ABSTRACT
In social science, the people are faced with the questions of what is explanandum and what is explanans. However, one needs something more dialectical here, in which it is possible to take two apparently distinct and contradictory notions and synthesize them in such a way as to be beyond conflictual relations, heading towards something more constructive and progressive. In seeking to escape from imprisonment by this binary, Karen Dale and myself began to argue that the ‘riparian' metaphor for structure and process was a way forward. Throughout the history of Organization Theory, there has been one important binary concerning what constitutes the ‘inside' and the ‘outside' of the organization. There has also been a question of the temporal origins of organizational forms. There is a clear dominance in Western Organization Theory of ‘institutional theory' in which, particularly in the USA, the field seems to have found a ‘paradigm' in the classical Kuhnian sense.
