Refocusing

Henri Bergson has been for many years relegated to a footnote in most philosophical texts, especially those in the North Atlantic analytical tradition, his work having been widely critiqued by Russell (1914) and others and subsequently dismissed decades ago, with the exception of treatments such as those by Carr (1919), Alexander (1957), Pilkington (1976), Kolakowski (1985) and Lacey (1989). Until recently, he fared only marginally better in the Continental tradition, but in the first two or three decades of the twentieth century he was perhaps the world’s best-known philosopher, with the public presence and celebrity these days afforded to actors and musicians. Nevertheless, it may seem unusual to turn to the work of a philosopher who has been neglected for over sixty years to illuminate contemporary organization theory, however creative he may have been. In a world that is characterized by constant change; where chaos theory seeks to explain conditions of complexity, instability and emergence; where the habitual nature of problem solving (paradigms, culture) produces false or factitious problems (puzzles) for us to “solve”; where creativity and perpetual learning are prerequisites for organizational competitiveness; where novelty is prized; where environmentalism is forcing us to rethink the nature of the relation of organisms, communities and organizations to their environment and to each other; where knowledge, capturing the implicit and preserving organizational memory are key concerns; where time and space are being collapsed into virtuality; where the body is reasserting itself as a social and psychological phenomenon in new and different ways through cyborgs and prostheses; where a new spirituality and concern with ethics are emerging in both the natural and the organizational sciences; where the image has become the dominant metaphor in postmodern social organization; where difference and multiplicity are key problems in understanding identities; where new evolutionary theory is now emerging in psychology and organization studies; where language is seen as unreliable in the process of representation; where critical realism struggles to offer a viable alternative to positivist empiricism and postmodern textuality, genealogy and deconstruction; and where action and experience are seen by many as the foundations of social networks, it seems hard to imagine that a philosopher whose reputation was at its peak during the Great War could have anything relevant to say. Yet, however remarkably, Henri Bergson did address these matters in a way that remains vital and accessible, and indeed speaks directly to many of our contemporary concerns in organization studies.