This dissertation places Wittgenstein and Nietzsche alongside one another in an attempt to deal with the question: "what is the role of the philosophy?" On the one hand Wittgenstein promotes a descriptive approach to philosophy, which insists that the philosopher should not meddle with practices but rather seek clarity and understanding as ends in themselves. On the other hand Nietzsche promotes a destructive and creative approach to philosophy, where the philosopher both dismantles values and offers a revaluation of values in their place. This work begins with a survey of remarks by the two philosophers and prominent interpretations of them on how best to conceive of and understand the philosopher and philosophy. In addition, the recent view of Nietzsche as a naturalist is responded to at length. If Nietzsche turns out to be offering substantive, naturalistic positions on human morality, the origins of religion, and so on, then he cannot be advocating a creative, spontaneous orientation towards perspectives. This work argues that while Nietzsche offers naturalized accounts of human practices, he does not mean these to be considered scientific hypothesis. After responding to this position, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are looked at together, and what emerges is a shared goal: the creating and/or revealing of missed possibilities of human life. These existential possibilities are on the one hand always right in front of us, and yet they are seemingly out of reach and all too often passed over. Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, in their various ways, (re)open these possibilities. Finally, given this "hermeneutics of possibility," the final chapter argues that the way Wittgenstein and Nietzsche differ with respect to Christianity and religion is not primarily about their style of philosophy nor even about Wittgenstein's descriptive approach, but about the existential possibility that each has in mind to promote.

Lean manufacturing is one of the most developing manufacturing philosophies through which firms can minimise waste in the production process. Implementing lean practices successfully enables firms to lower unit costs of production and maximise value to the customer, which in turn helps them to increase their competitive edge over rivals. The emerging literature considers organisational culture as a necessary intangible source for achieving a competitive advantage for companies, and to have a critical role in the success or failure of lean practices implementation. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the effect of organisational culture on lean technical practices in the manufacturing firms in Jordan. More specifically, four conceptual models have been developed in the current study highlighting the effect of each type of organisational culture on lean technical practices implementation. In addition, more emphasis was on understanding the mechanism through which customers' involvement, employees’ involvement and suppliers’ involvement affect the relationship between organisational culture and lean technical practices. Thus, the four conceptual models bring to light the potential intervening role of the human lean practices in the organisational culture/ lean technical practices association. After identifying and reviewing the relevant literature, the socio-technical system theory, contingency theory and RBV are adopted to develop the conceptual models and associated hypotheses. A Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) techniques have been adopted to analyse a dataset of over 200 manufacturing firms in Jordan, collected by using a self-administered survey. The findings of this study indicate that the hierarchical culture has the highest substantial positive effect on lean technical practices followed by developmental culture, group culture and rational culture respectively. In addition, it is found that each type of organisational culture (group, developmental, hierarchical and rational) affects positively lean human practices (customers' involvement, employees’ involvement and suppliers’ involvement) in different statistical levels. For example, all types of organisational culture affect suppliers’ involvement more than customers’ involvement and employees’ involvement respectively. Moreover, it is found that customers’ involvement and suppliers’ involvement have the highest positive effect on lean technical practices in the rational culture and the least positive effect in the hierarchical culture. Furthermore, it is found that the positive effect of each type of organisational culture on lean technical practices is partially mediated by customers' involvement and partially mediated by suppliers’ involvement. The highest significant mediating effect of customers' involvement and suppliers’ involvement lies in the rational culture/lean technical practices link whereas the lowest significant mediating effect of customers' involvement and suppliers’ involvement lies is in the hierarchical culture/ lean technical practices link. Finally, it is found that employees’ involvement does not mediate the relationship between organisational culture and lean technical practices. These findings provide new evidence from Jordan to support the hypotheses that the organisational culture can act as a crucial pre-condition for lean technical practices to be fully effective. Additionally, the findings reinforce the notion that emphasizing the human side of lean especially for customers' involvement and suppliers' involvement can promote the effectiveness of lean implementation. The current study contributes to the current literature at two levels. First, at the theoretical level, this study develops multiple conceptual models which crosses two streams of literature mainly, organisational culture literature and lean manufacturing literature with a focus on the human side of lean. Unlike previous studies, the models integrate the direct effect of organisational culture on lean technical practices and the intervening role of lean human practices due to which the organisational culture is assumed to have also an indirect effect on lean technical practices. Furthermore, employing a powerful statistical technique (Analysis of Moment Structure-SEM) provides more credibility to the results reported in this study. Second, at the empirical level, this study is conducted in the Jordanian context. As such, this study is one of the first, to our knowledge, that examines the effect of organisational culture on lean technical practices, as well as having examined the mechanism of how each type of organisational culture affects lean technical practices using empirical survey data from this context.