About the epistemology of administrative and managerial sciences

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to analyze and reflect on the epistemology of administrative and managerial sciences. Some thinkers consider it a true social science and others do not attribute scientific status to it. We will show the different epistemological problems that must be faced by administrative science and managerial science, including its object of study, the methodology, the practice used in research. Administrative and Management Sciences reached their status as a science in the twentieth century, when Frederick Taylor (Taylor, 1985)presented the foundations and principles of scientific administration, at that time, the prevailing paradigm was positivism, therefore, administrative science should have used principles assumed by the natural sciences as: experimentation, observation, control of phenomenon, the use of mathematics, organized system of knowledge and others, which allowed him to be a science. Since that event the Administration and Management have continued their own development assuming emerging paradigms, from systems theory to complex thinking. From the epistemological crisis, the possibilities of integrating and complementing the different approaches are analyzed, from the positivism centered on the quantitative in an extreme to the normative with a qualitative approach, going through the whole range of epistemologies.

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