Epistemological studies in higher education allow us to assume a deeper scrutinizing position of the sciences to which we dedicate our professional teaching and research work. It has been insisted that this more in-depth look makes it possible to penetrate the borders of our specialty with other specialties, when sometimes the image of that border itself becomes blurred. This helps to carry out interdisciplinary analyzes of greater scope and, therefore, of greater benefit for the development of science, university teaching and the personal professional development of the university professor.
Of course, the epistemological analysis referred to, in order to distance itself from what has been called "the epistemology of the teacher" here, must follow some paths. Below we would like to provide, by way of example, an epistemological analysis of administration as a discipline of knowledge and as a business activity. We have called this study "Epistemological challenges of the administration in contemporary globalization." The purpose of the inclusion of this essay is to provide the master's degree students with an example of how the different disciplines of knowledge could be approached, but in no case do we intend to take which recipe, but only as an example, which needs to be enriched and modified before the study of another discipline of university work.
The waters of globalization are very turbulent. Read contradictory. It has been said that "we are witnessing the beginning of a new century, millennium and also the beginning of a new era: the Era of Information Technology and the Knowledge Economy" (Castro Díaz-Balart, 2002, p.9). But, those beginnings are given in a concert of parallel symphonies, in which uncertainties surround the truths. On the one hand, the great advance of knowledge, science and technology; on the other, the worsening of the environmental, economic, energy, epidemiological, food, housing, labor, financial crisis, and even world peace.
Analyzing today's world requires the exercise of unraveling the true face of each act. The events of the contemporary world are so complex, and advances coexist with crises so closely, that it is sometimes very difficult to find their true impact on each one.
Above all, it seems prudent to clear a possible relationship. How to understand the relationship between Globalization and the Age of Knowledge from a cause - effect perspective? It could be understood from the vision that it has been the globalizing process that has engendered this enormous development of science, technology and knowledge. But, on the other hand, science, technology and knowledge have in turn promoted this globalizing development, which without them would not have reached its current magnitudes.
That is to say, AND VICEVERSA.
We are facing processes that have been taking place in parallel in the history of humanity, both born fundamentally in the death throes of the 19th century, but maturing, both also, throughout the splendid and contradictory 20th century.
Of the centuries and the sciences it has been said that the 20th century was that of Physics and some hope that the young 21st century will be that of Biology. It is this author's opinion that the 20th century created the premises, the scientific, technological and cognitive "infrastructures" that allow the 21st century to be the century of Sciences, knowledge and Technologies.
Of the Globalization many times only its expression or current neoliberal facet is observed. Rarely, however, is it understood as a consequence of the objective development of humanity, both economically, as well as politically, socially and culturally. She will have different expressions, but her objectivity and the impetuousness of her development are unquestionable and irreversible.
So, we enter the 21st century, which is, among other things, marked by a globalization defined by the rise of science, technology, and knowledge of high social value. This reality bursts into the life of scientific research, but not only, it even bursts into people's daily lives, hence for any business development it is essential to start from a clear understanding of the challenges that globalization imposes on business administration.
We could mark those challenges in two orders. The first, referred to the impacts of this globalization on the business community and its training, a very important topic for this Symposium and for the technological university campuses where it takes place. The second refers directly to the technical component of business activity.
In the first mentioned order, we must start from considering that business training, directly, that employer assumes it both from administrative practice and from the study of that discipline of knowledge, for some science, for others not yet, which is the administration. There are challenges that we could consider primary. The Administration, both as a discipline of knowledge and as a practice, is not exempt from the vicissitudes faced by contemporary science and technology.
Defining the margins of a discipline today becomes complex. The knowledge process itself is the product of a permanent disciplinary convergence, nuanced by the determining role of the organization, processing and distribution of the mega-magnitudes of information that appear on a daily basis in the global world about any phenomenon of natural and social life. we live.
To this is added the permanent process of origin of new and very solid disciplines of knowledge, the product of new mergers, contacts and integrations of disciplines that could be considered "traditional". They are an example, mechatronics, bioinformatics, genomics, pharmacogenomics, and with it the irruption of what are called «Transciencias», that is to say, «questions of fact from the point of view of epistemology and, therefore They can be answered in principle with the language of science, although scientists are unable to give precise answers to them; that is, they transcend science. As political and social issues possess this characteristic of transcientificity,the role of science and scientists in the context of transcience must be different from that adopted in that of traditional academic science »(García P, 2001, p. 25).
Alongside them, the so-called "regulatory science" breaks out, understood as the "scientific activity specifically aimed at providing knowledge to advise on the formulation of policies" (García P., 2001, p. 24) highly oriented to the regulation of technologies, productions, to assess environmental impact, risk analysis, etc., all intrinsically linked today to business activity.
And finally, the so-called «Technosciences», which are characterized because «there is no scientific progress without technological advance, and vice versa. The interdependence between science and technology is extremely close in the case of Big Science, and for this reason, it is convenient to distinguish between science, technique, technology and technoscience "…" when scientific knowledge strictly depends on technological advances, so that it is not possible observe, measure or experiment without resorting to large equipment, then we are talking about technoscience. (Echevarría, 2001, p. 222).
In this warp that leads to the tissues of knowledge, the boundaries of the specialties become blurred, they are increasingly interdisciplinary. «The problem is that the scientific development of the 20th century has blurred the boundaries between one specialty and the other; and it has become one of the main sources of creativity, precisely the ability to address problems of a «specialty» using concepts, data and approaches from others »(Castro Díaz-Balart, 2002, p. 143).
But, at the same time, this interdisciplinarity is contradictory.
On the one hand, science is increasingly the result of interdisciplinary work. This undermines the fidelity with which we adhere to the boundaries of the specialty. At the same time, as we go deeper into knowledge, knowledge becomes more and more specialized. These two tendencies persist and are leading to transdisciplinary, highly "specialized" knowledge but now from a new vision of the specialty.
The Administration is not left out of these realities. Advances in knowledge, science and technology have a very severe impact on its vital activity, by placing the center of its object of study, which we will consider as the business organization, immersed in what is called the "new economy".
For what reasons can one speak of a "new economy"? Where is its genesis: either in globalization or in advances in science and technology?
We return to the starting point. Both globalization, and advances in science and technology, march in a warp that makes up the solid fabric of contemporary knowledge. The phenomena of the world today live under the influence, and many times are the consequence, of that Globalization and of scientific and technological advances. Hence, the impacts on the business world are the result of the impact on it of globalization and scientific and technological development. In our opinion, it is not useful to try to separate both phenomena for their understanding, since both come hand in hand from their genesis, except from the angle of view of politics to analyze the singularity of the neoliberal character of this globalization today.
From the point of view of knowledge, science and technology, the new phase that the world is experiencing, fundamentally since the 1990s, has led to the conversion of knowledge into a fundamental economic resource. Advanced production processes are increasingly based on access to knowledge, which in fact becomes a significant competitive advantage. It has been emphasized that "the most important resource of the modern economy or new economy, as it is now called, is knowledge, and therefore, the most important process of economic development is learning" (Castro Díaz-Balart, 2002, p.225). "Countries that have the capacity to turn information into useful knowledge have a comparative advantage in this context and must develop policies to take advantage of it." (p.226).
This reality leads to the company having begun to become a space for scientific activity and for scientists to assume in their disciplinary training, the business economic vision of their activity. Of course, this has generated and made the issue of the appropriation of knowledge tense, based on three fundamental mechanisms: “the reinforcement of intellectual property rights; the displacement of funding for scientific research towards the private business sector and, finally, the selective migratory flow of qualified personnel ”(Castro Díaz-Balart, 2002, p. 157).
The influence of these mechanisms should not be absolutized from a negative point of view, since as long as they are accompanied by an ethical conduct of both the scientist and the businessman, this will lead to increased efficiency and effectiveness in fulfilling the social mission of the entity.
Thus, knowledge has become "intangible capital" for business activity, determining competitive advantages. This enriches and makes the administration's object of study very complex, and therefore creates new rigors and demands on the manager who today faces the mission of directing the administrative destinies of the company.
At one time the administration used to assume its functions based on considering the material components of the company. Another approach put the human factor at the center. Lately, the visions that see the company as a system in which the material and subjective components interact, in a well integrated way, systemically have made their way. Still later, the role of the contextual factor in which both develop began to be seen clearly.
But, as we enter the 21st century, already inevitably marked by advances in the human genome project, the understanding of these elements is making headway, but not as systemically inter-acting factors only, but integrated into themselves as a system. It is being understood that this approach reflects a reality that characterizes the entire business world. All entities are made up of material and human factors interacting in their context, and this occurs in an intimate systemic interrelation. So, what differentiates some entities from others, which leads to their behaviors being so dissimilar?
The fact that these interactions take the form of types of emerging networks, that is, human action contextualized on the material components of the economy, both in the world and in the company, takes the form of networks in which there are flows of technologies, sciences, technosciences, finance, energy, information, etc., with the environment creating the emergence of successive heterogeneous alternatives of instabilities and stabilities.
It is becoming necessary to incorporate the complexity approach in the study of business phenomena, starting from understanding the action in the business world of factors such as:
- Nonlinear local interactions; Connectivity; Feedback; Recognition of own patterns; Distributed networks; Emerging complexity; Creativity and innovation; Flexibility and orientation to change. (Sotolongo, 2002).
In the current globalized world, the administration has to take into account transnational components, stock exchanges, changes in marketing practices and concepts, the role of the mass media, the role of governments and political conflicts, etc. In short, it becomes a "global distributed network of interactions."
The practical exercise of administration acts on the universe of what Marx called "relations of production", that is, all those relations in which men intervene in the process of material production. Moreover, in this concept the universe of contextual interrelations is not explicit, and the complex web that is woven as a result of these production relations could not yet be seen. We are talking about the relationships between men, and between them with the objects and means of work, in a specific context marked by an era and a type of international relations that, for the present and as already mentioned, is defined by globalization starring for its neoliberal character and the content of the impetuous development of knowledge, science and technology.
Thus, all business activity is the result of this huge world of interrelations. From an analogy, we could identify them as SYNAPSE. We take into account that in the human brain, it is considered that there are about a thousand billion of these connections. Of course we take the comparison to matter in its highest degree of known organization, which is the brain. But without forgetting that the process of genesis of what is called "Neural Engineering" is operating, which tries to learn from the brain to create devices equipped with artificial intelligence.
Therefore, it is considered essential to add to the already almost universally recognized "systems approach", the complexity approach, which provides us with the conceptual starting points and the methods to penetrate the understanding of the functional heterogeneity of these emerging networks of interrelationships that characterize business performance, and from whose qualities and traits emerge the quality and traits of the entire company.
In this complexity, marketing has been operating which integration strategy of all the components of the system. But, it must be, in the first place, an integrator of the synapses that make up the business network. For the company's marketing management, in the global era of knowledge, science and technology, mastering the principles and methods that allow the understanding of these interrelationships, becomes a source of competitiveness. It is an example of how in the new economy, knowledge is the main source of competitive advantage.
This globalization immersed in the era of knowledge makes, as has been seen, the activity of business executives extremely complex. It requires a highly qualified manager, and a fundamental component of that qualification, taking into account the leading role of knowledge in the referred changes, we see it in the ability to understand the world of science, the requirements of new knowledge, the interdisciplinary demands of new technologies, etc. This implies being prepared to take on the epistemological challenges of contemporary administration.
What do we mean when we talk about epistemological challenges?
First, it is necessary to clarify what to understand by epistemology and then it will be understood, in addition, the importance and need to develop an epistemology of administration as a business administrative condition to be up to the globalization of the age of knowledge.
Seen this way, the Administration as a practical exercise and as a discipline of knowledge, has to come configuring its own regional Epistemology, of the administration in this case, that allows it to take safer and more solid steps in business development, based on a high domain of science and technology, which lead the entity in question to pass to the domain of this new economy that makes knowledge its fundamental competitive advantage.
What, then, are the epistemological challenges of contemporary administration?
The irruption of science as a business activity.
The understanding of business activity as a system of emerging networks.
The presence in business of the most notable advances in science and technology.
The new role of knowledge in business performance.
The globalization of the company's interactions with its environment.
The emergence of multidisciplinarity as a condition of administrative exercise.
The role of ICT in the exercise of administration and in all business activity.
The requirement to build "information infrastructures".
The necessary strengthening, under these conditions, of one's own values and standards.
These challenges require a highly trained administration, and this starts from a solid epistemological base in the exercise of business administration.
The new century is a luminous century, we must live it at the height of its challenges, and with the responsibility of making it the scene of the definitive economic, political, cultural and social flourishing of all nations.
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