ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief history of the processual approach to organizational change and discusses some of the pertinent issues and concepts that arise from the process turn in organization studies. Strategic choice, when considered as a process, points to the possibility of continuing adaptive learning cycles, but within a theoretical framework that locates ‘organizational learning’ within the context of organizations as socio-political systems. In contrast to the then dominant approach in organization theory that emphasized the importance of sophisticated quantitative analysis, the focus of processual–contextualist research was on detailed studies in the collection of longitudinal qualitative data. A process turn in organization studies emerged in the late 1990s and took root in the 2000s. Storytelling Organizations is about how people and organizations make sense of the world via narrative and story. In organization studies, this process turn raises the importance of temporality and of understanding phenomena as temporally evolving–a continuous process of becoming.
