind of slow reading that leads us, not to a referential‐representational understanding of the text, but to a relationally‐responsive understanding of it, a shift from being concerned with the extra knowledge or information that one is left with after reading a text to a concern with what can happen during one's reading of it. Its focus is thus on the provision of detailed portrayals rather than on accurate representations, and with how ‘striking’ expressions remembered from our reading of such portrayals can come to in‐form our ways of perceiving, acting, talking, thinking, and evaluating events occurring around us.

Originality/value

Through this way, the seemingly merely descriptive inquiries of the kind Wittgenstein advocates can be applied, for example, in making sense of knowledge creation and innovation in organizations.

Citation

Shotter, J. (2006), "On the edge of social constructionism: Wittgensteinian inquiries into organizations and management", Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, Vol. 1 No. 3, pp. 189-203. https://doi.org/10.1108/17465640610718789