ABSTRACT
In the field of organisation studies, some theorists have begun to utilise a process metaphysics to argue against what they describe as a tendency towards reification. By means of a deconstructive analysis of organisation they are beginning to challenge approaches to organisation theory and management that view organisations effectively as outcomes of forgetting (as constituted by conventional wisdom but pre-existing our experiential knowledge of them) and argue for a refocusing on the practices of organising rather than the features and effects by which we define organisations (boundaries, environments, goals, strategies). Here, we find evidence of an increasing processual awareness of organisations as ‘loose and active assemblages of organizings’ (Cooper 1998), as ever-moving groupings of dynamic acts rather than static structures. Such an understanding, it is claimed, can help to foster a more constructive consideration of organisations than has been possible on the basis of ideas derived from the mechanistic and rationalist assumptions of Newtonian thought. On this view, the problem as inherited is threefold: in the first place,
Newtonian assumptions have now become ‘so firmly entrenched that they [have] led to the creation of a disciplinary self-image, whereby the field [has drawn] the boundaries around itself so narrowly as to exclude th[os]e ideas and practices … which [are] not modern’ (Tsoukas and Cummings 1997: 657); second, theoretical development is now underpinned by ‘progression’: there is an ‘assumption that we are part of a continuous progress in supplying ever more adequate unifying conceptions’ (Tsoukas and Cummings 1997: 663); third, ‘conventional analytical approaches adopted by mathematics and the physical sciences [have proved] impotent in helping us fully understand… [our] experience of change’ (Chia 1998: 349). This is because ‘commonly held notions of time and sequencing of events… [together with a] reliance on scientific systems for objective analysis fail to recognise [that] our experience of temporality and change is one of indivisible movement’ (Dibben and Pantelli 2000: 6). Of course it is true that, at one level, ‘formal organizations [do] accomplish through an architecture of constraints, … highly stable and discriminate
types of behaviour’ (Kallinikos 1998: 372) but, in organisation studies at least, it is also quite clear that Newtonian terminology is gradually being replaced by a new, and ‘significantly less mechanistic than before’ (Tsoukas and Cummings 1997: 656), Aristotelian or Heraclitian style of thinking more in tune with a processual understanding of the world. This newer way of thinking both encourages a consideration of how a subject may intervene upon the experience of the object and discourages a view of chaos as antithetical to organisation; instead, there is a growing awareness of the importance of unpredictability, multiplicity, novelty and surprise. In sum, such a view cultivates ‘awareness of dynamic processes; it encourages a positive attitude toward unpredictability and novelty; and it invites us to rethink the character of human intervention in the social and natural world’ (Tsoukas 1998a: 292-94). Thus, we find a significant shift in organisation studies from thinking of
organisations as entities to a ‘more ontologically and epistemologically aware understanding’ (Dibben and Pantelli 2000: 6) of the process of organising as:
a complex and dynamic web of interlocking visual acts of arresting, punctuating, isolating and classifying of the essentially undivided flow of human experiences for the purpose of rendering more controllable and manipulable such phenomenal experiences of the world.
