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Uncertainty, managers' frequent companion as they guide firms towards anticipated goals, is poorly dealt with in theories of the firm. If knowledge is to be treated as the most strategic of assets, we must consider its relation to uncertainty. Knowledge suggests a degree of certainty, an absence of uncertainty. The paper draws on prior research and categorize uncertainty as three types of knowledge deficiency: indeterminacy, ignorance and incommensurability. It is argued that uncertainties lead to emotion. The paper draws on analysis of emotions as value judgments, indicating a person attaches significance to things lying outside her/his control that affect her/his goals. This insight opens a way of relating knowledge and uncertainty. The impetus behind this approach is partly theoretical and partly personal, from observing and participating in New Yorkers' emotions during and after the September 2001 WTC attacks. It is argued that it is no longer acceptable to ignore the ways in which emotion shapes our knowledge. The paper moves from rational self‐interest, the calculative basis for organization, to the social and cultural basis of identity through action, pursuing the idea that knowledge deficiencies produce emotional responses as they arrest rational decision making.

Our focus is the differences between monist and pluralist epistemologies. We want to illustrate how the adoption of a pluralist epistemology can reshape our theorizing about firms, organizations and their management. We can then build theories that are inherently dynamic and treat firms and organizations as the processes of creating the values which markets distribute. But to do this we must move beyond today's positivist monist conventions to a kind of epistemological pluralism that some might describe as postmodern. Given this shift we can then address the kinds of dynamic non-equilibrium systems that are proving of increasing interest to social and economic systems theorists. Our conclusion is that useful knowledge-based theories of the firm are less theories of objective entities `out there' than sets of contextualized heuristics guiding managers' intervention in their organizations as quasi-autonomous systems.

Confronting Managerialism offers a scathing critique of the crippling influence of neoclassical economics and modern finance on business school teaching and management practice. It shows how business managers, once well regarded as custodians of the economic engine driving growth and social progress, now seem more like the rapacious "robber barons" of the 1880s. Confronting Managerialism is a unique, topical, and controversial look at a subject that impacts us all