Duelling with dualisms: Descartes, Foucault and the history of organizational limits

Abstract

Critical perspectives in organization studies often dismiss Descartes’ philosophical contribution because it is seen to legitimize a patriarchal and phallocentric mode of reasoning. In particular, the Cartesian mind–body dualism is said to reinforce gender inequality in organizations by privileging the rational mind over the emotional body. However, not only is this view incomplete and misleading, it also fails to consider the more significant division between reason and madness in Descartes’ work. For Foucault, Descartes’ Meditations plays a role in excluding madness from the domain of thought at the beginning of the classical age; this mirrors organizational practices of exclusion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, namely the incarceration of the mad in houses of confinement. This tells us that Descartes’ work has relevance for understanding the relation between philosophy and organizations in a specific historical context. In place of the historically de-contextualized use of philosophy we frequently find in organization studies, we propose that organizational scholars should seek to identify physical exclusions, conceptual binaries and historical breaks in order to conduct a critical ontology of the present – what we call a ‘history of organizational limits’.

Keywords:

• Descartes
• Foucault
• history
• mind–body dualism
• philosophy