Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was an Austrian philosopher who had a major influence on logical positivism and analytic philosophy. This entry focuses on [Page 815]how his thought is influential in action research in that, in his remarks, he highlights how actions are shaped and rendered meaningful only by occurring within particular surroundings; lacking a context, they are literally senseless.

In action research, where inquiries are conducted from within one or other particular organization, or a particular practice within it, with the hope of improving that organization or the practices within it in some way, inquiries are thus practice driven rather than theory driven; similarly, words come to make sense by being used within a specific situation rather than within a theoretical framework. Thus, for Wittgenstein and for researchers with people's activities as their central focus, ‘the words you utter or what you think as you utter them are not what matters, so much as the difference they make at various points in your life. Practice gives words their significance’. So although in the fields of management and organization studies terms such as leadership, expertise, organization, system, strategy, innovation, motivation and so on are used, and actionable knowledge is sought by practitioners in the hope of understanding how to implement appropriate causal processes to bring about such things, as Wittgenstein sees it, there are no such things in existence for these words to refer to.

Indeed, these words in fact refer to certain characteristics that are observed in people's activities only after they have been performed. Thus, in Wittgenstein's terms, theory-driven, scientific forms of inquiry arrive on the scene too late and look in the wrong direction with the wrong aim in mind—too late because scientists act as if the basic elements of their analyses are already there in existence as fixed, determinate and nameable entities; in the wrong direction because they look backwards towards already existing actualities rather than forward towards possibilities; and with the wrong aim in mind because they seek a static picture or theoretical representation of a phenomenon rather than a living sense, or sensing, of it as an active agency at work in shaping lives now, in the actual place and actual time of their enactment.

This is what makes Wittgenstein's kind of investigations so special: They are concerned with ontological rather than with epistemological issues, with reflexive rather than reflective investigations, with changing us in ourselves and not just our knowledge. Given researchers' training as rational thinkers and scientific investigators, they are inclined to think of all the difficulties they face as problems that can be solved by the application of a science-like methodology. But as he sees it, besides such difficulties of the intellect, they can also face a difficulty of the will, a difficulty that manifests itself in each new situation when they encounter what, spontaneously, they want to see. Relational or orientational difficulties such as these cannot be overcome by the application of any current theory-driven methods of inquiry. They are difficulties to do with the embodied expectations and anticipations with which researchers go out to meet the detailed features of their surroundings, and thus to find their way about and to go on within them without (mis)leading themselves into taking inappropriate next steps. Thus, the difficulties they need to overcome involve a working on the way they see things (and what they expect of them).

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