Year
2025
Abstract
Our societies are facing radically new situations characterized by existential challenges. Social sciences and management are faced with the need to invent innovative responses, expand the realm of possibilities, and facilitate the creation of novel proposals. This involves developing and implementing “abductive competence”, i.e. the collective capacity to construct new hypotheses in response to situations that appear confusing. Abduction is a concept we owe to the pragmatist philosopher Peirce, who sees it as the first stage of the “inquiry”, the social process of exploring problems and experimenting with new responses, which Dewey would later develop further. The chapter analyzes academic functioning based on “the beaten paths of induction”, then the use of fiction to develop the abductive approach, illustrated by three examples: the study of organizational temporality through Hitchcock and Chekhov; the critique of the precarious notion of “data”, through a short stoy by Primo Levi and an adventure of Sherlock Holmes; the questioning of the time/space dichotomy in the study of situated action, based on an ontology of movement, through various literary references. In conclusion, it is suggested that literary and cinematographic fiction be given a reinforced pedagogical and heuristic status in the training of management scholars and managers, under certain conditions of methodological rigor.
LORINO, P. (2025). La fiction comme outil d’enquête sur les organisations. L’enquête abductive. Dans: Rebecca Dickason, Fabien De Geuser, Alain-Max Guénette eds. Littérature, management et travail. Tome 2. La littérature comme révélateur du travail réel et de l’expérience intérieure du management. 1st ed. L’Harmattan, pp. 51-70.