ABSTRACT
As we write this, it is some twenty-five years since Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan (1979) left the field in no doubt that philosophy is relevant and important to the analysis of organizations. Although theirs was a narrower focus than they would have taken had applied philosophy been their objective, by concentrating on the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of theory and method it not only presented itself in an interpretively convenient matrix, but became a towering citation index success. So there is really no excuse for what has been the relative neglect of philosophy, especially in its other branches, in organization studies until comparatively recently. In its turn, until recently philosophy has tended formally to treat anything to do with management with disdain, as part of the messy but necessary business of earning a living, and the study of organization has been damned by association (Laurie and Cherry 2001:4).
