Searching for a theory of practice in the strategy field

The present work has explored the possibility for an encompassing and overarching view of quality, relevance, interdisciplinarity and process at the epistemological level where the issue at hand is how paradigms are created. By following the epistemological path, it has shown that interdisciplinary connection calls for a process perspective encompassing relevance. To search for such broad view of commensurability we engaged in an ‘epistemological experimentation’. For this purposes we have explored after-modern partial epistemologies of Nature, Society and Discourse, assuming that some answers lay hidden in the very heart of epistemological incommensurability. Our research has shown that beneath incommensurability stands the same rationale. This is related to the very assumption of ideologies about the world consistent with a single sphere of knowledge. Each ideology represents the unifying logos around which researchers build paradigm coherence, claiming to be the ultimate alternative to modernism. These epistemologies assume incommensurable ways of becoming, which make it impossible to think of an integrated processual perspective. Our experiment has gained some understanding of commensurability by dropping these very ideological assumptions and substituting them with the real world, thus assuming relevance at the epistemological level. Analysis and comparison of after-modern epistemologies have shown that reference to a single epistemology falls into the inconsistency of electing one perspective – of either objectivity, or subjectivity or discourse – and silencing or decentring the others, thus ignoring that objects, subjects and discourses in the world are always in the process of connecting while maintaining their own identity. In the end this experiment has revealed that the way for commensurability appears only after rejecting the Great Divide between Science and the World, as well as between theory and practice (Latour, 1991, 1999, 2004). This way has also emerged when we found how to deal with the paradox of objects, subjects and discourses coming together without loosing their autonomy and power to enact.