Topic and Purpose: This editorial asks about the relationship between philosophy and management and argues that philosophy is not an academic ornament but one of the fundamental foundations of management. Its purpose is to offer a research agenda for managerial success along three interconnected pathways: philosophy as practical wisdom, philosophy as the epistemological foundation of organization, and the construction of management theory grounded in indigenous philosophical traditions.
Diagnosis of the Problem: Since Taylor’s scientific management movement, management has made “the conversion of experience into science” the core of its legitimacy and has increased productivity, but it has gradually been reduced to a set of calculable and optimizable technical processes. Drucker’s insight that the enterprise, as a social institution, requires a philosophy of business was marginalized under the dominance of functionalism and efficiency-driven approaches. Contemporary managers must make ethical judgments under volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, rely on judgment when data are insufficient, and respond to employees’ demands for meaning, dignity, and the humanization of work. A management theory devoid of philosophical reflection lacks the capacity to attend to these demands.
Bases of the Argument: Three limits of the instrumental paradigm are examined. First, instrumental rationality reduces decision-making to optimization, whereas managerial decisions inherently involve value choices, and efficiency calculation cannot determine which performance is worth pursuing (Ledoux, 2012). Second, ethical decisions rarely have clear “right or wrong” answers, and philosophy helps preserve intellectual precision and caution in judgment; Windsor shows that the philosophical foundations of management and ethics are presented in management education in a fragmented and unsystematic manner (Windsor, 2015). Third, an instrumental view of human beings cultivates “feudal managers,” and the philosophical tradition from Aristotle to Kant to Nietzsche provides an alternative anthropological foundation (Reynolds et al., 2019); the Wittgensteinian “theory as therapy” approach can also bring managers’ unconscious assumptions to awareness (Shotter & Tsoukas, 2019; Tsoukas, 2019).
Research Agenda: The first pathway turns philosophy from a “system of knowledge” into a “practical capacity” and proposes topics such as Socratic dialogue, Stoic emotion regulation, phenomenological method, and the measurability of practical wisdom (phronesis), using interpretive and action-research methods (Sułkowski et al., 2025). The second pathway addresses organizational epistemology: the relation of epistemological traditions to the definition of “knowledge,” Wittgensteinian therapeutic philosophy, process philosophy and organizational “becoming” (Chia, 1999), and Deleuzian deconstruction (Tsoukas & Chia, 2011). The third pathway elevates indigenous philosophical resources from “cases” to “theoretical sources”: the theory of the “philosopher-ruler” in ancient Iran and Ibn Sīnā’s four conditions—political independence, authentic intellect, noble character, and mastery of the Sharīʿa (Zakaria, 2002)—and self-governance as the foundation of societal governance (Badr & Kattan, 2024), in dialogue with the Confucian tradition of self-cultivation (Chan, 2008; Van Norden, 2018), while avoiding cultural essentialism.
Implications and Conclusion: Philosophy in business curricula is often reduced to fragmented “business ethics,” whereas it should be taught through experiential workshops, philosophical foundations modules in research methods, and cross-cultural philosophy of management courses. The importance of philosophy for management lies not in providing answers but in keeping questions open—a capacity that, in a managerial culture hurriedly seeking problem-solving, may be the most fundamental factor in success. Philosophy of management is not an academic subfield; it is an intellectual attitude—a commitment to rejecting the reduction of management to technology.