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Another paper I recently completed is entitled “Phenomenology and institutional theory: Should institution be taken for granted?”

This paper investigates the concept of institution, a concept which has been used by scholars from across a number of disciplines to explain a wide variety of phenomena. Among organization scholars working in this tradition, one fundamental idea is that institutions become taken for granted to some degree. Over the years this linkage between the two concepts has itself become institutionalized and taken for granted. Any sense of difference that may have once existed between institution and taken for granted seems to have been forgotten.

In an effort to retrieve this distinction, the paper returns to Husserl, on whose philosophy these concepts rest. In doing so we find a richness and distinction otherwise glossed by merely reciting the idea that institution becomes taken for granted. The paper concludes that institution and taken for granted are phenomenologically distinct concepts. Through writing and documentation institution can become taken for granted. However, the process is reversible. Indeed Husserl’s real project seems to have been a demonstration of how taken for granted can and must become institution if we are to ever truly know ourselves and our world.

You can download a copy of the paper at the link below, or by visiting the Research section of my blog. As always, I invite your comments and feedback. 

Download Working Paper From SSRN (93k .pdf) 

In tracing the concepts of institution and taken for granted in Husserl’s work, especially The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, I was struck by the fact that Husserl seems to clearly describe a concept we might now label as the moment of inversion (Latour & Woolgar, 1986).

Although moment of inversion is not a phrase Husserl uses, the concept is clearly Husserlian.  Crisis speaks repeatedly of the “art of measurement” and its role in “externalization,” a process through which the sensible qualities of an object are externalized and substructed, i.e., put on the surface and made to cover up, while the original senses are pushed under or buried. The result is an inversion through which idealities, quantities and symbols become an index to realities, qualities and senses.  A world of formulas replaces the world of forms.

We can even suggest a preliminary definition of the moment of inversion as: “The surreptitious substitution of the mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable - our everyday lifeworld” (Husserl, 1970: 48-49).

Citation: Husserl, E. 1970. The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology (D. Carr, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

As it relates to memory, Edmund Husserl’s (1970/1954) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology differentiates between retention and recollection.

Husserl argues that “The world exists as… a spatiotemporal world in which each thing has its bodily extension and duration… its position in universal time and space… Perception is related only to the present.  But this present is always meant as having an endless past behind it and an open future before it… If we consider perception abstractly, by itself, we find its intentional accomplishment to be presentation, making something present… But in this presence, as that of an extended and enduring object, lies a continuity of what I am still conscious of, what has flowed away and is no longer intuited at all, a continuity of retentions, and in the other direction, a continuity of protentions… Yet this is not, like memory in the usual sense of intuitive recollection, a phenomenon which openly, so to speak, plays a part in object and world apperception” (p. 160).

For example, to understand the experience of music, we have to understand retentions and protentions.  Without retention of the just-played-notes and protention of the almost-played-notes, Husserl argues there would be no music, only a sequence of notes unrelated to one another.  Thus the phenomenology of music suggests that the present moment is not a single moment, but a continuum of the moment along with its retentions and protentions, without which perception would be unable to make something present.

In contrast with retention and protention, which make things present, recollection brings the past (i.e., a present which has passed) forward as an original intuition, that is, as an original experience.  In doing so, recollection gives intentional meaning to the past, even though perception itself (i.e., the flowing-static present) lacks such meaning.  Similarly, expectation is an anticipatory recollection, an intentional modification of perception towards the future as a “present-to-come” (p. 169).  In both cases, Husserl sees recollection as a rerecognition.  Recollection is an a-perception, that is, not a perception.  Thus, recollection is not the memory of a perception, but something else.

Importantly, perception gives us “only the temporal mode of the present” (p. 168).  In turn, “the present points to its horizons, the temporal modes of past and future” (p. 168).  While perceptions are the “first prefigurations of temporalization,” these “remain in the background” (pp. 168-169).  It is recollection (and expectation) that “represents the beginnings of new dimensions of temporalization, or of time and its time content” (p. 169).  These temporal dimensions are quite apart from the temporalization which gives to each entity its spatiotemporal presence.

Citation: Husserl, E. 1970. The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology (D. Carr, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.