Individual Contribution to a Themed Symposium by Armando Toscano¹, Severin Hornung²
¹ University of Bergamo, Italy ² University of Innsbruck, Austria
TIME: Tuesday, 14 July, 14:30 – 16:00
Location: Room 4
Session: 8
Abstract
This contribution applies the concept of epistemic violence in the context of the process and content of research in applied/ organizational and work psychology, drawing on additional theory and current examples from the field. The non-neutrality of scientific knowledge is recognized in nearly every field of the social sciences. If we accept that scientific knowledge develops propositionally and that language is a form of action, we can logically establish the idea that knowledge is itself a form of action. For knowledge to be considered a violent action, according to Thomas Teo (2010), three conditions must exist: it must be objective, it must have as its object a marginalized or dominated group, and it must cause harm to the object to which it is addressed. With respect to the first point, the creation of an objective world requires an operation of oblivion and fetishization. The subject must forget the operations of representation; the constructed world must be perceived as an opus alienum (Berger & Luckmann, 1967). Thus, a new world is created, a dimension of dehumanized technology, forcibly cleansed of human elements. That same world becomes an object of veneration as a supreme truth (Paci, 1961). Regarding the second point, unless the scientific community is investigating its own functioning or the dynamics of neoliberalization of academic production, the object of knowledge is likely to be a dominated group: adolescents, women, ethnic groups, people experiencing poverty. In studies conducted in the fields of organizational and work psychology, it is possible that the investigated otherness is consodered obvious, and traces of social domination get lost. However, studies on effective leadership, or on improving working conditions, etc., focus on workers. Workers are those who daily embody the harmful effects of the naturalization of capitalist relations of production. The idea that the surplus value of one’s labor benefits third parties and not the workers themselves has become so firmly entrenched in common sense that it is considered the only natural and possible path. Regarding the third point, we propose a vision according to which any scientific knowledge that does not reveal the reproduction of the relations of domination implicit in scientific innovation itself can be considered a source of harm to society and the social groups involved.