Purpose: By engaging with recent debates between management historians over social constructionism, this paper aims to show the merits of adopting a new realist ontology of the business enterprise. In contrast with ANTi-History, the purpose is to provide a philosophically rigorous conception of social objects and to argue that enterprises are a member of this category. Design/methodology/approach: Insights from Maurizio Ferraris’s documentality theory and Graham Harman’s philosophy of social objects are used to identify the ontological forming ground and developmental pathway of an Antipodean stevedoring company that operated prior to the deregulation of New Zealand’s ports in 1989. Findings: With regard to social entities in general and firms in particular, continental philosophy’s resurgent realist movement provides a history-aware social ontology that incorporates the grain of truth lying within social constructionism. As exemplified by the writings of Ferraris and Harman, r
Thinking through object-oriented ontology and the work of architects such as Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid to explore new concepts of the relationship between form and function
This article will be released in full online February 14, 2022. Across the humanities and the social sciences, critical attention is being given to the nonhuman…