LA TEORÍA DE LA ACCIÓN COMUNICATIVA DE JÜRGEN HABERMAS. UNA INTERPRETACIÓN Y SUS POSIBLES APLICACIONES EN LAS CIENCIAS DE LA GESTIÓN

Abstract

An observation of organizations as social cells allows us to identify that they act within a framework of instrumental rationality, described and instrumented from the statements of the nascent sociology and, especially, by the thinking of Max Weber, pioneer of the bureaucratic school, who focused his statements on a teleological and at the same time procedural approach based on the interaction of the duality “should be” and “what to do”. This thinking became dominant in the so-called management sciences, generating actions characterized by domination over the human, its freedom and autonomy.The intellectual effort of this work is to find or contribute to a different approach in the management sciences, starting from the recognition of the historical context of the emergence of critical thinking, in the conception of the Frankfurt School, in a scenario of spiritual and cultural crisis that addressed the tasks of a redefinition of culture, the revision of ideal, hegemonic and central legacies of the thought of classical modernity, enlightened modernity, bourgeois modernity and its crisis of concepts such as reason, subjectivity, time, narrative, reality, progress, truth and value. Great importance is given to the production of Jürgen Habermas, identifying in his work the categories of “lifeworld”, “rationality” and “communication” and his critique of integrating mechanisms such as money through the market, power in the structure of organizations and solidarity generated by virtue of norms, values and communication.On these bases, the need for the theory of communicative action is justified in order to understand and overcome “instrumental rationality” so that social management (or inclusion) colonizes strategic management (or exclusion) and not as it has been happening socio-historically. Under the above perspectives, the aim of the article is to contribute to the debate on how to achieve an “economically efficient” and “humanly viable” management in order to find a reification of the empowerment of subjects, never their annihilation, since organizations are networks of the human fabric that transcends instrumental processes.

Keywords

• communicative rationality
• critical theory
• dialogic management
• instrumental rationality
• reification
• theory of communicative action