Field Philosophy: A Methodological Approach to Organizational Philosophy-in-Practice

Organizational research methods have increasingly been concerned with the relation between scholarship and practice, as part of an impact-oriented, responsible management literature. These concerns find an unexpected ally in recent developments within the field of philosophy, in which a distant and abstract relation to the field is replaced by a practice-oriented, collaboratively intense form of engagement referred to as “field philosophy.” Considered as an organizational research method, field philosophy emphasizes exchange, knowledge from below, and insider–outsider collaboration. The current article develops field philosophy for the study of organizational phenomena, illustrating this method with an empirical illustration from a field study of a carbon credit project in the Brazilian Amazon, and drawing out implications for the design and application of field philosophical methods for studying organizations.