ABSTRACT
This final chapter on alternative methodology explores the issue of ‘critical retrospective research’. In their introduction to critical management research, Alvesson and Deetz (2000) argue that much of mainstream management research is built on modernist science, which itself is founded on the Enlightenment promise for an ‘autonomous subject progressively emancipated by knowledge acquired through scientificmethods’ (Alvesson andDeetz, 2000: 13). In contrast to a past defined by authority and traditional values, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment represented the rise of reason and modernist science, which:
proclaimed a transparent language (freed from the baggage of traditional ideology) and representational truth, a positivity and optimism in acquisition of cumulative understanding which would lead to the progressive enhancement of the quality of life. The Enlightenment’s enemies were darkness, tradition, ideology, ignorance, and positional authority.
