The Role of Aristotelians, Positivists, Hegelians, and Relativists in Shaping the Ideas Knowledge & Knowledge Management

Abstract

The basic aim of this very paper is to justify that today’s modern management is shaped by the viewpoints of positivists and relativists. Positivists and relativists argued from a different perspective. While the former claims that methodology is inevitable to have genuine and justifiable knowledge, the latter argued that methodology is not a necessity for knowledge creation. This paper claims that today’s knowledge management is developed by inculcating the views of positivists and relativists. To justify this very claim, the Hegelians’ thesis-antithesis-synthesis perspectives were taken into consideration. In the first place, the basic themes of the two perspectives were presented. Secondly, synthesized ideas were produced. Thirdly, their contribution to modern knowledge management was investigated. The synthesized evidences indicated that Aristotelian, Baconian inductivism, positivism, and relativism contributed a lot to today’s knowledge and knowledge management. The idea of hypothesis testing is borrowed from Baconian inductivism. They believe in logically, mathematically, and statistically justified knowledge was taken from the positivists’ viewpoints. Relativists were also impacted knowledge management scholars in that organizational knowledge can be created anomalies in particular institution and/or nation.