Faced with the greater intention of explaining what management is, me and my study partner, Professor Paulo Grave, have been led, due to a purposeful and imperative discursive circularity in the construction of an answer-argument, to the elaboration of a speech about a certain complex object – the organization – that corresponds to the convenience of administration in stricto sensu. To put it another way, our inquiry regarding administration has required us to formulate an explanation of the phenomenon of organization, an explanation that meets the requirement of studying a cultural object that, as we think, is and should be the proper scope of administration.
In this sense, we resort to the fundamental ontological question: organization, what is it? To answer it, we have studied certain elements that, currently, already allow us the preliminary formulation of a deontological thesis: the organization is / must be a social instrument in the practical way of life, a productive micro-society, a contemporary oikos extended, in which the activity of producing goods useful to man becomes effective, collectively, providing man with the necessary, sufficient and convenient conditions for him to aspire to the good life.
It is important to say that the architecture of this argument-thesis is based on the Aristotelian thought and that of some of its followers on the ways or genres of life, the essential human activities and the teleological question to which they turn. In addition, it is anchored in a critical-systematic review of what has been historically said about the organization, as well as in our direct perception of contemporary administrative reality. We do this because we believe it is important to set up organizational types that can correspond to the action of the agent we characterize as an administrator – a virtuous agent.
This has resulted in a movement of study and research that has made us visualize the possibility of moving from an ontology to an organizational deontology. Now, if the administration is what we believe to be – the virtuous action of a virtuous agent – it is so within the scope of the must be. In other words, this organization is the human relational sphere in which the administration is present, not by chance or by any means, but because the administration thus requires that that sphere be, in this case, a social instrument of practical life for the human well-being. Thus, our defense is that, administratively speaking, the organization only makes sense if it corresponds to a duty to be claimed, since the administration being, would ensure that the organization would be for it.
