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In recent years, the concept of “reification” has virtually disappeared from debates in social theory, including critical social theory. The concept was at the center of the revitalization of Marxist theory in the early twentieth century generally known as Western Marxism. Georg Lukács in particular introduced the concept to express how the process described in Marx's critique of alienation and commodification could be grasped more effectively by combining it with Max Weber's theory of rationalization (see Agger, 1979; Stedman Jones et al., 1977).¹ In Lukács's use, the concept of reification captured the process by which advanced capitalist production, as opposed to earlier stages of capitalist development, assimilated processes of social, cultural, and political production and reproduction to the dynamic imperatives and logic of capitalist accumulation. It is not just interpersonal relations and forms of organization constituting the capitalist production process that are being refashioned along the lines of one specific definition of economic necessity. In addition, and more consequentially, the capitalist mode of production also assimilates to its specific requirements the ways in which human beings think the world. As a result, the continuous expansion and perfection of capitalist production and its control over the work environment impoverishes concrete social, political, and cultural forms of coexistence and cooperation, and it brings about an impoverishment of our ability to conceive of reality from a variety of social, political, and philosophical viewpoints.

Purpose – Appreciating the continuing relevance and contribution of Theodor W. Adorno's work requires acknowledgement of the difficulty to grasp his philosophy in a way that is consistent with that which is to be understood, as the necessary first step to achieving concordant understanding.

Design/methodology/approach – To assay an understanding of Adorno's quest for the object beyond the concept, it is best to undertake a journey through the complexity of his thinking, beginning with the book he wrote with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Findings – The difficulty to capture the substance of philosophy in a manner that allows for representation arises from the inherently processual character of philosophy, which is always both unfinished and without secure summation of report at any step along the way. Indeed, the difficulty is all the greater with respect to Adorno, in light of his postulate that philosophy “must strive, by means of the concept, to transcend the concept.”

Research limitations/implications – Adorno's obsession to overcome the compulsion of identity made him perceptive and blind at the same time. To liberate his insights from their reconciliatory-philosophical shroud, one would have to expose the concept of rationality to the same obsessive gaze under which false generalities dissolve in Adorno's philosophy.

Originality/value – The inherently processual character of Adorno's philosophy makes his writings especially germane to present conditions of modern society, as they highlight the importance of efforts to develop theories that are sufficiently sensitive to the dynamic character of modern society, including its inconsistencies and its contradictions.

Scientists are constructing knowledge about global warming by adapting evidence-based disciplines to reflect the Precautionary Principle. It is equally important to communicate the complexities and uncertainties underpinning global warming because inappropriate vehicles for giving accounts could result in defensive decisions that perpetuate the business-as-usual mindset: the method of communication affects how the risk associated with global warming is socialised. Appropriately constructed accounts should facilitate reflective communicative action. Here Beck's theorisation of risk society, Luhmann's sociological theory of risk and Gandhi's vehicle of communicative action (or satyagraha) are used to construct a risk-based accountability mechanism, whilst providing insight into Schumacher's concept of total accountability. These accountability constructs will be illustrated through the lived experiences of South Australian citrus horticulturists in the context of a richly layered narrative of competing discourses about global warming. The reiterative process of theory informing practice is used to construct a couple of dialogical vehicles of accountability.

This review of Amy Allen’s book, The End of Progress (2016), first addresses the structure of the book and focuses on specific points made in individual chapters, including the affinity between postcolonial theory and the approaches of Adorno and Foucault in subjecting the notion of historical progress to “withering critique,” and Allen’s alternative approach to decolonization; Habermas’ aim to put critical theory on a secure normative footing; Honneth’s stance that the history of an ethical sphere is an unplanned learning process kept in motion by a struggle for recognition; Forst’s attempt to reconstruct Critical Theory’s normative account through a return to Kant rather than Hegel; and Allen’s claim that her approach is fully in the spirit of Critical Theory and could be seen as continuation of Critical Theory’s first generation, as in Adorno, and how it is a “genealogical” approach that draws on Adorno’s negative dialectics and critique of identity thinking, as well as on Nietzsche’s conception of genealogy, as developed by Foucault. The second part of my response raises three issues: (1) Allen’s partial compromise with the idea of progress; (2) whether critical theory would profit from engagement with other critical theories and theories of ethics, beyond postcolonial theory; and (3) nonwestern theories shed a different light on the question of Allen’s critique, a theme that also draws attention to the gesture of decolonizing, the distinctions between colonialism and empire, and the sociology of knowledge production.

Recognition of the importance and difficulty of engaging physicians in organisational change has sparked an explosion of literature. The social identity approach, by considering engagement in terms of underlying group identifications and intergroup dynamics, may provide a framework for choosing among the plethora of proposed engagement techniques. This paper seeks to address this issue.

The authors examined how four disparate organisations engaged physicians in change. Qualitative methods included interviews (109 managers and physicians), observation, and document review.

Beyond a universal focus on relationship-building, sites differed radically in their preferred strategies. Each emphasised or downplayed professional and/or organisational identity as befit the existing level of inter-group closeness between physicians and managers: an independent practice association sought to enhance members' identity as independent physicians; a hospital, engaging community physicians suspicious of integration, stressed collaboration among separate, equal partners; a developing integrated-delivery system promoted alignment among diverse groups by balancing “systemness” with subgroup uniqueness; a medical group established a strong common identity among employed physicians, but practised pragmatic co-operation with its affiliates.

The authors cannot confirm the accuracy of managers' perceptions of the inter-group context or the efficacy of particular strategies. Nonetheless, the findings suggested the fruitfulness of social identity thinking in approaching physician engagement.

Attention to inter-group dynamics may help organisations engage physicians more effectively.

This study illuminates and explains variation in the way different organisations engage physicians, and offers a theoretical basis for selecting engagement strategies.

The liberal wing of accounting research has taken some peculiar turns into postmodernism in recent years; gyrations that are echoed elsewhere in social science (Petras, 1991). Such circumlocutions are also prevalent in Gallhofer and Haslam’s book. The fingerprints of Laclau (1992, 1996), Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Lyotard (1984), Nederveen (1992), etc. are all over these sections, and this is where the book alerts us to the first troubles that beset postmodernist accounting research. We begin with the uncritical embrace of the ‘philosophical critique of modernity…[specifically Laclau’s desire to go beyond]…totalizing perspectives’ (p. 19).“Totalizing,” in Laclau’s sense, is the key that gives away the punch-line. Laclau’s thesis springs directly from French disenchantment with Soviet Communism and its satellite: the French Communist Party. The red-baiters lump these “communisms” (and their progenitor, Marx) into the same dock as Totalitarianism and modern capitalism. The conclusion is that both are equally despotic.

One of the most important and brilliant contributors to the Frankfurt School understanding of character was Theodore Adorno. For Adorno, domination was not simply due to class relations, but the totality of market society in which Reason as the logic of exchange relationships migrated into the family and was insinuated within the person to colonize subjectivity. A central moment of the critique was the internalization of the authority relations of caretakers within superego (cf. Horkheimer, 1972). The law of value, together with Instrumental Reason as a hegemonic ideology and the commodification of culture led to the formation, if not deformation of an authority seeking superego as the typical means of adaptation that sustained political economic arrangements, albeit through suffering based on the repression of desire, the suppression of self and the thwarting of human possibility. Although this critique was rooted in Marx's analysis of capitalism as alienating, dehumanizing and objectifying, the emancipatory quest sought the liberation of self and desire from the alienation, commodification, and objectification of bourgeois society. But so too can we find that from out of the depths of the alienation and despair of the émigré scholar, there also comes the promise of redemption and the possibility of the “good life,” which requires overcoming alienation, and with that overcoming, transcendence, and emancipation from domination.¹

This study aims to define the main characteristics and possibilities of ontological approaches to research in architecture by considering content, methodologies and subject position in this type of research and questions if there is a future for this type of research or not.

The primary data collection method of this research is based on the ethos of the author who has taught research courses for many years. This research has also been questioned through the discussions made within a related PhD course.

Results of this research reveal that the spontaneous ideology of architecture might have influenced the neglection of the ontological approaches in academic research in architecture.

Architecture has an interesting position towards reductionism because architectural thinking has ontological characteristics. The ontological approaches to academic research seems to be more applicable to architecture. However, research in architecture does not necessarily have this ontological character.

The “ontological approach to academic research” covers a larger set of research than the method of ontology, which is used to discuss the categories, limitations in research. Thinking on ontological approaches to research is needed because there is a considerable increase in the use of mixed research methods, which combine qualitative and quantitative research. The second reason for this is the criticisms about the unethical reductionism directed towards contemporary science by philosophers. However, there is no sufficient literature on the ontological approaches to research. This is true also for the academic research in architecture.

We argue that aspects of the Luhmannian strand of systems theory could be mobilized in a crypto-normative way for an immanent critique of certain trends in contemporary social development, especially the growing economic determination of different spheres of life and the formation of sectorial industries – such as healthcare, education, crime control, etc. – with the consequent erosion of the autonomy of these spheres and the progressive exhaustion of social conditions for the exercise of freedom and the experience of difference.

A decisive step in this approach to systems theory lies in the indication of certain “elective affinities” between Luhmann and Adorno, reinforcing the plausibility of an internal connection between these different theoretical conceptions – not their mere instrumental appropriation and external juxtaposition. From this point of view, we argue that aspects of Luhmann's conceptual construction – notably the way the system-environment relationship is thought – hold a strong family resemblance with the Adornian mode of conceiving the subject–object relationship in the speculative key of negative dialectics.

Conceived as a critical model that modulates society's real abstractions toward difference and systemic autonomy, and especially as a critical model that underlines possibilities of reciprocal mediation between system and environment, systems theory seems to emphatically put itself in tension with what, at least in part, could be seen as its other: neoliberal governmentality, the generalization of the commodity form and the instrumentalization of the individual by unilateral systemic imperatives in global capitalism.

The chapters included in this volume appeared over the course of 11 years, between 1997 and 2008. They reflect two central concerns. The first concern was whether the trajectory that had guided the development of critical theory since the linguistic turn of the early 1970s was as conducive to addressing the most important issues of the late twentieth century as the works of the first generation had been for their time, from the 1930s to the late 1960s. The second concern was how to confront the challenge of reconceiving the thrust and agenda of critical theory as a practically relevant analytical program, in light of societal conditions and trends in the early twenty-first century. The chapters in Part I were driven by the need to provide an accounting of the state of affairs in critical theory that took as its vantage point the program of the early Frankfurt School, rather than the communication-theoretical rendering Habermas has engendered. The chapters in Part II were inspired by the desire to circumscribe the kind of contributions critical theory should and can make to illuminating dilemmas and roadblocks in the social sciences and in social policy in the early twenty-first century that are contributing to a peculiar state of civilizational stasis – dilemmas and roadblocks that most of us have come to take for granted and internalized as integral elements of the fabric of societal life, and which obstruct creative theorizing beyond the social, political, and economic status quo.