Back to the Roots of the Linguistic Turn

One crucial dividing line within present social and organizational research can be found in the approach to causation. While the search for causal factors of relevant phenomena such as performance constitutes the main type of research within the ‘traditional’ paradigms, more or less explicit rejection of the cause—effect form of knowledge characterizes the ‘new’ interpretive paradigms. Such a divided picture of social research is not a recent innovation and reflects philosophical disputes between verstehende Geisteswissenschaften and erklärende Naturwissenschaften that can be traced back to the late nineteenth century. Debates between ‘humanistic’ and ‘naturalistic’ modes of understanding social phenomena tend to reappear, and for the past twenty years or so these issues have pervaded organizational research (Burrell and Morgan 1979; Morgan 1997; Morgan and Smircich 1980).