Oral Presentation by Martin Morf¹
¹ University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, Canada
TIME: Wednesday, 15 July, 14:30 – 16:00
Location: Room 2
Session: 14
Abstract
There are organisations and there are people. Organisations are large, hierarchical, objective structures somehow “out there” and beyond individual experience and consciousness. People, individuals, or persons, on the other hand, are subjective entities propelled by perceptions and ideas which somehow seem to be “in there.” The type of organisation considered here is the commercial corporation offering goods, services, and employment to flesh-and-blood individual persons. Such corporate entities are what makes modern life possible, but the fit between them and their dependents is less than perfect. Corporations are typically large, distant, and abstract while a person is small, up close, and concrete. The objective of this paper is to look at this mismatch within a comprehensive contingency table of empirical and rational epistemic claims, made about ontological entities which are either subjective or deemed objective in the sense of “independent of human minds.” The table constructed allows situating corporations and persons as the hypothesized abstract and concrete entities. It also suggests how they broadly relate to mainstream psychology (e.g., Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) and its earlier materialist European critics (e.g., Holzkamp, 1983) and its current, largely American, and mainly humanist critics (e.g., Held, 2004).