Critical Realism, Managers and Information

Abstract

Many accounts of contemporary management raise the issue of the effective use of information, but little is said about how this is to be achieved. This paper sets notions of ‘information literacy’, drawn from higher education, against the reflections of a small group of managers. This indicates that there are a number of dimensions, notably the relationship of information use to organizational power, that are not adequately catered for in current conceptions of information literacy. It is argued that existing accounts focus excessively on the construction of meaning without taking into account the constraints on such construction. Drawing on resources from critical realism, these constraints are taken to relate both to the individual's embodied nature and to the structural dimensions of their practice. Exploration of these constraints is felt to require attention to the temporal dimension of social analysis and to an examination of the interrelationships between structure and agency.

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