Weiss’ (1998) objective is to "balance" the overly positive portrayal of postmodern founders, methods, and theory in organization science in order to judge us as unworthy of the Academy. He does this by constructing a "Tamara" (a network of correlate stories): five stories that allege founding postmodernists (Nietzsche, Heidegger, de Man, Derrida, and Foucault) are implicated with Nazism and extermination. In short, decadence. And, five stories that allege contemporary postmodernists (e.g. Martin, Kilduff, and Boje) adopt non-objective and unethical positions of "extreme relativism," defined as advocacy politics to attack modern scientists who critique postmodernism or the controversial "dossiers" of its founders, more decadence. Decadence is a serious allegation. I have three purposes. First, to show that both modern and postmodern is science, with overlap-agreement on eight ground rules of reliable and valid argumentation. Second, to use the ground rules to analyze the ten stories. Third, to agree with Weiss’ observations that the postmodernists are infiltrating the Academy even publishing in its top organization science journals. I disengage from polemic Science Wars by presenting a seeing/not seeing window: areas where we both are science caught in the transition of hard science paradigm shifts redefining "real" (i.e. chaos, complexity, and relativity theory in quantum physics); areas where we see each others’ blind sides; and areas where we both are blinded by our polemics from realizing win/win complementarity.

Toward a critique of the philosopher. – It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence – Nietzsche (1967/1888: 239)

S1 – The German philosopher Nietzsche’s early philosophy is tainted with "idealism" (advocating what is good) and "solipsism," (world is all in the mind) stating that there are no "true" interpretations or "real" facts (no real world exists), statements Nietzsche sought to vehemently overcome in his later writings (Weiss, 1998: 23). Hereafter "S1" references Story 1.

My goal is to deny the polemic choice:

If postmodern, then NOT a science;

If science then NOT postmodern.

I reply, why NOT postmodern organization sciences (POS’s)?

I think that POS’s need not be dualized as against MOS’s.

I think POS’s are many (therefore the "’s" and are legitimate Sciences (hence the capital "S"), and MOS’s are also many and legitimate. I seek to avoid the polemic defense of all forms of POS’s against all forms of MOS’s. As Weiss (1998) reveals, we have many skeletons in our closet. My purpose here is to replicate and analyze steps, activities, and procedures in the Weiss (1998) "essay" used to produce this Tamara (network of correlate stories) as reliable and validated finding that POS’s is decadence. I do this by reintroducing nuances stripped away.

Why Tamara? The ten stories build one upon the other, as sets of mini-dramas, building to the climatic finale scene (S10), the defense of Jeffrey Pfeffer (1993) against the decadent attacks by postmodernists. Stories S1 to S5 are set together in the drama titled "Sources of Postmodernism" (p. 23-27). The five founding postmodernists are implicated in Nazi controversy as follows: Nietzsche (theory contributor), Heidegger (party member), de man (collaborator), Derrida (sympathizer), and Foucault (denial). Stories S6 to S10 are part of a mini-drama that implicates contemporary postmodernists (e.g. Martin, Kilduff, & me) in the crime of "extreme relativism:" defined as:

That advocacy and relativist argumentation often are found together in postmodernist writing suggests that relativism facilitates advocacy … a subjectivist perspective may provide a basis for skepticism regarding views one wishes to discredit (Weiss, 1998: 9).

Extreme relativism is unethical conduct. Weiss claims he does not have to prove unethical conduct, he only seeks to "balance" an overly positive portrayal of postmodernism in Organization Science (OS). Nor, does he claim to say that contemporary postmodernists are Nazis, only that they work in a "controversial" field and deflect criticism with "extreme relativism" (which by definition is unethical).

My response claims POS’s and MOS’s are legitimate sciences with overlapping guidelines of what constitutes ethical argumentation, which I term "narrative ethics." My purpose therefore is to apply eight guidelines for narrative ethics to the ten stories (allegations) assembled by Weiss. In doing my analysis, I will not dismiss the claim that some postmodern founders are Nazi, or discount my own, too often polemic statements about postmodern. I will trace citations, to restore their context to differentiate innuendo form objective critique.

By way of summary, I will assert that Nietzsche has a central theory of anti-anti-Semitism, race mixing, and reform by heredity that is exactly opposite to Nazi doctrines of extermination. Further, de Man, a Nazi-collaborator and Heidegger, a Nazi-member, did work that is ethical and legitimate as science. Further, Derrida’s defense of de Man, while seeming naïve, is not reason enough to dismiss all his work. Foucault’s association with Nazism by Weiss, I will show as an absurd misreading and misrepresentation of another author’s polemic attempt to make Foucault guilty by innuendo. Printing the charge in Organization Science without evidence and objective analysis is unethical narration. Finally, I will prove reliably and validly that every single contemporary postmodernist study and theory reviewed by Weiss is dismissed in ways that violate one, some or many of the guidelines of narrative ethics.

Narrative Ethics Three parts: first, polemics and nuances, second, a seeing/not seeing window of differences and overlaps, and third, presentation of eight guidelines. Ethically, critics of either MOS’s or POS’s legitimacy have double obligation. First, not to diminish the potential of either/both sciences or persons and (2.) not to side step the political issues or contributions by polemic win/lose positioning. Polemics overstate, ignore, underplay, and in the end trivialize their interplay. Ethical problems are more complex than a choice of science versus postmodern. Polemics reduce all issues to two sides. I prefer to keep the nuances that open up questions to many sides, to seeing our "ands" and "betweens."

One way to read Weiss’ ten storylines, and his constellation of stories, is as a nuance, an accenting of a strand of deconstruction and postmodernism, a strand that is not flattering. But, to see only the strand and not the texture of the rope is reductionism; to fashion the worst strands into a rope is a lynching. If there are many sciences, many POS’s and many MOS’s, then some strands are the same, some different, some are broken, others stretched, and I think more strands need to mend. One I would like to mend, and one I would like to show that we share, can be depicted (see Figure One).

Both See. Both MOS’s and POS’s have modern science at their base. Empirical Marxism and Critical Theory both advocate quantitative analysis, objective science, and statistical comparison. Both MOS’s and POS’s see that changes in the hard sciences, such as complexity, chaos and relativity theory are changing assumptions about reality. Gephart’s (1988) ‘Ethnostatistics" looks at the quantification of qualitative, and the qualitative aspects of quantification, accenting common ground and non-duality. Best and Kellner’s (1997: 223) review of the postmodern turn in hard science present the work of scientists who assert that postmodern science "continues to be oriented toward quantitative knowledge, experiment, prediction, and control." POS’s are based in postmodern science, not merely in Humanities or architecture.

POS’s Blind Spot. MOS’s see the blind spots to POS’s and point them out. Can POS’s take feedback and criticism without deconstructing it? Findings are mediated by values and advocacy gender, race, ethnicity, class, etc. in ways that alienate dominant groups. While there are locally constructed "realities" there are also grand narratives, "real" trees and forests. With deconstruction comes the responsibility to offer a reconstruction, especially when criticizing others’ positions.

MOS’s Blind Spot. POS’s can see blind spots in MOS’s. My entries here are adapted from Guba and Lincoln (1994: 106-107) and are explained in detail below. There are Internal (intraparadigm) critiques about situating analysis in context, attending to etic (insider) categories, etc. There are external (extraparadigm) critiques of MOS’s by POS’s abut overcoming dualities between theory/fact, value/fact etc (explained below).

Both See. The polemics of continuing the Science Wars (Frost and Martin, 1996; Best & Kellner, 1997) is damaging to both sciences. If we can declare peace, we both know the advantages of win/win collaborations. We have seen the advantage of complementarity in triangulation studies. There is commensurability, but the polemics make it all seem incommensurate. We are also blind to our shared fate, given the changes to hard science as well as global capitalism we both see.

The purpose of the Seeing/Not Seeing Window is to learn more about what is not being seen, and to communicate without raising defenses and inviting reactive polemics. The contribution I find in Weiss is his attention to POS’s blind spots, our excessive rebel language, our obfuscation, our Nazi complicity. There are three other viewpoints in Seeing/Not Seeing that are not just relativism. Weiss has a blind spot, doing his own variant of deconstruction. For example, consider the sections of the paper as an assemblage: ("Alternative Readings of Postmodernist Studies" p. 18-21); genealogy ("Sources of Postmodernism" p. 23-27); decentering ("Echoes of Postmodernism’s Origins in Contemporary Organizational Analysis" p. 27-33); fiction writing ("Meet the Postmodernist" p. 4-6), literary criticism ("Critiquing a Critic" p. 34-39), and even Tamara (presenting the Meet the Postmodernist play as a model story to analyze alternative stories and dramas, while denying the legitimacy of Humanities moves as "science." I am not saying he is hypocritical or even decadent. I contend that in imitating (even satirically) what he dismisses as legitimate, he becomes more postmodern in the sense of the charge of "extreme relativism" than he self-reflectively admits. And, thereby disproves his own claim of a separation of modern and postmodern science.

As postmodern scientist my contribution is to restore these and other nuances. Postmodernism is interdisciplinary, many-stranded, as is poststructuralism, feminism, social construction, environmental ethics, etc. Collapsing is reduction. Each has so many variations, some even agreeing with Weiss’s critiques of relativism and deconstruction, but many more extending the kinds of quantitative, objective, science he denies as our common heritage. Lumping all the variants into the label "postmodern" overdetermines the term, and returns us to the win/lose science wars. On the surface, it is in the "Both See" and "MOS’s Blind Spot" boxes.

Methodology At a deeper level, I have listened to Weiss, and rendered the Guba and Lincoln (1994) challenges to positivism and logical positivism less polemic, translating them in ways, I hope can be heard. And in ways that define narrative ethics.

First, I spent 120 hours on this project, reading, transcribing, and researching the sources for each story. After four careful readings, I made a listing of every assertion made about postmodernism, the authors ascribed to be postmodernist or a sympathizer with postmodernism (these became rows in Appendix A). I recorded each assertion in the essay, the postmodernist to which the term was being attributed, and the context of what was said in the originating document.

Second, I did comparative content analysis contrasting quotes included from authors (column one) ascribed as postmodern (or sympathizer) versus the text of their original work. Single word or simple phrase caricatures are listed in column two, and more complex caricatures and my analysis are in column three. Using each author as a row, the essay quote (or summary, where no quote was made), corresponding original statements, and original-context were recorded in column three.

Third, to construct the ten story scenarios and their network of relationships, I used guidelines from grounded theory, writing storylines, checking it against the Weiss text, rewriting as I got a sense of the whole and its parts (Glaser & Straus, 1968).

Fourth, I adapted Guba and Lincoln (1996) into a set of guidelines for narrative-critique ethics in terms of reliability and validity. Narrative ethics consists of four internal reliability (1 –4) and four external validity (5-8) analyses:

1. Context Stripping Test – How accurate is the context of the quote-segments of postmodern work presented in the ten storylines? The test is to trace how context of an original work is or is not stripped away from the reader’s direct consideration. For example, quotes can distort: truncate/omit pre-fixes to sentences, or substitute an alternative rendering to a paragraph of the original. Context stripping is one way to increase the abstract rigor of concepts, but can sometimes detract from the relevance of a generalization. The analysis is to compare original context with reported context for each storyline so that any imbalance can be redressed.
2. Etic/Emic Dilemma – An etic category is imposed by an outsider to the field of inquiry, group or culture. Etic categories can be misapplied to craft a storyline, conclusion, or interpretation that has little or no relationship to emic (insider) categories or to insider-definitions of etic-categories. For example, the word "relevance" can be applied as etic (outsider) when it has no relation to how insider’s (emic) use and/or define the word. I shall focus in particular on cases in which dualisms (bifurcation into two opposed concept extremes) are used as etic categories when such bifurcation can be questioned as a legitimate emic-usage (e.g. good-true, right-wrong, qualitative-quantitative, science-Humanities).
3. Reliable Assemblage of Data - Generalizations may appear meaningful as a result of data amassed in ways that stack the deck. A quantity of evidence can be produced which in actuality is an incomplete picture of each individual case (e.g. leading out a review of postmodern science approaches can make it appear that there is no quantitative analysis and POS’s are rooted only in Humanities.
4. Discovery Process Evaluation - Each of the ten stories can be treated as a theory or hypothesis to be tested. The discovery process analyzes the extent to which a story was an "a priori" a hypothesis before being applied to the data. A priori hypotheses can become a way of sampling only data which fit and excluding cases that do not. I turn now to the four external tests. Since my renditions are themselves hypothetical statements of Weiss’ stories, I include how I see the stories constructed and how I constructed the stories from the evidence provided.
5. Theory-Laden Facts – An external test of "objective" analysis is the ability to independently research and to replicate the data assemblage, independent of the theory application procedures. If theory application procedures are interdependent with data assemblage, then the case for objectivity is not met. The analysis is to replicate the data assemblage producing each storyline.
6. Induction and Deduction Problem – Different theories may "be equally well supported by the same set of ‘facts’" (Guba & Lincoln, 1994: 107). There are two cases to distinguish. In deduction, a theory is crafted and facts are assembled to give the theory coherence-believability (Culler, 1981: 169-187). Or, in induction, the same facts can be explained, more or less parsimoniously or accurately, by different theories. In a deductive-story, there is a "grasping together" of elements (Ricoeur, 1984) such as characters, events, and objects into a plot line (a theory) that gives each element factual-value. Each deductive storyline can be compared with inductive stories that give different value and believability to the facts. Verifying a storyline (deduction) is different from falsifying or rejecting a story (induction), as Popper (1968) makes apparent.
7. The Value-ladeness of Facts – It can be argued that each of the ten stories is a statement of value. That, the stories are a correlative network, or aggregated macro-story, (i.e. Tamara) on the basis of a value framework. The question becomes how did the author get from S1 assemblage to S10 assemblage, with S2 through S9 as intermediary connecting points? My definition of a correlate story network.
8. The Inquirer and Inquired Dyad – In the story network, there is an inquirer influencing the relationships among the ten stories. Two principles in the hard sciences, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the Bohr complementarity principle have documented a dyadic impact of the inquirer (see also Lincoln & Guba, 1994: 107) on what is observed. This is also referred to as VARA (Validity-as-reflexive-accounting). Altheide and Johnson’s concept of VARA (1994: 489) "places the researcher, the topic, and the sense-making process in interaction." VARA directs our focus to the relation between observer and observed, the point of view of the observer, the role of the audience in reading the essay, the rhetorical style of the observer, and the relation of what is observed to wider contexts (historical, cultural, and organizational).

In sum, my method is comparative content analysis (between claims and originals), applying each of these eight tests of narrative reliability and validity to the received-findings of the Weiss essay. I do so to avoid falling into the polemic abyss of the duality machine. "Duality machine: sets up arguments as the analysis of bifurcation: evil or true, subjectivism or objectivism, Humanities or science, left or right politics, reality or fiction, intellectual or scientist, relativist or ethical. The duality machine is the very opposite of POS’s attempt to implode dualities and too easily escalates to the War Machine (to the expulsion of those on the wrong side of dualities). Can postmodernists claiming the simultaneity of multiple positions, advocate ethical positions? Yes, there is local agreement on guidelines for narrative ethics, and what Lyotard (1984) and Cilliers (1998) term "agnostics of the network" to counter excesses. Derrida also argues that ethics is possible since a guideline can be "remotivated" every time we apply it, to insure that it fits the context of the analysis, and to not accept what Weiss (1998) calls: "anything goes." This is not acquiescence to Habermas’ universal rules for speech communities. What I mean to be doing in my remotivation of Guba and Lincoln (1994) in the context of each analysis and to fit, in this case, the overlap between MOS’s and POS’s.

• S1 – The German philosopher Nietzsche’s early philosophy is tainted with "idealism" (advocating what is good) and "solipsism," (world is all in the mind) stating that there are no "true" interpretations or "real" facts (no real world exists), statements Nietzsche sought to vehemently overcome in his later writings (Weiss, 1998: 23). Hereafter "S1" references Story 1

S1 is a story based in practices of context stripping. We can refer to the context of the snippets of Clark (1990: 2) remarks "no facts, " only interpretations," "no truths," are summed by (Weiss, 1998: 23) to assert Clark is asserting that Nietzsche is "nearly solipsistic." The context is that Clark’s (1990) is a refutation of Rorty’s theory of correspondence (mirror theory of realism). Weiss quotes the snippets correctly, but grafts them out of a book that gives them a totally different meaning:

Like Berkeley, Schopenhauer claims to be defending common sense by insisting that the empirical world exists only as representation and not independently of consciousness. Nietzsche, in contrast, apparently thinks that common sense affirms the independent existence of the external world. Nietzsche agrees with Schopenhauer that the world we perceive exists only as representation. But because he thinks "we believe we know something about the things themselves [the extramentally existing things] when we speak of tress, colors, snow, and flowers," he presumably does not reject the whole idea of independently existing objects as contradictory. He simply denies our perceptual access to such objects (Clark 1999: 81, additions hers).

Clark’s nuances to Nietzsche are important. Nietzsche rejects the "metaphysical correspondence theory." Clark (1990: 40) is offering a critique of William James, Richard Rorty, and Hilary Putnam’s rejection of correspondence theories.

All three seem to accept the two points that I have claimed commit Nietzsche to understanding truth as correspondence, namely, the equivalence principle (that "grass is green" is true… ) and common sense realism (the claim that the world exists independently of our representations of it)" (p. 40).

Weiss appears to advocate the "common sense realism" [ontological realism, p. 41] that Clark critiques Nietzsche for having. For example Weiss (1998: 7) equates postmodernism with the "pure idealist view:"

… that forests (and for that matter forest products, such as the pages of this journal) exist only as subjective perceptions or interpretations, that is, as ideas in your mind .

Weiss confuses Nietzsche with the idealist, Berkeley (Weiss’ "mind-body problem" p. 7), the reverse of what Clark claims Nietzsche’s position to be (i.e. common sense realism, while rejecting metaphysical correspondence). Weiss (1998: 7, 23) makes realism and idealism a dualism, in ways no postmodernists would accept, and in ways inconsistent with a contextual reading of Clark (1992). The nuances are critical here, since postmodernism (and Nietzsche) are given an ironic twist to mean the opposite of common sense theories of truth, correspondence and idealism (all is mind).

According to the very end he considered racism a maze of lies, and believed that race mixture was the source of great cultures and that social penalization might well result in a re-doubled spiritual effort. Now as ever, he insisted that the Jews had through their history accumulated characteristics that made it desirable that they should become an ingredient of a future mixed race … and that anti-Semitism was the "the lowest level of European culture, its morass" … Nietzsche’s views are quite unequivocally opposed to those of the Nazis – more so than those of almost any other prominent German of his own time or before him (Kaufman, 1968: 303).

There is no point in citing more examples of Nietzsche’s theory of master race and racial union as diametrically opposed to Holocaust, I do not have the space. Instead my focus is on internal and external validity of textual practice. Referring, to other authors work, Kaufman (1968: 300-1, 304) concludes: "Here, too, Nietzsche would be quoted in support of Nazism only when passages were torn from their context … improvised for polemic purposes" and calls "the Nazis’ way of citing him … one of the darkest pages in the history of literary unscrupulousness."

S3 grasps together in one plot, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, De Man, and Foucault as Nazi or Nazi-involved. My view, I do not buy the dualisms (If Nazi-implicated, then not great thinker; If not Nazi, then [not] postmodern). I do contend: Heidegger was a seriously involved Nazi, but also a great thinker. De Man was a twenty year old Nazi-collaborator, but also a great thinker. Derrida defended his friend De Man with naïve-sounding apologetics but his thinking is still great and he is not a Nazi. As discussed above, I do not think Nietzsche a Nazi or anti-democratic (see for example S 292, 293), but his writings were definitely revised and appropriated to the Nazi cause. Just because Foucault lived in occupied France does not make him a Nazi or less than a great thinker. I also have serious validity and reliability issues with S3.

S3’s correlate of Foucault’s link to Nazism imitates and misreads the "evidence" assembled by Hirsch (1991). We can trace how Weiss fashioned his misinterpretation of Hirsch’s (1991) "innuendo" (not evidence) of Foucault as Nazi? Hirsch accuses Foucault in his Riggins (1983) interview of not recalling memories, such as the horror of the herding of Jews into cattle cars. As Weiss summarizes it (1998: 26-27): "Foucault, who spent his teenage years in a Nazi-occupied French town, during which time its Jewish residents were herded into cattle cars and sent to concentration camps" (p. 27). However, Weiss completely misreads Hirsch (1991: 122-125). Weiss’s (1998: 26-27) inference is that Hirsch (1991: 126-128) is describing "herding Jewish residents" of Foucault’s own "hometown" into cattle cars. The confusion comes from Hirsch’s juxtaposition of Foucault’s interview excerpts of childhood and teenage memories with someone else’s observations of Jews boarding train cars in Germany, not France, and not Foucault’s hometown, as well as how German boy’s threw rocks at those cars, in Germany (p. 126). Weiss again strips the citation from its context and makes it an assertion about a postmodernist. Hirsch asks: "If the kid of ten or eleven that Foucault remembered himself as being in, let us say 1941 or 1942, had become a German, would he also have become a '‘kraut?’" (p. 126). But, Foucault was not and did not become German, nor did he become a Nazi, nor is there any evidence in Hirsch (1991), or elsewhere to support such a perverted assertion. In short, Weiss and Hirsch assemble etic categories, without attending to emic categories in Foucault’s narration of history.

This example is not only context stripping, but violates every validity and reliability guideline explained above. The assemblage of data is not reliable evidence to warrant Weiss’ generalizations. In terms of discovery process, S3 is an a priori hypothesis (i.e. Foucault’s childhood under occupation determines the writing of his theory of power and his critique of liberal democracy), an etic category "Nazi-occupation-forgetter" applied by innuendo, not data. The facts are already theory and value-laden, seeking to include only evidence to advance the claim, while ignoring context and actuality. There are also transparent deduction problems in how the evidence is assembled to make the claims. In short conditions for narrative ehtics concerning Foucault have not been met.

S3 also imitates another polemic prosecutor, a dossier-compiler of evidence to convict the postmodern, Farias (1989). Indeed, Heidegger was, by all indications, a member of the Nazi party. However, does this warrant caricature and trivialization, without analysis of original text, of Heidegger’s entire life work as "destruction" as well as "ideology" (Weiss, 1998: 24)? Heidegger’s involvement in Nazism is summarized as "opportunism" context-stripping Rorty’s (1988) more nuanced-quote, and his German nationalism is alleged to echo "Nietzsche’s contempt for democracy and Judeo-Christian ethics" (p. 24). What is the context of Rorty’s remark? Rorty (1991: 19n) put it this way:

I would grant that Heidegger was, from early on, suspicious of democracy and of the ‘disenchanted’ world which Weber described. His thought was, indeed, essentially anti-democratic. But lots of Germans who were dubious about democracy and modernity did not become Nazis. Heidegger did because he was both more of a ruthless opportunist and more of a political ignoramus than most of the German intellectuals who shared his doubts. Although Heidegger’s philosophy seems to me not to have specifically totalitarian implications, it does take for granted that attempts to feed the hungry, shorten the working day, etc., just do not have much to do with philosophy…."

Again, there is context stripping, a priori-hypothesis, etic application of category to construct evidence, etc.

S3 also summarizes Hirsch’s (1991: 24-26) dossier of what Weiss titles: "The de Man Affair" (p. 26) as reason to dismiss his "distinction between fiction and reality." De Man was, by all accounts, was a Nazi collaborator and also did critique the dualism between fiction and reality. But, does this warrant dismissal of his life work, without first-account analysis of that work? Or, to present the "nagging question of postmodernism’s relationship to Nazism" (p. 25) as the collaborator characterization of every postmodernist?

First de Man, even in the quote represented by Weiss (1998: 24-25) asserts not a duality (unable to distinguish reality and fiction), as Weiss caricatures it, but states "experience always exists simultaneously as fictional discourse and as empirical event." The ignoring of nuance here is important. De Graef’s (1993) book reviews de Man’s work, without collapsing it, into a defense of his guilt over being a collaborator. De Man’s work in art history, narrative and poetry is a "science" an "art-historical science" that involves deduction, induction, and questions of reliability and validity (e.g.. the relationship between objective-fact and subjective-value) in textual interpretation (De Graef, 1993: 18). De Man does claim there is a difference or separation between how literature claims truth and how positivist science claims truth, however his assertion is that it is historical. De Man also has a critique of Heidegger’s deconstruction, and Lyotard (1993) has another. Typecasting them together as all Nazi-linked or all Heideggerian-inspired oversimplifies nuances, leading to reductionist claims. I could go on listing nuances and more severe critiques by postmodernists of the work of other postmodernists and deconstructionists, but I think my point has been made. Postmodernism is not unitary and yet has a narrative ethics that escapes Weiss’s essay.

What is Weiss’ theory of relativism and from what evidence is it derived? Weiss’s theory is a dualism, first a bifurcation of relativism from the domain of science defined as "true" the objective, rational, pursuit of single truth. What is "good" is postmodernist-relativism which Weiss’ (1998: 7, 10, 18) splits into four parts: (1) "idealist view" (or subjectivist, the world is in your head), (2) "moderate view" (or idealist view, that there are multiple interpretations of the world mediated in language in culture), (3) "extreme" view (truth is merely illusion), and (4) "selective" view (advocacy motivated by preferred political values). The article ends with arguing that postmodernist assertions need not be taken seriously or tolerated since postmodernist-sympathizers and practitioners acknowledge "extreme subjectivism is simply a rhetorical pose" (p. 42). On what evidence is this conclusion and S4 derived? First, Weiss (1998: 24) uses the typology to cast all admirers of Nietzsche and Heidegger as idealist plus selective relativists (1998: 24):

… left-wing and right-wing admirers of Nietzsche and Heidegger do seem to have in common a basically idealist, subjectivist, relativist approach that, by denying a singular truth, allows for interpretations that more conveniently fit with whatever view one is advocating.

Second supporters of Derrida, because of the "de Man Affair," are also typed as "idealist" relativist (p. 26-27). De Man is by definition a selective relativist and idealist-relativist, engaged in "advocacy" and the quote, allegedly splitting fiction and reality (p. 24-25). Foucault, the "disenchanted Marxist" (p. 24) because his theory of power is restricted to oppression in liberal democracy, as linked to his "teenage years in Nazi-occupied" France (p. 26). With the exception of the quote from de Man (used to typify his life work) the characterizations are drawn from other polemic authors’ sources of the founders of postmodernism that appear to fit Weiss’ typology of relativism. My point is that such a novel theory of relativity merits more rigorous empirical investigation (i.e. content analysis) based in a reading of the actual work of the authors, before the typology is used as a way to catalogue contemporary postmodernists. My objection is that the typology is founded primarily in the link of postmodernism to Nazism, rather than in a comprehensive reading of their actual work. The category system is therefore etic and not one any postmodernist or poststructuralist I know subscribes to. It is also an a priori hypothesis (all contemporary postmodernists use selective relativism to attack and defend), taken from quoted references by other polemic authors (Ellis, 1989; Hirsch, 1991; Aschheim, 1992; Lehman, 1991). In terms of reliability and validity, the few citations in Weiss are once again context-stripped to provide deductive-fact selection from these sources and from context-stripped, self-reflective comments of postmodernists and poststructuralists.

There is another complication, reductionism. By page 28, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida are an unambiguous "other:" - "those who do not believe the world exists" (i.e. Weiss’ definition of idealist relativist). The panoply of S4 reduced to "selective relativism" leads to a further reduction to the S5 characterizations.

Weiss (p. 9) gives concise presentation of S5-relativism as follows:

That advocacy and relativist argumentation often are found together in postmodernist writing suggests that relativism facilitates advocacy … a subjectivist perspective may provide a basis for skepticism regarding views one wishes to discredit.

Weiss associates postmodern founders not just with Nazism but also Fascism. "Contemporary postmodernists’ antipathy to fascism may come as no surprise" (p. 28). Weiss argues that since Nietzsche was critical of anti-Semitism and nationalism, with questionable link to fascism, "that some postmodernists blame modernist for the Holocaust probably may best be seen as part of the debate over whether this historical link to nazism should make us wary of postmodernism’s current applications" (p. 23, "nazism" lower case in original). I think Burrell’s (1994, 1997) and Weiss’ (1998) positions are both polemic. What is needed is systematic investigation of the historical record. Another study would compare the two accounts to assess which has more reliability and validity. The question is far from settled by S5 that correlates postmodernism to Nazism and Fascism. "The debate" like the "de Man Affair" sets up the meaning of S6.

S6 is embedded in a "war" trope, stating Van Maanen (1995) "attacked Pfeffer" (p. 39) by using a relativist position "no singularly true view of the world" (p. 37) and associating Van Maanen’s (1995) critique of Pfeffer with Derrida’s apologetics for de Man (p. 37, see S4). Van Maanen is typed as the postmodernist’s "disapprobation of Pfeffer’s article" (p. 38) Summing it up by chastising postmodernists for not being aware of ethical implications as published in the Academy of Management’s code of ethics, and finally as "substituting advocacy for scientific analysis" (p. 41).

Weiss (p. 11) describes a clash in turn-of-the-century Germany between Humanities (historians) and scientific (economists and sociologists):

Methodologically, their opposition to the institutionalization of the scientific ethos manifested itself as a predilection for qualitative over quantitative research" (p.12).

Not crossing the boundary between Humanities and Science is a basic dualizing theme beginning in the first sentence of the abstract: "Postmodernism, an intellectual movement most frequently associated with the Humanities" (p. 1). Kilduff and Mehra’s (1997) study of POS’s is characterized as "a postmodernist perspective – these impressionistic, qualitative forms of research traditionally have been alternatives to normal science: (p. 20). Further reduced to the label "subjectivist perspectives" (see relativism typology S5) are used to frame all "ethnographies" per Manning (1995) as "both postmodernist and symbolic interactionist" (p. 20). The dualism between science and humanities is used to type Kilduff and Mehra:

And in our field, a contrast between the writing of postmodernists (such as Kilduff and Mehra) and of mainstream scholars is the formers’ frequently-evinced sympathy for work from the Humanities (p. 11).

The two dualities qualitative versus quantitative, and humanities versus science, in my view (see Figure One) is a way to polarize the disciplines and keep interdisciplinary scholarship marginal. To me, the interdisciplinary merger of science and Humanities defines POS, but is also a false dualism. The reviews by Alvesson & Deetz (1996) and Kilduff and Mehra (1997), as well as Boje, Gephart and Thatchenkery (1996) all call for interdisciplinary work. As stated in the introduction, Gephart’s (1988) "Ethnostatistics" is an interdisciplinary exploration of the relation of qualitative and quantitative. Best and Kellner’s (1997) review of the postmodern turn in science questions the application of such dualities. Finally, Weiss (1998: 12) duality self-deconstructs, since he describes Weber as spanning "qualitative and quantitative research."

Weiss (1998) questions Martin’s storytelling as poor data-knowledge, contends her analysis misapplies Derridian deconstruction, and presents little of the executive’s story. Weiss also points to Kilduff’s (1993) study being published in Academy of Mangement Review, as evidence that it is not quantitative, and therefore not really part of the domain of quantitative organization science. He does not mention in the body of the essay that Martin (1990) published her study in Organization Science and myself in Academy of Management Journal (See Appendix A for these and other moves).

Kilduff & Mehra "acknowledged postmodernism’s solipsistic tendencies and, following Rosenau (1992), argued that extreme idealism is not characteristic of postmodernism in general, but of skeptical postmodernism"(p. 8). With this caricature of extreme relativism, Weiss proceeds to dismiss each of the five articles reviewed in the Kilduff and Mehra study: I compared the content of each summary of the study in Kilduff and Mehra (1997) with the content Weiss’ (1998) summary and rereading. The differences I found are more than context stripping, the moves are "ironic" (replacing phrase of meaning with its opposite). Due to space limits, the ironic moves in the representations of the five studies are traced and presented in the Appendix. I shall focus on one, noting that Knodo and Cassell are dismissed as qualitative, therefore not scientific in one gesture. I will use Burt, since this is where Weiss does field work to collaborate his dismissive. "The study by Burt" says Weiss (1998: 19) " …can be read as an exemplar of normal science, rather than as postmodernist." No one disputes this claim. The dispute centers on Burt’s offer to make data available for subsequent review. Is it a prototypic postmodern gesture? To Weiss, this hinges on the inclusion of the word "passionate" in the gesture. Contrast Weiss’s summary with an in-context quote by Kilduff and Mehra.

Weiss - "Burt (personal communication, July, 1997) indicated surprise at Kilduff and Mehra’s characterization" (p. 20).

Kilduff & Mehra - "There is no pretense in the article that the analysis has been performed simply in the service of science. As a passionate statement of advocacy for a particular perspective, Burt’s work succeeds in communicating the excitement of personal discovery rather than the dullness of objective analysis" (p. 469).

The context of Kilduff and Mehra’s point about Burt’s work being a "passionate statement of advocacy" is context-stripped to become the opposite assumption about Burt. Weiss’ (1998) follow up call to Burt dose not clarify the matter because he does not report any of the text of the call. Weiss does not provide either the evidence given to Burt or any direct quotes from Burt’s ("personal communication") we do not know what Burt is interpreting. It is the ironic opposite of what Burt has done in putting quotes into the text and providing the means to verify the analysis and findings. There are ironic moves to shift meaning in each of the other study presentations. In the end these moves allow all five studies to be dismissed as not prototypical postmodern.

Every single postmodernist mentioned in the Weiss article is dismissed in ways I do not have space to present. Here is a brief summary. Clegg’s (1990) study is rejected "makes it seem merely like the now-familiar ‘adhocracy’" (p. 2); Morgan (1989) is dismissed as "endorsed the view that truth is merely an illusion" (p. 7); Connell and Nord (1996) "advocate values such as ‘emancipation’" (p. 8); Lehman (1991) and Thompson (1993) "both have pointed out that … relativism provide a basis for saying that others have no right to claim they have the truth" (p. 10); Jacques (1992) "falling back on ‘referential expertise and notions of accuracy" and questioning the masculinity of the academy (p. 10); Marsden and Townley (1991) for their "advocacy of the leftist political values with which postmodernists generally associate" (p. 33); Martin and Frost who "questioned the validity of qualitative research … by criticizing quantitative methods" (p. 33). A reading of the original does not support typifications. For example, and ironically, Martin and Frost (1996) are critiquing the whole trope of "War Games" as counter-productive to the Academy. Their statements about qualitative work are critiques of their own field, culture studies. A quote is attributed to Hassard and Parker (1993) on p. 28, when it comes form Burrell (1993: 81) and is itself commentary on Gergen (1992). Gergen (1994) is singled out for severely distorted and dismissed for his social construction theory, he admitted he was castigated for his "nihilism."

I think that stories S1 through S9 are the premises for S10, a polemic defense of Jeffrey Pfeffer’s (1993) remarks about OS and postmodernists. Each of the nine stories sets out caricatures of postmodernists as extreme relativist, subjectivists, Nazi-implicated, fascist, qualitative, etc. It is a virtual duality machine, a set of dichotomies to separate POS’s from MOS’s, then turned into the war machine to use in the Science Wars.

Van Maanen (1995) is cast as the "relativist," Canella and Paetzold (1993) are loyal to the subjectivist, relativist clan, Clegg and Hardy (1996) are in error claiming that Pfeffer (1993) is read erroneously as a gatekeeper trying "to re-establish the old elite’s domination over organization science." Weiss sends in Weber to rout the lot of them. Clegg (1989) holds his ground. He has no fear of Weber. Martin and Knopoff (1995) stand their ground.

In sum, Weiss’ analysis (S1 to S10) imitates the "Science Wars" fought between the "gang of three" and postmodern scientists (Best and Kellner, 1997). Weiss reports one of the gang, Sokal, in his introduction. The other two are Gross and Levitt (1994) who sent their polemic book of superstitions to every department head, across the land, to inform them about the evils of postmodernism. And Sokal (1996), as Weiss (1998) indicated has performed a hoax on us all. Together Gross and Levitt (1994), and Sokal (1996) are what Best and Kellner (1997) term the "gang of three." The narrative ethics of each are questionable.

Weiss makes serious ethics and extreme relativity charges against fellow organizational researchers, but does not follow any guidelines for presenting reliable and valid evidence, while claiming to bring balance to a perspective received too positively. Both are claims need more detailed analysis than space affords here. I hypothesize that Weiss (1998: 23-27) assembles polemic references that too often do not explore the enormous and slanderous questions raised and too often do not present valid and reliable empirical evidence (e.g. comparative content analysis). A "balanced" study would drop the duality machine, unframe the Tamara, and set out the important questions.

What is Weiss’ contribution? Too further isolate MOS’s and POS’s by ignoring shared fate, shared heritage, and shared complicity. Weiss (1998: 27) claims "not to say that contemporary proponents of postmodernism are anti-democratic, anti-Semitic Nazis" but goes ahead to do it anyway in citing evidence (he calls it) how the Nazi-echos of the founders (p. 27- 28) "make their antipathy [to fascism/nazism] no surprise." Yet the assemblage of second source polemic accusations and innuendo-links between contemporary POS and founders (some who did have Nazi-links, others such as Foucault who did not) serves despite qualified denial to make the following quite direct finding: "postmodernism’s … link to Nazism" a final judgement (p. 27). I dare not imagine what is his "final solution."

The gang of three’s (Sokal, Gross, Levitt) questionable methods and polemics are imitated by Weiss, lumping positions together that are quite unique, and leaving out all the positive contributions of those cited, ignoring many that have brought much interdisciplinary work to Science, sending it in for publication. All four equate superficial readings, blatant ignorance of subject matter, guilt-by-association, innuendo, distortion, and interpretive error with a lump of postmodern, poststructural, social construction and feminist critique (See Best & Kellner, 1997 for a thorough critique of Science Wars and statements about the interdisciplinary turn of postmodernism in the hard sciences). What Weiss calls the postmodern "controversy" and the "de Man Affair" led to more books, conferences, and articles, throughout the humanities, and locally to our Academy’s Science Wars exchanges with Pfeffer, to Weiss’ article, and now to my reply. I declare peace.

There are important questions raised by Weiss and this review. We need to move beyond polemics and set ground rules for empirical investigation of the relationship between philosophy, science, and Nazi. I hope that my response set out eight initial approaches to critiquing reliability and validity. This is also what Lyotard (1990) does in his critique of Heidegger’s deconstruction work and "Nazism." The main rule is "double obligation" as Carroll (1990) explains in the introduction, not to diminish the serious complicity but not to simplify their thought so it can be dismissed with a story such as S3. I have space to ask, but not answer a difficult question. What is our (both MOS’s and POS’s) relationship to "Nazism" and extermination? This moves us beyond a story framed to argue that POS’s has more responsibility than MOS’s? I prefer to ask: how can we both resist polemics, dogmatism, and reductionism in exploring the connection of the five great thinkers to their Nazi involvement, and expand it to include our own complicity as organization scientists? Anything does not go, every reading is not equal, there is a real world, POS like MOS has local standards of reliability and validity.

What would peace look like? I contend that it is across this transdisciplinary borderline that exciting POS’s work is being done (Czarniawska, 1997; Hatch, 1996; Fletcher, 1997; O’Connor, 1997). Hatch (1997) differentiates between postmodern, social construction, and critical theory in a scholarly map of the field, that includes the role of Pfeffer’s work. Hatch’s (1996) contribution is her work to draw narrative and postmodern theory into more collaboration with MOS. To propose a cut away from the humanities ignores significant contributions to organization science. Should we avoid humanities because, as Weiss argues, they have "intellectuals," or is it that he does not want only the master race of normal science in our Academy infected by postmodernists? I think we can learn to be more sensitive to nuances, more subtle in our critiques, and more open to new ideas.

To be self-reflexive, I do play the role of the rebel, and Weiss, your storyline and Martin and Frost (1996)’s call for peace, convinces me to find more manners, and quickly.

                    Thompson, Paul

1993 "Postmodernism: Fatal distraction." Pp. 183-203 in J. Hassard & M. Parker Postmodernism and Organizations. London: Sage.

Toffler, Alvin

1970 Future Shock. NY: Random House.

Toulmin, Stephen

1982a "The construal of reality: Criticism in modern and postmodern Science," In the Politics of Interpretation, W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1982b The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern science and the Theology of Nature. Berkley and LA: University of California Press.

Van Maanen, John

1995 "Style as Theory," Orgnaization Science, 6, 133-143.

Weiss, Richard M.

1998 "What is postmodernism, and what is its potential for the analysis of organizations?" Paper accepted (November) for publication in forthcoming issue of Organization Science.