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The essay builds a timeline of the friendship and intellectual intercourse between Sraffa and Wittgenstein with data from both their Cambridge Pocket Diaries (CPDs) and their correspondence and biography. The timeline distinguishes five phases: their first meetings until June 1930, the time in which their weekly conversations run uninterrupted (October 1930–June 1933); the period in which the enchantment of their previous meetings was broken (October 1933–July 1936); the following decade in which their meetings were in some years intense, in others nearly inexistent, until Sraffa decided to put an end to their conversations; and finally the years preceding Wittgenstein’s death. The meetings between Sraffa and Wittgenstein from their CPDs are listed in the Appendix.

Recently there has been much discussion of the relevance to sociology of Wittgenstein's philosophy. In this discussion, reference has been made to Wittgenstein's remarks on classification. For instance, Dutton writes “After Wittgenstein, we might say that the category of acts which may be labelled criminal (or deviant) is the category: “any” acts”. (Ditton, 1979, p. 20). According to Hughes, “Wittgenstein uses the term “family resemblances” to make the point that states of affairs falling under a common term, such as ‘games’ show overlapping similarities and resemblances rather than universal, finitely specifiable common properties”. (1977, p. 72). However, the philosophical importance of Wittgenstein's remarks and their relevance to the concerns of the sociologist have not been fully explored. What precisely is Wittgenstein thought to be asserting and denying with his observations about games? After all, on the face of it, it hardly seems controversial or interesting to say that games resemble each other. It has been argued, most notably by Bambrough, that Wittgenstein's remarks are directed towards “the problem of universals”.

What has emerged in large organizations is the use of hybrid language of abstractions, jargon, euphemisms, and complex syntax known as bureacratease. Often this misuse of language is done with the purpose of deceiving and misinforming. Whether or not this was the intent, however, the result of bureaucratees is often just that along with the breakdown of communication between the organization and the clientele it serves. Moreover, there is insufficient research devoted to this phenomenon. Borrowing from Wittgenstein, this article offers a model for understanding bureaucratese and attempts to move the field of public administration toward a theory of this misuse of language in organization.

In this chapter, drawing primarily on Wittgenstein, we argue that a representationalist view of theory in an applied or practical science such as organization and management theory (OMT) is unrealistic and misleading, since it fails to acknowledge theory's ineradicable dependence on the dynamics of the life-world within which it has its ‘currency’. We explore some of the difficulties raised by the use of representational theorizing in OMT, and mainly explore the nature of a more reflective form of theorizing. Reflective theory, we argue, invites practitioners to attend to the grammar of their actions, namely to the rules and meanings that actors draw upon in their participation in social practices. In this view, the role of theory resembles the role Wittgenstein ascribed to philosophy: it is theory-as-therapy. The latter seeks to make action more perspicuous by providing the conceptual means to practitioners to engage in re-articulating, not only their taken-for-granted assumptions and models but also their modes of orientation and their ways of relating themselves to the situations in which they must work. Reflective theory works to draw their attention to aspects of people's interactions in organizations not usually noticed, to bring to awareness unconscious habits, confusions, prejudices and pictures that hold practitioners captive, and, furthermore, to point out that other continuations of them than those routinely followed are possible. This view of theory – as perceptually reorienting rather than as cognitively explaining – is illustrated by looking at the Karl Weick's sensemaking theory.

In this monograph the author discusses the problems in constructing a logical and ethical‐empirical foundation so that relevant social values may be studied by the scientific method. Part One is concerned with the difficulties posed by the prevailing methodology. Part Two presents a new research programme based on the simultaneous equilibrium versus disequilibrium approach in conjunction with Wittgenstein's logic and the current research in ethics.

The economic science is again in a crisis and a new solution prolegomena to any future study in economics, finance and other social sciences has just been published by the International Institute of Social Economics in care of the MCB University Press in England. The roots of the major financial and economic problems of our time lie in an open conflict between theory and practice. In the 1930s and before the conflict was between classical theory and given realities. In the 1990s the conflict appears between the now prevailing modern, Keynesian theory and the actual realities. In addition during the twentieth century a great argument developed between the two schools of thought, argument which is not yet settled. In one sentence, the prolegomena tried and was successful to solve the conflict between theory and practice and the big doctrinal dispute of the twentieth century. It was a struggle of research and observation over half a century between 1947 and 1997.

Relativism, at least in some of its forms, is antithetical to sociology as traditionally practiced and conceived. (See, for instance, Benton and Crabb, 2001, pp.50‐74 and 93‐1006; Collins 1996a; Mann, 1998; Murphy, 1997; and Taylor‐Gooby, 1994). Hence, sociologists should consider abandoning traditional sociology or rejecting relativism. An example of the sort of relativism I have in mind is the philosophical theory that the truth and falsity of propositions is relative to the social context of their promulgation. Such epistemological relativism is expressed by Newton‐Smith when he says: “The central relativist idea is that what is true for one tribe, social group or age might not be true for an other tribe, social group or age” (Newton‐Smith, 1982, p.107).

In Bateson's theory of mind, the adaptation of Russell's theory of logical types is of key importance. Korzybski represented the type‐logical difference between language and reality as the metaphorical distinction between map and territory. The confounding of logical types generates cognitive, and logical problems, which Bateson reflected in his theory of schizophrenia. In Wittgenstein's philosophy, this type‐logical distinction is of equal significance.

The present paper, through the elucidation of the concept of language‐game and its relationship with grammar, demonstrates the proximity of Wittgenstein's and Bateson's understanding of language, which allows for a productive improvement of possible therapies of insanity.

For Bateson, schizophrenia is the attempt to escape from a pathogenic learning context, within which the map of thought has become malformed. Insanity can thus be understood as transformed grammar and can additionally be illuminated by both Wittgenstein's and Kant's conception of insanity. Wittgenstein's idea that in madness the lock is not destroyed, only altered is further reflected in connection with Bateson's theory of schizophrenia. On the basis of this conception of language, we develop an understanding of language that allows us to interpret “insanity” as deviating cognition originating in a family's system of communication.

On account of the “reality‐constitutive” character of language, it can be shown that “insane” thinking is based on a change of grammar. Therefore, the aim of therapy must be the change of pathological language‐games and the creation of bridges between inconsistent self‐interpretations of the patient by means of inventing new language‐games (stories).

A rule‐governed derivation of an indexing phrase from the text of a document is, in Wittgenstein's sense, a practice, rather than a mental operation explained by reference to internally represented and tacitly known rules. Some mentalistic proposals for theory in information retrieval are criticised in light of Wittgenstein's remarks on following a rule. The conception of rules as practices shifts the theoretical significance of the social role of retrieval practices from the margins to the centre of enquiry into foundations of information retrieval. The abstracted notion of a cognitive act of ‘information processing’ deflects attention from fruitful directions of research.