Constructivism in Strategic Management
The issue of management raised by uncertainty is an issue of strategic management. The Authors seek to better the effectiveness of the business or organisation through the elaboration of strategies, and by implementing methods that have the effect of increasing cooperation between the stakeholders. This objective can be achieved by acting upon its organisational structure, its culture, or its management systems.
Their scientific research process focuses on the analysis and understanding of human interactions within organisations. Its aim is to study uncertainty through social relationships at three levels: intrapersonal, interpersonal, and organisational.
The methodology adopted by the Authors is the one of psychosociological intervention. It should be recalled that this methodology, which emphasises clinical approach, borrows many aspects from clinical psychoanalysis. Examples include demand analysis, repetition, transference, and interpretation perlaboration which characterise together a reflexive behaviour from the researchers with respect to their positioning and a critical questioning regarding the final meaning of their research process.
This constructivist methodology places the emphasis on the context. It highlights the active role played by the researcher in shaping the theoretical perspective. It reflects ontological realism and epistemological relativism.
Uncertainty, complexity, paradox and reflexivity are central concepts in the demonstration of the relationships of the variables selected by the Authors. Those are essential concepts, indeed, of the constructivist framework. So, their work logically features the three founding assumptions that structure constructivism:
ü Negation of the ontological presupposition – the phenomenological assumption implies that knowledge is derived from a theory. This means that reality must not be addressed independently from the observers who are describing it
ü Interrelation between subject and object – knowledge is not the product of a linear and sequential accumulation of cumulated facts about a phenomenon. It is reached by trial and error; it is the resulting product of a permanent back and forth process by the researcher from theory to practice
ü Construction of an artefact – the cognitive conception is developed from an object of thought. This means that the organisation and its environment represent an abstraction, an intellectual construct that lends itself to a complex process of design and construction around a phenomenon relating to psychosociology
Immanence!
Our private equity firm is built around human identity and behavioural psychology.