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The foolishness of wisdom: Towards an inclusive approach to wisdom in organization

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  • Izak, Michal

Abstract

The review of multiple attempts to develop an understanding of wisdom suggests that its modern conceptualizations being typically essentialist and objectivist are more restricted than historical interpretations. Many popular accounts imply interpreting wisdom in terms of other notions, such as knowledge or intelligence, however, as this paper suggests, this path of reasoning is far too limited to be meaningful, since by preventing theoretical exchange between discourses it makes the concept of wisdom unfeasible. This study shall attempt to demonstrate that departure from the essentialist framework of wisdom's conceptualizations may be tempting, and that exploring possibilities of replacing such restrictive approaches to wisdom with more inclusive one is an interesting option for organizational theorists, among others. Such a possibility is investigated via exploring March's notion of foolishness – not as an antithesis to wisdom, as essentialist accounts readily imply, but as a notion with which it appears inextricably linked. The deconstruction of the binary pair wisdom/foolishness suggests undecidability of the meaning of wisdom and encourages considering an extended context capable of accommodating the whole variety of concepts resulting from different sensemaking strategies rooted in the local theories of wisdom. It also invites regarding foolishness as an important organizational and societal concept. As a result, a more inclusive, post-modern context for organizational research on wisdom/foolishness for the potential benefit of organization studies is proposed.

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  • Izak, Michal, 2013. "The foolishness of wisdom: Towards an inclusive approach to wisdom in organization," Scandinavian Journal of Management, Elsevier, vol. 29(1), pages 108-115.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:scaman:v:29:y:2013:i:1:p:108-115
    DOI: 10.1016/j.scaman.2012.07.002
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    Cited by:

    1. Larsen, Bøje, 2020. "Whatever happened to “The Technology of Foolishness”? Does it have any potential today?," Scandinavian Journal of Management, Elsevier, vol. 36(1).
    2. Mahdavi Akramsadat & Ardabili Farzad Sattari & Kheirandish Mohammad & Ebrahimpour Habib & Daryani Shahram Mirzaei, 2020. "Presenting a Model of Managerial practical wisdom in Hospitals," Management, Sciendo, vol. 24(2), pages 20-48, December.
    3. Agata Pierscieniak & Monika Stelmaszczyk, 2020. "Organizational Wisdom: The Impact of Organizational Learning on the Absorptive Capacity of an Enterprise," European Research Studies Journal, European Research Studies Journal, vol. 0(Special 2), pages 271-281.
    4. Ali E. Akgün & Halit Keskin & Sumeyye Y. Kırçovalı, 2019. "Organizational wisdom practices and firm product innovation," Review of Managerial Science, Springer, vol. 13(1), pages 57-91, February.
    5. Annachiara Casalini & Guido Fioretti & Andreas Pyka, 2016. "Playfulness, ideology and the technology of foolishness in the creation of a novel market niche for distributed control: The case of iPLON," Journal of Organization Design, Springer;Organizational Design Community, vol. 5(1), pages 1-16, December.

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