The end of the “end”? An investigation of the limits of management science through the conceptual nebula of decline-decadence-downgrading

Abstract

The question of the end haunts managerial thinking through any approach to change but also, and very explicitly, in the very intimacy of the various life-cycle curves that shape the knowledge produced in many management disciplines (strategy, marketing, organizational behavior). This question conceals many ambiguities and a strong projective charge: Is it not our own end as living and mortal beings that each of us projects when we attribute a historicity to our object of research, whereas other sciences, more mechanistic, seek the immutability of laws and principles? By investigating a paragon of finitude—the theme of decadence—we encounter, lurking in ambush, the question of the end things, those of our world, but also those of the human sciences. In its never-satisfied quest for harmony between the being of its objects and the necessarily dedicated description it produces, management science, when it endeavors to reproduce as closely as possible what happens and is experienced in the field of research, aspires to that immediate access to being that the ancient eschatological religions called “parousia.” We conclude that in order to avoid treading water, management science must take a reflective and hermeneutic look at the utopia of a presence in being that it unwittingly pursues. It is a matter of leaving aside the end in order to engage in a hermeneutic process that has no end.