Relativism: Entry for the Sage International Encyclopaedia of Organization Studies

According to standard dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary, is a doctrine that truth or morality is relative to situations and not absolute or universal. For example, a relativist would claim that statements such as Peter works more than Sally or Peter acts badly cannot be correct in themselves but presuppose that one already has some notion of how to measure an amount of work (e.g. number of hours; quality of output) and of what is morally right or wrong. In other words, a relativist believes that the value of epistemological and moral judgments depends at least in part on the person or group of persons who hold that claim. In the remainder of the entry, I explore the main philosophical positions identified with relativism and then examine the import of for the study of organizations.